You’ve heard it said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Let me twist that a bit: The road to achievement is paved with good intentions. We call them goals.
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If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. So it’s not enough just to "start out" in your career; you have to know where you’re going personally and where we’re going as a company.
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"There’s no point in carrying the ball until you learn where the goal is." At (company), we tell new hires right from the beginning that they have to let their managers know what their career aspirations are. Do they want to get into management? Do they want to stay in a technical field? Do they want to be a specialist? Or do they want to be a generalist? We have to know where their goal line is—and they have to know ours—so that we know who to give the ball to and when.
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But then talk is cheap. Everybody talks about goal-setting. We have corporate mission statements and objectives. Department goals. Sales quotas. But really what’s their value? An old proverb from India sums it up like this: "No one was ever lost on a straight road." And you’ll have to admit it, some companies have gotten lost in the global race for quality products.
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Something like 90 percent of all products launched in the U.S. are failures. Our success rate at (company) is (number) percent—better than the average. And we’re always looking for ways to improve those odds.
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So why don’t people set goals as methodically and frequently as corporations? Fear. Not having goals covers up for failure. We don’t have to face failure if we have no yardstick. If we don’t do much, nobody—including ourselves—knows. People without goals drift.
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The most important thing about a goal is to have one. Goals focus our attention.
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I like the story about the old man who was trying to lead a contrary donkey down the road. A passer-by stopped him and commented on the way the donkey was behaving. "Oh, I can make him do anything I want him to with just a kind word," the owner said.
"Doesn’t look like it to me," the other sneered.
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"Sure, I can," the owner said. Whereupon he climbed off the donkey, picked up a two-by-four beside the road, and clobbered the animal on the head, then explained to the onlooker. "I simply have to get his attention first."
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Goals get our attention. Losers stay busy doing things. Winners concentrate on planning before they ever make a move. For people who don’t give attention to long-term goals, the future is any time after tomorrow. But the future has a habit of suddenly becoming the present. And some 40-, 50-, and 60-year-olds are still asking themselves what they want to be when they grow up. To repeat: Goals make us focus.
So what are the characteristics of good goals?
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Well, first, good goals are set by decision, not default. You have to set the long-term goal early on in any project. Have you ever started out for a Sunday afternoon drive with a friend without a particular destination in mind? And after a mile or two the conversation began to go like this:
"Where do you want to go?"
"I don’t know—where do you want to go?"
"How about to Tony’s for dinner?"
"Well, we already passed that highway."
"Okay, how about a game of golf?"
"The best golf course is all the way across town."
"Well, then how about a movie?"
"Hmmm. It’s 2:45—everything’s already started now."
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I can tell by the nods, you’ve had some of those Sunday afternoons. John R. Noe, in his book Peak Performance Principles for High Achievers, sums up the experience like this: "By the time we are ready to make the big decisions, the options have been narrowed by our little choices along the way. If we do not focus our goals, our lives will be controlled by haphazard decisions."
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You’ve heard it said that not deciding... is deciding. In goal-setting, the same is true. Late goal-setting is not really goal-setting—it’s recapping after the fact.
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The second characteristic of a good goal is that it’s a big goal—one worthy of your efforts. Someone has said that if you intend to succeed beyond your wildest expectations, you have to have some wild expectations. A few people wake up every day to go out and slay dragons. Most are satisfied to chase lizards.
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If you’re an "average" performer, don’t set your sights on "above average." Look at "excellent." Whatever the average, look at what your colleagues would term a "reasonable" goal and then double it. That would be worth working for. That would be worth achieving. Consciously or unconsciously, you always get what you expect. So the secret to success, it seems to me, is to raise your expectations, to set goals worthy of your effort.
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And don’t let fear that you won’t reach big goals keep you from setting them. Here’s what author and management consultant Peter Drucker has to say about that fear:
Objectives are not fate; they’re direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for making of the future.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes agreed: "The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving." Unless you set big, worthwhile goals, you’ll never move beyond your current abilities.
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The third characteristic of a good goal is that it has a completion date. Goals are dreams with deadlines. Always put a deadline on your goals, because deadlines wake you from your dreams to bring you to the reality of achieving them. Sleepwalkers don’t get around very well—at least not without a lot of bumps on the shins.
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When talking to the authors of the bestseller Thriving on Chaos, Fred Brooks, a System 360 Chief Designer at IBM, had this to say about the lack of setting corporate goals: "How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time."
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Set five-year goals. Ten-year goals. Six-month goals. Without deadlines for their achievements, goals are simply "Pie in the sky" plans.
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A fourth characteristic of good goals is that they are followed up by a plan of action. The how. Will Rogers quipped, "Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there." You’ve got to put the how-to to the goal. If you plan to switch careers, what new training will you need? Where can you get it? What college or corporate course?
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If you plan to raise funds for a civic memorial, how? Which contributors do you want to reach—individuals or corporations? Do you want to use a direct-mail campaign or a fund-raising dinner? Or both? Goals are no good without plans of action to bring them into reality.
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Successful companies have elaborate plans. You wouldn’t dare to go to work for them if they didn’t. "Buy low, sell high. Collect early, and pay late," says educator and author Dick Levin. Sounds good in theory, but we’d be in trouble if we depended on a paycheck from companies that didn’t have a more complete game plan than that. Without plans, the only way businesses run is downhill. The same is true for individuals and organizations such as ours. We need specifics to be successful.
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A fifth characteristic of good goals is that they can be broken into specific short-term steps and completion dates. Maximum achievements are the result of minimum steps. A big house is built with one little nail at a time. A suit is sewn one seam at a time. A business is built one employee at a time.
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Next, good goals are written goals. Committing them to writing makes them real for you. You can review them. Modify them. Commit their accomplishment to others. They’re constant reminders of where you’ve decided you want to be at what point in your life.
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Finally, good goals generate excitement. The late Malcolm Forbes said, "Men who never get carried away should be." Don’t be afraid to show your commitment—some might even call it fanaticism—about reaching a goal. If you’re kicking and screaming about reaching or not reaching a goal, at least we all know you’re alive.
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Let me run those by you once again. How to set good goals:
• Set them by decision, not default.
• Set big goals.
• Add a completion date.
• Develop a plan of action.
• Set short-term steps and interim completion dates.
• Write them down.
• Get excited about them.
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Norman Vincent Peale may have oversimplified it, but I don’t think so. He said, "Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan."
If you don’t start, it’s certain you won’t arrive.
