7/19/2013

Fridays For You: SMART Goals


One thing that turns into great unhappiness is the sense that you are not achieving your goals, that you are not making headway, that you are not getting things done and you will never be a success.

Note that I said the sense that all this failure is happening...because we humans are very prone to a thing called confirmation bias.  We don't really see things so objectively; we give great weight to evidence that supports our theory and beliefs, and discount anything that might suggest we're wrong.  That means that when we're in a nice deep blue funk (for whatever reason, legitimate or not), we're going to see all the things that support our belief that we're a failure and gloss over our successes.

At the same time, if you're a woman (and actually, plenty of men fall into this category too - it's just statistically more likely to be a gender thing, thanks to a heap of social pressures and reinforcements), you are going to look at your professional accomplishments and misattribute them - to anything other than your work.  You will find reasons to not take credit for things that you have accomplished, even if they are things you actively worked to make happen.  

There's a powerful tool to combat both of these things.  SMART goals.

Goal setting is a great way to organize your daily work, manage your professional growth in monthly and quarterly and yearly chunks, and think about the longer horizon in a productive way.  But most people set goals like "get promoted by next year" or "get boss to like me" or "become a successful novelist"...even something as compelling but utterly unmeasurable like "be happy."

If you are setting unmeasurable, unrealistic goals, you will never achieve them (because they're unrealistic) and even if you did, by some miracle, get there, you'd never know (because they're unmeasurable!)

SMART goals are:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Timely

An example of a specific goal - let's say you're hoping to go to law school - don't say "I want to improve my LSAT scores"...your specific goal will be "I want to increase my logic score to the 97th percentile."

The above is a good example of a measurable goal, too...but much of life doesn't result in concrete test scores.  Let's say that you've read Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and are convinced that you don't speak up enough in department meetings.  Rather than "speak up more in meetings," your goal will be "speak up at least 2 times in every meeting."  It's more than your base level, and you can keep track in a very concrete way: simply count.

Achievable goals, well, you have to keep yourself honest on this one.  "Get promoted to Vice President" is achievable (even if it's not easy - that's why it's a goal, not a forgone conclusion) for some people, but let's assume you shouldn't put it on your list of goals for next year if this is your first year out of college, working for a Fortune 500 company.  Again - achievable is not meant to keep your goals from being ambitious, just realistic.  

I like checking things off my to-do list as much as the next person.  But "take shower" is not something that's super relevant to my larger goals - specific, achievable, measurable, yes, but completely tangential at best to my three year plan for world domination.

Timely is one of the things that I find oddly hard for my more ambitious clients.  They want to beat the curve, they want to do the superhuman.  I force them to adhere to the achievable guidelines - ambitious is OK; virtually impossible is not productive.  For example, a junior professor I worked with insisted that 3 publications and 2 new grants was a good goal for the fall semester.  Nope.  We sat down and looked at a timeline to tenure and came up with a much more plausible set of goals...timing is often the key on making a goal achievable or not, and don't forget that all your goals add up, so accomplishing one or two may be possible, but not if you have six labor intensive goals that you expect to accomplish all at once.

There are plenty of resources on the web when it comes to SMART goals.  They're used in both teaching and business management a lot.  Give them a whirl.

I want to be explicit about what they'll do for you though:

  • If you're prone to confirmation bias, SMART goals, thanks to their measurability and relevance will keep you from giving too much weight to your negative thoughts.  It's hard to wallow in an I'm-Such-A-Failure Funk when you have some very concrete evidence that you're making small gains on a consistent path to a bigger goal.
  • If you're prone to impostor syndrome, it's hard to change your perspective, but SMART goals are again, concrete evidence that you are setting goals and realizing them.  Luck and the efforts of other people are part of the mix, but you deserve credit for these specific, measured achievements that you conceived, committed to, and made happen.
  • Also, duh - they're a good tool for thinking about where you're going and how you're going to get there.  Goals are also good for keeping you focused and moving forward towards whatever those goals might be.
Want help figuring out how SMART goals apply to your life?  I'm willing to workshop with you in the comments section.  

No comments:

Post a Comment