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Creating Solid Goals

Solid goals give people a clear picture of what needs to be accomplished and when it needs to happen. We give examples of poorly defined goals and offer a model that will create solid goals.

Your team will be able to use solid goals to make implementation plans and to measure their progress.  Clearly defined goals are easy to measure and imagine. Poorly defined goals are fuzzy, and you can’t tell when you’ve achieved them.

Here are a few examples of poorly defined goals:

• Provide great customer support. This goal sounds excellent; however, nobody can tell if it’s been achieved. How is the customer support measured? When does it need to happen?
• Hire the best people. Again, how do you measure this, and when does it need to happen?
• Support our salespeople. How will you know if they feel supported?

These are general statements that can go into a mission statement, but they make poor goals. Make sure your goals will drive activity by using the SMART model described in the next section.

SMART Model
The SMART model is an easy-to-remember system for defining goals. This system creates five parts for each goal. When you fill inn all the parts, you’ll have a clearly defined goal that you can measure.

There are five parts to the SMART model:

• Specific. The goal must have a mechanism that showed whether the specific objective has been achieved. You can make our example goal measureable by changing “Write a report…” to “Deliver a comparison report on IT vendors to the team.” Now you have a way of measuring whether the project is complete.
• Measurable. You can clearly see when a specifically defined goal has been reached. For example, “Investigate IT vendors” is not specific. “Write a report comparing IT vendors” is specific. You’ll know whether the report has been delivered; it is a quantifiable measurement.
• Achievable. The people who are assigned to the goal must believe it’s feasible. If people don’t believe the goal can be completed, they will not commit to it. Consult with your team members as to whether they believe the goal can be accomplished.
• Relevant. The goal must be tied directly to the mission. For example, a sales team that is creating a report to evaluate IT vendors is probably creating an irrelevant goal.
• Time-bounded. The specific, measurable result must be delivered by a certain date. Goals without dates are dreams. In our example, the goal should read, “Deliver a report comparing IT vendors to the team by 28 May.” That fixes the goal in time.

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