How to Set Successful Goals for Employees

Ed Muzio, President & CEO of Group Harmonics, says that by setting SMART goals "specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based" you can avoid a lot of frustration. Managers who follow these steps increase the chances of an employee completing a task successfully and decrease the amount of time it takes to meet their goals.

Hi! I'm Edward Muzio CEO of Group of Harmonics and I'm going to tell you how to set smart goals for the people you work with. There is a game we can play called Bring me a Rock. Here’s how it goes, I say to you bring me a rock; you come back with a rock. I say to you “No. I wanted a smaller rock” and you come back with a smaller rock. I say to you “No, I wanted a different colored rock” and you come back with a different color rock and now we can go on like this forever and bring me a rock starts out funny and quickly becomes frustrating. When you're talking about asking somebody to do something at work playing bring me a rock is not just frustrating, it's demoralizing and it's waste time and resources. The way to avoid that is by an old trick called setting Smart Goal S-M-A-R-T. Smart goals means when you asked someone to do something you're request follows five criteria. First what you want to ask for should be specific. I need to hold my request to you down to a fine point of what I want. I should just say go find out what's going on in sales. Maybe I should say there's been a 10% decrease in sales figures over the last six months, find me some root causes please. It's a more specific, more narrow request. Second what I asked you for should be measurable. That means there is a clear measuring stick, a criteria that we can use to determine what success looks like and when you got there. Do I want you to find me three root causes for the sales decline? If I want you to publish your report in some forum, if I want you to implement something and get the sales figures back up by a few percent? Whatever the criteria is, it needs to be clear and need to agree how you’ll know when you got there. A stands for attainable. Now I can ask you to climb Mount Everest this weekend. You can know what I want and not be able to do it. I can ask you to produce a 400% increase in company revenue and you can't know what I want and not be able to do it. What I asked you for has to be something you can reasonably produce. If I don’t know what's reasonable I need to work with you, to agree on what is a reasonable goal. My request should also be relevant. And this means that it ties into and answers the question of how does this relate to the other work you're doing? For example if you're a person that works in IT supporting computers and I'm sending you off to look in sales figures that might not be a very relevant request, almost I can't explain why you're the right person to do it. On the other hand if you work in sales, it's much better. Somehow I should be able to answer the question how is this related to your work and the work of your organization or group? Finally, my request for you should be time based or time bound and this just means that I'm going to put some kind of a clock or a calendar or something on my request to you, so that know when it's due that way were clear on what I expected. So that’s it when I asked you to do something for me, I should make sure that my request is specific, I asked you for exactly what I want, Measurable, we agree on what success looks like, attainable, it's something you can do, relevant it's something that relates to the other work you're doing and time based you know when it's due. The next time you're going to ask someone to do something for you at work. Whether you're setting a major goal or just asking someone for a favor. Take a few minutes and figure out the smart criteria for your request in advance. Those few minutes you take could save you and the person you're working with a lot of time, energy and frustration.