
Smart Goal Setting
Corporate Goverment | In many of my management short training programs, whether it is about Crisis, Issue, and Risk Management; Compliance Management, Affirmative Communication, or even Business English for The Mining Industry as well as English Communication in Finance & Banking, the SMART Goal Setting Concept has helped most of the participants in applying the optimal objectives in gaining the most value of the training sessions.
You might like to take advantage of reading some of the paragraphs I take here as reference studying Charles Duhigg’s book “Smart Faster BETTER” – The transformative power of real productivity, (2017) Random House Trade Paperback Edition, New York, USA. Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of Power Habit.
A graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College. You would agree that people would enjoy reading a management book in a storytelling style, which is entertaining and will inspire the brain more accessible to grab the meaning as well keeping it to be put into practice.
Please follow the following paragraphs from Chapter 4:
Goal Setting – Smart Goals, Stretch Goals, and the Yom Kippur War. This 6-day war is his storytelling style in which we recollected about the strategy of this war as a real scientific historical event that practices the “smart goal setting” and further lead to the “stretch goal” concept as a deeper strategic way of thinking.
Charles Duhigg depicts Goal Setting by drawing it as the goal setting of a marathon runner, which SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and following a Timeline. Specific: “I will run 5 miles”. It is Measurable: Finish! 5 miles. Take steps to be Achievable: Mon: 3 miles, Wed: 3 miles, Fri: 5 miles, Sunday: 5 miles. Realistic in a day setting: 08 AM: Meeting, 2 PM: picking up kids, 5 PM: running.
Timeline: Set a calendar:
January: average 3 miles,
February: average 4 miles,
March 15: go on a 5-mile run.
My personal experience:
This realistic and achievable goal setting should be transferred as a teamwork exercise on realistic goal setting in the industry or any business in line with the management training
program. Although the SMART Goal Setting system was formulated in 19880, now it is still put into practice that every division and manager are expected to describe and conduct each step, and true enough it leads to maximum productivity. The workouts would be successful because they balance the psychological influence of immediate goals with the freedom to think about bigger things (from 3 miles to 5 miles!).
Going forward, every executive and department, in addition to delivering specific and achievable, and timely objectives would also have to identify a stretch goal – an aim so ambitious that managers couldn’t describe, at least initially, how they would achieve it.
According to Jack Welch, former GE CEO: everyone had to partake in “bullet train thinking.” How should we practice it? Prepare a goal-setting plan that pairs stretch goals and SMART goals. Come up with a menu of your bigger ambitions. Dream big and stretch. Describe the goals that, at first glance, seem impossible, such as starting a company or running a marathon. Then choose one aim and start breaking it into short-term, concrete steps.
I wish you success!
Ludwig Suparmo, Strategic Communication Specialist.