SMART Goals To Motivate Your Team

Goal setting is a great way to motivate your staff in either the long term (financial year) or short term (project).

Make sure your team are fully involved in the process of setting their goals.

If you simply tell them “these are your goals for today” they won’t respond, whereas if they have set the goals themselves they will be more motivated to reach them.

The goals they set need to be SMART so they can see easily if they have achieved them.

They should also be positive rather than negative goals, i.e. “this month we are going to focus on winning 90% of all proposals” rather than “we’re not going to lose any more than 10% of quotes submitted in the next month”.

Specific: Goals should be specific for an individual or for the team on a particular project. They should also relate to a specific skill or objective. Remember that 100% is not realistic.

Measurable: You must be able to measure the goal to see if it has been achieved, so think about how you can accurately do this. In sales this is easy, you measure revenue. But for other areas of the business you should have specific indicators to measure progress.

Adaptable: There will be times when you realise that a goal is totally unachievable (often for reasons out of your control). In these cases you need to be able to adapt the goal to make it more realistic.

Realistic: There’s no point having goals which are completely unrealistic. Don’t have a goal to increase revenue 100% pa in a downturn, it’s not going to happen (this year)!

Time based: You need to set a time frame to achieve the goals, “we are going to achieve this by next week” or “in the second half of the year we are going to …”

SMART goals can help in all areas of your life. I have coached sports for over 30 years and find when I set SMART goals for individual players and the team, our results are always better than expected.