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Empowerment Through Knowledge
No.08: SMART Goals

When communicating within an organisation it is not uncommon that different people and different departments, can have varied understandings of the targets of the business and of the meaning of success. For this reason you may sometimes feel like you are constantly pushing towards achieving a goal but that other members of your organisation seem to be working with different priorities. You may also find yourself looking back and not recognising or being able to identify progress, meaning that you lack that feeling of success, or you may find it hard to predict when you will finally feel like you have achieved success. These are all situations when setting SMART goals can be what you need; allowing you to align priorities across departments, and helping you and your team to achieve success by having Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals.

Specific

First of all, your goal must be specific and focused, removing any vagueness and room for different interpretations. For example; instead of saying “we want to grow our business”, a more specific goal would state that “we want to grow our market share in a particular locality by opening a new branch/outlet”.

 

Measurable

Second, you must make your goal measurable in order to be able to identify milestones and track progress, keeping everyone motivated and target oriented. Our example goal may then look something like this: “we want to grow our market share by 120% in a particular locality by opening a new branch/outlet”.

 

Achievable

Although you and your team may have a well thought out vision for where you want the business to go, it is important to consider how ambitious your goal is in relation to the resources that you require to achieve it. Toning down your expectations or adding detail on what makes this possible, may be one necessary step to enabling your organisation to experience successes, keeping everyone motivated and engaged in wanting to take the company further.

Our fictitious goal may then be adjusted to look more like this: “we want to grow our market share by 60% in a particular locality by opening a new branch/outlet and by supporting a local voluntary organisation”.

 

Relevant

In order to make a goal as relevant and realistic as possible, it must be in your control to achieve it, with steps that you and your team can action to get there. If this is not fully the case, then at the very least you should be aware of who or what can stand in the way. When creating a relevant goal, it is important to note why you have set the goal up the way it is, explaining your reasoning for clarity.

Now, the goal may be as follows: “we want to grow our market share by 60% in a particular locality by opening a new branch/outlet that will make our brand accessible within 15 minutes from any point in the locality due to a wide enough footprint, and by supporting a local voluntary organisation, becoming the first business of its industry in that locality to promote what it does to fulfil its CSR”.

 

Time-bound

Having a deadline and a timeline for the steps you need to take to achieve your goal ensures that you keep this in the forefront when going about your every-day tasks and keep yourself in check when prioritising those tasks. Having a visual representation of your goal’s timeline by creating a Gannt Chart, as discussed in our first edition of Empowerment Through Knowledge, can be a useful tool when considering the temporal aspect of your SMART goal setting.

Your SMART goal may finally look like this:

“We want to grow our market share by 60% in a particular locality in the next 18 months. We will do this by opening a new branch/outlet that will make our brand accessible within 15 minutes from any point in the locality due to a wide enough footprint, and by supporting a local voluntary organisation, becoming the first business of its industry in the locality to promote what it does to fulfil its CSR. After launching a campaign in 4 months and opening the doors in 6 months, we aim to then need 12 months at an average growth rate of 5% monthly to reach our target market share.”

 

SMART Targets are discussed in our Award in Organisational Communication, forming part of our Level 6 Bachelor in Business and Management and our Level 5 Undergraduate Diploma in Business and Maagament

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