In this video, we'll look at why goals are important for you, you and your team, how to write SMART goals and the importance of mutually accountable goals. So why are goals important? Well, as the saying goes, if you don't know where you're going, how will you know when you've arrived? I'm sure that you want to know that you're successful at what you do in ways that are measurable. So you can keep on doing those same things and do more of them. When your team wants to know that too.

You may think that saying you're doing a great job is good enough. It really isn't. Why are they doing a great job, which parts of the job they're doing particularly well? It helps to get specific. Similarly, if they're not performing well, it's demoralizing and ambiguous to say you need to do that better, or I'm disappointed in that piece of work or that's not really good enough. Those phrases are meaningless and don't help the team member know what To change.

Again, it helps to get specific. There are three different types of goal I'm going to talk about in this class. In this video, we're going to look at the first type of goals the SMART goal. The next video, we'll look at the smart behavioral goal. And finally, we'll look at another approach to goal setting with the aspirational or wow goal. But let's start with smart goals.

SMART goals may already be familiar to you. They've been around for a very long time. But I find that even when teams are really familiar with smart goals and SMART goal setting, their goals are sometimes still not that smart. Smart stands for specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic and with a time scale. Here's an example of three SMART goals. My SMART goal is to write a 300 page book on effortless leadership and have my first draft ready by the end of the year?

Well, at the end of the year, it's clear whether I've done this or I haven't, I can show you the draft or not. Steve SMART goal is to reduce the amount spent on staff travel by 15% to $600,000. By the end of this financial year. Well, the financial data, the financial figures, my accounting department will tell me whether this decrease has been achieved or not. And SMART goal is to get detailed feedback from for internal customers on the new customer support software by the end of quarter three. Let's just pause for a minute.

I'll say that again. AMS goal is to get detailed feedback from for internal customers on the new customer support software by the end of quarter three. Does that sound smart to you? You're right, it doesn't. There's some lack of clarity there. What does detailed feedback mean?

What's the specific feedback we're looking for? Do we want it in writing? Do we want it in verbally? Do we want it verbally, but the so called goal like this and might assume one thing, you might mean something else. So this goal again needs to be much more specific with some detail attached to it. There are six steps you need to follow to write SMART goals.

I'm going to go through through those with you now. Firstly, start with an action verb. But remember that words like improve, reduce, increase, grow and so on, and not enough without figures or some other form of measurement attached. That's what makes the goal measurable. To the timescale is obviously the fifth date or period of time, as soon as possible is open to interpretation. three goals should be realistic but with a bit of stretch.

Or challenge involved. And four goals should be agreed with you if you're the team leader, rather than imposed by you, so your team takes responsibility for them. Now, sometimes you may have to impose a goal on a team member. That's the nature of business. But if that's the case, make sure that together you figure out how your team member will achieve it. That still gives them some ownership of the goal.

Number five goals need to be written down and refer to regularly not just during a yearly appraisal or if you keep them front of mind, and six golden goals describe the wallet, but you also need to help your team member work out the how. This is where what I call the how, what how when compensation can help you. Here's how it works. Let's go back to Steve. His goal was to reduce the amount spent on staff traveled by 15% to $600,000 by the end of this financial year. So with Steve, I'm going to help him with that goal and ask him for questions.

How, what, how, when, Steve, how will you reduce that spend? I'll ask him to break the goal down into some smaller steps or milestones with timeframes attached to each. What is your first step going to be? This is a really important one, because if he's not sure where to start, he won't. How can I help you? Your role as team leader is not to do the job for him, but support in coaching and help him stay on track.

When should we get together to see how you're progressing with your first step that keeps them accountable and focused, and you're available for support, feedback and guidance very early on. Finally, I think it's useful for us to think about what happens when Team goals or goals across the wider business appear to clash with each other when they're not joined up. When I worked as an operations manager in the travel industry some years ago, my role was to improve the quality of the hotel accommodation we were using for our customers on their annual vacation. Part of my financial bonus was based on two key things. Firstly, improving the customer feedback ratings for the accommodation by a certain percentage each year. Secondly, reducing the amount of compensation we paid out by certain percentage to customers who were unhappy with the accommodation that they'd been allocated.

My colleagues in another team in another area, however, had performance goals, and were paid bonuses based simply on reducing the cost of this accommodation, the amount of money we paid for it. So even if we had to pay compensation afterwards to those customers, it made no difference to them. Their bonuses weren't related to that. So it didn't matter to them. So their mantra was get it as cheap as you can. And mine was quality, quality quality.

As you can see, we weren't thinking in a very joined up way. And it seemed as if there were no, there was no mutual accountability. If I achieved they wouldn't, and vice versa. So think joined up and ask the question, if two goals seem to be contradictory, how do we achieve both together? Either you need to look at the two goals and see if one is important and not the other. But ultimately, in my situation, we were all given responsibility and bonuses for quality and cost savings, which made us work together much more effectively and creatively.

In summary, I love SMART goals. There are a lot of things you need to pay attention to to make them really meaningful and to make them smart. And that is particularly true when we're setting goals based on behavioral change. That's where we're going next in our next video.