Welcome back practicing leaders. Today, we're diving into the world of goal setting methodologies, whether you're an individual looking to achieve personal goals or business, striving for success, having the right approach can help you make all the difference in achieving your goals. This is the practicing leader podcast.
I'm your host, Parul Bhargava, and let's discuss.
There are many different methods that are available for doing goal setting. We're just going to dive in and look into a couple of them to be able to see how do you set goals effectively. And first up, we have SMART goals. And in this case, SMART is not the word, but it's actually an acronym. This method is all about being specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound when setting your goals.
It provides a structured framework for being able to create detailed and attainable goals. As an example, if you look at it from a fitness industry perspective, increasing gym membership sign ups by 15 percent within the next six months by launching targeted marketing campaigns and offering personalized training plans and hosting community events.
It's something that's very specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. All together, all wrapped up in a single package. Next on the list are OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results. This approach, used by many companies, involves defining your objective and then identifying key results to help you achieve them.
An example of an objective could be develop a cutting edge mobile app for your company. Where a key result might be, launch the app on both iOS and Android platforms within the next four months. And then secondly, achieve a four star rating or higher on app stores. And then finally, reach a 10, 000 downloads within the first year.
You can notice that there are very specific key results that are measurable to allow you to figure out, are you meeting your objective? Moving on to the next one, Management by Objectives. This method involves collaborative goal setting between managers and their employees with regular performance check ins, reviews, and feedback.
So, let's say we're going to go try to go set, let's go look at an example of management by objectives. Collaboratively, set objectives with teachers and staff to enhance student performance. Key objectives might be improve students test scores by 10 percent in core subjects within the academic year.
Another one might be increase student attendance rates by 5%. And finally, implement regular teacher training sessions and performance reviews. Again, when you're setting these things collaboratively with your employees, you have a higher chance of them executing on them because now they have a vested interest in delivery.
Agile goals is the next one. These are commonly used in software development and project management. This is where you can take an iterative and adaptive approach. This method focuses on short term goals, regular progress reviews, and adjusting objectives based on feedback and changing circumstances.
Using an example from software development, you could say develop a web based project management tool, set short term goals such as designing for the user interface, and implementing core functionalities, conducting user testing, and continuously iterating based on user feedback. Again, these are very micro set of goals in order for you to be able to react to new information coming in, so that way you can set yet another set of goals in the future.
Although not a goal setting methodology per se, conducting a SWOT analysis can help identify goals and leverage strengths, address weaknesses, and exploit opportunities and mitigate threats. SWOT in this case, S W O T, stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. And this is where you can look at it and say, as an example, if SWOT for a retail industry, you could say, Leveraging our Strengths in Design and Brand Reputation, Address Weaknesses in Supply Chain Management, Exploit opportunities in e commerce and international markets while mitigating threats by diversifying our product offerings and strengthening customer loyalty programs.
Again, these are very generic, but this is where I think a combination of looking at a SWOT analysis in conjunction with SMART goals might be able to make things more specific and more actionable to be able to show what is progress in each of these different sectors. Another powerful tool is the Pareto analysis, also known as the 80 20 rule.
It helps identify the most significant factors contributing to a goal, allowing businesses to maximize impact with minimal resources. So as it is a generic example, identify the 20 percent of customers who generate 80 percent of the sales and focus efforts on nurturing those relationships to personalize marketing strategies and exclude exclusive loyalty programs.
Again, this is about trying to figure out where are you going to try to maximize the effort you're going to place in order to get the most gain out of it. The last 20 percent that you try to go for is, it tends to be the most expensive. It's that last 20 percent that ends up taking 80 percent of the cost.
And you may be missing out on opportunities, which you could be tackling in instead. And there you have it. That's a breakdown of various goal setting methodologies that you can tailor to your specific needs and context. Remember, it's essential to consider the different factors such as industry, organizational structure, the nature of your own goals.
Once selecting an approach because one size does not fit all personally, I find that combining methodologies can be highly effective. For example, I currently use okay. Ours to define a direction and use smart goals to build a defined key results that are concrete. I leverage SWOT and Pareto analysis to be able to figure out, am I delivering what my customers need when and where they need it?
All of these elements together, you can try to find the best in each of them in order to be able to leverage them together to deliver a best of breed results. So, which methodology resonates with you the most? Go ahead and leave a comment down below.
