Running a successful business isn’t one of those things that just happens. After you open your business, the gauntlet begins. When you want to see personal or professional growth in your life, you set goals, and the same applies to when you want to expand your business and gain a competitive edge on the rest of the field.
Goal setting is essential to growing your business, however, many business owners struggle with exactly how to set goals. SMART is a goal-setting acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound. Continue reading to learn how SMART Goal-setting can help transform your company culture and elevate your business.
1. Set specific goals.
Being ambiguous about your company objectives is one of the best ways to ensure you never see the key results you desire. To improve your company culture and your team members working together, you have to have well-defined, specific goals.
Just saying you want to grow your business isn’t specific enough. Furthermore, if your goals aren’t specific, you won’t be able to figure out the best way to go about striving for them. When setting your company objectives, you have to consider your company’s needs, strengths, and weaknesses. When setting goals, you must outline them in great detail, and your goals should revolve around capitalizing on your company’s strengths while addressing its weaknesses.
2. Your goals should be measurable.
One of the most important things to remember when setting goals is that your objectives need to be measurable. Having measurable goals makes accountability easier because you have metrics by which to determine your progress.
With an OKR management tool, it’s easier to track key results from your goal-setting initiatives. OKR is short for objectives and key results and is a set of best practices for implementing company objectives and gaining valuable insights into company performance.
OKR tools are enterprise-level software programs that use analytics to deliver metrics that give insight into how your company and team members are measuring up to your expectation. OKR tools also give clarity into how much time team members spend on specific tasks and even give valuable insights into how productive specific team members are.
You must measure your company’s progress toward its goals to hold your team members accountable on a personal level and corporately. With OKR tools, you can hold your entire company to a greater account by tracking key results.
3. Your goals should be attainable.
Part of being the boss is having high expectations for your team members. Even though all CEOs and small business owners want to set ambitious goals for their companies, but your company objectives have to be attainable to be successful. Your company may be a long way from where you want it to be, but setting small, attainable goals gives you a better chance of achieving them and boosts company morale.
You should also set attainable goals while focusing on your professional development as the boss as well. As you strive for personal career goals, you can serve as a powerful motivator for your employees and coworkers to get more serious about their personal development.
4. Your goals must be relevant.
If you want all your hard work to pay off and take your company to the next level, you have to set relevant goals for your company. It’s hard to encourage teamwork and get everyone striving toward a common goal when they can’t see how the company objectives are relevant to expanding the business. If you’re looking for easy ways to boost employee engagement, getting them focused on a common goal is one of the best ways to shift the company culture.
5. Goals have to be time-sensitive.
Last, but certainly not least, in SMART-Goal setting is putting a time limit on your goals. If you don’t have a deadline for your goals, you might not ever take the first step toward achieving them. Great leaders know that they have to make their goals time-sensitive and keep their team on schedule.
