So how can you enhance your goal setting experience to come up with something that will really help you navigate the year? As discussed in the previous article, you do start with the definition of your SMART goals – on a very high level. However, you don’t stop there. Instead, keeping these static goalposts in mind, you put the emphasis on having a set of processes, routines and rules to follow, of which you expect to bring you to the goals. These, as well as consistency in adherence to them, should be the focus: it will help you to combat both, the luck-factor and to at least minimize the cheating potential we talked about in the previous article.

In general terms this means shifting your attention from the result (what we want to achieve: writing the first draft of a 365-page book by the year-end) to the process (how we are going to achieve it: writing at least one page per day, every single day). The goal setting should rotate around the pivotal question: “What should I ensure doing on a regular basis, day in-day out, to achieve the desired outcome and what metric would help me see whether I am on track?” In our example, what you need to ensure would be a dedicated and allocated time where the only thing you do would be writing and not stopping until you have exactly one page (preferably, proofread). This approach will be most likely much more time and energy consuming, but it will also give you a “roadmap”. But there is more: it will also provide you a way to adjust on the go should you notice that your roadmap is taking you South as it will be very straightforward to see the issue and pinpoint whether your process is failing you or you are failing your process.

Obviously, this is no panacea as this is still a set of rules and a curious mind will find a way to bend most of the rules without breaking, however, this task becomes more difficult, the probability is lower, and the periodicity of your goal revision can largely mitigate this risk. At the same, it rules out at least one of the evils we’ve talked about – luck. If you are setting goals for your team, by no means should you single-handedly create goals for all of them. Instead, your team-members should make their suggestions on how they are planning on achieving the goals and what process you would be monitoring.

With that, let’s say a couple of words on monitoring. Regardless of whether you find an opportunity this time around to use this approach for goal setting or not, it is generally a good idea to monitor the progress on a periodic basis – much more periodic than once per year or even the quarter. Monthly rhythm seems to be optimal. First, it gives you much more “data points” and makes the end-of-the-year revision much more objective and balanced as the last month performance won’t be overshadowing the rest and having the numbers in front of you, you can concentrate on more exciting topics or have an in-depth conversation with your team members. Moreover, the data points are your “action points” throughout the year as with them comes the flexibility to adjust with regard to the process or the outcomes. If you are still operating with static goalposts and the time now is obviously too tight to change it, try the following. This year, introduce monthly revisions and use them in part to reverse-engineer the process behind your goals and so you will be all set for the next year, having in place both, actionable and sustainable SMART goals and a routine to follow-up on them monthly.

With that, I wish you some great year-end discussions and a splendid Christmas time!