Do you need to set SMARTER goals to improve your business performance?
9th of November, 2020
This is a 15-minute read so grab a coffee and gain a valuable update on a proven business tool.
The article is about SMARTER goals. The importance of setting yourself and your business goals to:
- To solve problems
- To improve performance
- Add value to your customers
- To drive growth
Many people are aware of SMART goals as a concept. I would like to update this tool by adding an E and an R because today SMART goals need to be SMARTER if businesses are to succeed.
Setting SMART goals is not a new technique. It's been around for a long time and like all techniques, it has gone through various iterations. What I'd like to do is give you a little bit more nuance and a deeper understanding of this technique, and how to use it to the best effect in your business.
What does SMART goals stand for?
Let’s start with the S = Specific.
If you're going to have a goal, you need to know what that goal is. Unfortunately, I've got lots of examples where people have tripped up on the very first hurdle of defining their goal. They're not specific enough in actually identifying what they are trying to achieve.
If you start with the situation that you don't have clarity of what you're trying to achieve it’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to get the achievement you need, because you're going go along wrong roads, go into cul-de-sacs, slowing you down, or worse getting into a situation where you get lost and give up.
Being specific is absolutely essential. Do not move on from here until you've, really, thought through AND written down a very specific call to action. Something that you need to achieve.
It helps to provide FOCUS for what you're about to work on and what you are not going to work on and what a distraction might look like.
I have been asked to help implement improvement projects without being given a specific outcome beyond;
- Reduce costs
- Increase productivity
- Improve the customer experience
- Increase engagement
- Or...we need to change
I have then been given a team of people to work with who at best have very different opinions of what the purpose is, and some didn’t even have that. Total confusion. A lot of wasted time and energy. A lot of unhappy, time-starved people. The project is already on the slide before we have even started.
A tip for me is, to write down the goal in as much detail as you can. Sleep on it. Go back to it the next day and make sure that you understand what was the issue you are seeking to address? What was your concern? What was needed? What was the opportunity? And if you can't understand it. If it is a bit vague, a bit woolly and it's not entirely clear then you have not been specific. Go over it in detail again. Don't do anything until the goal statement is clear.
A good test is that if you can read the goal to someone else and they literally have no questions or comments then you have clarity and certainty.
M = Measurable
If you can't measure it, you can’t improve it. If you can't measure your success, how do you know that you've achieved your goal? This ties in closely with being Specific. So being able to identify your goal, specifically, so that you can then produce a specific measure is going to be critical. You need to know when you have succeeded. You also need to know along the way, how you're getting on. Identifying a way of measuring progress and the outcome is an especially important part of your improvement project.
I use the word project carefully. You are embarking a something of high significance to your business; by treating it as a project you are giving it the level of effort and attention it needs.
A = Achievable
This is where you're doing a reality check. This is essential in the current environment in which we are all working. Is this goal achievable? Goals can be stretching but don’t stretch to breaking point. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to change something that you can't ultimately control. Look carefully at the scale of the goal. You may have to take smaller incremental steps or continuous improvements to reach your overall goal.
R = Relevant
This addresses prioritisation and importance. Does this goal address the real and pertinent issues inside and outside your business right now? Are you addressing issues that will add value, improve revenues, increase competitiveness, eliminate waste, enhance delivery, quality, and customer services? Time is a very precious commodity for all businesses. Devoting your time to delivering a goal is a significant investment ON your business. Make sure that your investment is giving you the payback required
T = Time-bound
We need to define clearly and again with no ambiguity when we are going to get complete this project. Please don't pluck a date out of thin air. Be thoughtful, specific, and realistic. Be ambitious too. Creating a sense of urgency will help to spur you on.
However, if a deadline has already been set that is simply not achievable you have to flag it now; especially if it involves a customer. Go back over the goal and set the most appropriate date based on all the factors involved in the project.
We have now completed the definition of our goal, and this is where we enter the most dangerous and unproductive phase of the process because very often this is where people stop. Seriously! They've got their goal and it is smart. They break up the meeting or discussion and pick up something else and that's it. This is where the goal dies because there is no activity. There is no agreement of the steps that are going to be taken, by who, by when and with what resources to enable the goal to be achieved. This is the point where most smart goals fail.
At this point, this is where we now need to go back and reflect on what is missing.
This is where goals need to become SMARTER because SMARTER goals are more successful than smart goals.
So, let's just go back and reassess what we've done. Let's add in a few more words because at the moment we've only written a single word for each letter, Let's add in more.
Go right back to S for Specific. Now we will be focusing on both a specific goal statement and a specific set of actions to deliver it. More on actions plans in a moment.
Meaningful and Memorable
If we go to M, we've got measurable, and this is crucial. Now add the words Meaningful and Memorable.
If you're going to present this goal to a wider audience, to employees or people are going to participate in the project. This is where you want to make sure that the SMARTER goal is meaningful to the team, meaningful to the organisation. People buy into something they can identify with, which influences their work. They can understand what it is and the role they will play in the achievement of the goal.
A SMARTER goal is one that is communicated and accessed widely. It is communicated often. It needs to be alive; it needs to be visible to everyone within the organisation.
