It’ s that time of the year ! The strategic goals of your enterprise get cascaded throughout the organization and everyone is frantically trying to convert the core strategies into goals that make sense to your specific context AND will serve to inspire you and your teams !
Likewise – you are asked to revisit and update your development goals – an exercise which not always receives the care and attention proportional to its importance for talent development and retention, one might say.
Let’s reflect for a moment: Why do we set the goals in the first place ?
Do we set goals to drive performance towards a fixed set of short term objectives that we may either surpass or fail to achieve – OR do we set goals that help us perform at our very best, i.e. utilizing our full potential rather than a fixed and, perhaps, suboptimal proportion of our magnificence ? Do we set goals that solely focus on the outcome rather than the process of mastery, growth and learning ? Which goals will ultimately and more sustainably drive our business to grow and prosper – which goals will result in regression to the mean and suboptimization ?
As food for thought - here are 4 types of goals that will inevitably drive different performance behaviours:
· The safe-bet goals that will help you avoid looking incompetent or underperforming (performance avoidance) – we all know these goals when we see them – and they will get challenged ! They will lead you to self-judge and most certainly lead to judgement by others – not necessarily conducive to growth, learning and optimization
· The performance approach goals that, although they relate to specific capabilities / growth aspirations you set for yourself, are still fixed to an outcome and imply that you must win/loose or outperform someone else.
· Mastery goals, that are not directly linked to a specific outcome and thus are better designed to drive learning and growth, i.e. learning, improving, developing, growing
· The CORE goals are the goals that express the downstream result of successful achievement of your mastery goals i.e. what you / your team / your organization get as the end result of your accomplishment, learning and growth
So, are outcomes not important ? Of course they are ! – If indeed they are used for feedback and guidance rather than a measure of self-worth or end result. The outcomes will help guide the way to further progress, higher levels of mastery, learning and growth.
RISPOSTA CONSULTING is uniquely positioned to help you articulate and pressure test the goals of you & your teams , and help ensure that you achieve your learning & growth aspirations ! Book a free scoping session through our website: www.risposta.dk
Acknowledgement: This post was inspired by the copyrighted work of Bruce D Schneider and the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC).
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