If you're working on your own, it needs to be visible to you daily, so it doesn't just become a just a piece of paper that you've put to one side and is now cluttering up your desk. It is front and centre to what you are doing. It needs to be Meaningful.
And it needs to be Memorable. Pick two or three keywords for a title or a heading or name. £50K Challenge, Growth 2021. Something that you instantly understand when you see that on a post-it note on your laptop or an entry into your calendar. You know exactly what it is. You know exactly how you are going to implement it. This is something you need to be focused on.
Agreed Action Plans
To be a SMARTER an achievable goal it must have an Action Plan and all elements of the goal must be Agreed. If you're going to achieve something. You need an achievable action plan. You need to take the time and the effort to sit down and write down all the steps, all the actions that are going to be required to succeed. These need to be sorted into a sensible series of steps that you're going to commit to. If you have a written action plan with a specific series of steps your chances of success increase exponentially. SMARTER goals must have written action plans and those action plans must be achievable.
Ultimately all stakeholders will need to be in complete agreement with the goal and to be completely on board. They (and in your instance you) need to agree with “The Why,” “The What” and “The How.” Any doubts or questions must be addressed with strong, powerful answers. The agreement increases engagement and ownership. It leads to motivation and motivation is a powerful element to the successful completion of a project.
Resources and Responsible Person
The goal needs to be relevant. What I'd like you to add is Resources and Responsible Person. We have an action plan. All plans need resources.
Resources are critical. We now need to allocate resources to the project. This will be blocks of time, obviously, but they may also be an investment in a piece of equipment, or a piece of learning, or a piece of technology, or a supplier, a contractor or a service provider who is going to help you. You need to understand what type of resource you need and when you are going to need it, how you're going to deploy it and how you're going to make sure you know you're not wasting it.
If the resources that you're allocating are just not realistic at this point, then you need to adjust the goal and the timescales that you're going to set. You may have to push out the completion date to suit your resources, but you must do that. There's no point putting in place an action plan that’s going to be done by a certain day when you simply don't have the resources to achieve that. Again, if resources are limited you may need to break down your goal into relevant chunks of activity to match the resources that you do have available.
If you have a goal and an action plan someone needs to own, it. Someone needs to be responsible for it. This needs to be clearly defined so there's no confusion of who owns it, who's going to drive it. Now if you are a sole trader business owner, you're going to say well that's obvious it's going to be me. Most of the time it will be; but some of the time you may outsource it to a virtual assistant, a supplier, contractor, or a service provider. If you are going to do that, please make sure everyone knows who is responsible for what.
Start date and Finish dates
When we review timelines now instead of just having a single deadline date, we now have a detailed series of steps or actions. Each of these has a specific start date and finish date.
Now we getting to the successful creation of a SMARTER goal.
You have a goal with an action plan. It's written, you have activities, you have a responsible person, you have allocated resources and you have a method of measuring progress and completion. It is agreed. You are motivated.
The new letters: E and R
The E stands for Evaluated
Many Business Owners fail to make time for evaluating progress in the achievement of their goals. It can be seen as yet another thing to do. Often reacting to the day-to-day becomes the priority and proactively evaluating your progress towards achieving key goals fails to happen. It is a major mistake and in no time, you are way off track.
You must schedule progress checks. You need to have a formal point in time where you stop and evaluate where you are. You will need to evaluate the actions completed so far and the actions that need to be done next.
- Are you ahead of the plan or are you behind?
- Do you need to speed up?
- Do you need to allocate more time?
- Do you have any issues with resources available for the next steps?
- Has the work done been correctly?
You may have learned something on the way that you didn't realise at the start. It cannot be ignored. It needs to be evaluated and incorporated into the action plan.
The evaluation point needs to be at an appropriate time. It could be weekly. It could be every other day if you're doing something that is relatively urgent. It needs to be done regularly and in a structured way. To evaluate progress, you sit down formally and review your goal and all the actions. Be honest about where you are versus where you should be and address any issues:
You will have to tweak things and move things around. That’s fine, but when the evaluation is finished you must re-focus upon the next important action.
Reviewed and Readjusted
Review the goal at regular intervals. Is it still relevant? It is still appropriate?
As you proceed in the project, you'll learn so much more about it. You may need to reassess the scale of the project. Maybe the end date is not right anymore. Or maybe something in the environment has just made the goal of lesser or greater importance.
There's nothing wrong with reviewing your goals. Flexibility and agility are important business skills. Sticking inflexibly to a pre-set plan is not going to help your business to be responsive. If you need to readjust or tweak the direction, the outcome, the action plan, the resources etc then you must do so. Any plan doesn't survive the first contact with the enemy: you have all heard that term. Your SMARTER goal will naturally need to be reviewed and readjusted to make sure it stays relevant to your business.
So, there we go, we've now taken a SMART goal and we've turned it into a SMARTER goal with detailed action plans and with regular evaluations. You now have increased certainty of being successful in making the right and timely changes in your business that will drive your growth.
I hope you enjoyed your coffee and the article. Thank you very much for sticking with it. If you need any support in reviewing your business situation and selecting your key goals, then please contact us for an initial consultation on how to set SMARTER goals.
