Becoming a first-time manager is simultaneously exhilarating and daunting. Importantly, you have earned the recognition of your skills and capabilities with your promotion to a leadership position. At the same time, you are now accountable for the actions of other people and have a broader impact on the organisation – for better or worse.
These new responsibilities bring lots of new issues related to dealing with the business, dealing with people and managing your own personal performance that you have probably not had to deal with before.
One of the most important areas for a manager to address is effectively setting and using goals to manage performance, vital for delivering organisational results and helping individuals develop personal capabilities.
Without goals, team members can flounder, confused about what to do and whether what they are doing is correct and important. With clear goals, teams can see dramatic improvement, sometimes even 10 times what they achieve without goals.
Goals Come from the Organisational Mission, Vision and Strategy
As a manager you will have much more opportunity to provide input to the overall vision and mission for the organisation. After all the years that you have lived with various issues – and possibly complained about them – you now have the chance to make improvements. Use your new, stronger voice to leverage the understanding that you have of your local operations’ capabilities and limitations to influence long-term strategy.
The organisation’s mission and vision will lead to goals. In most cases this will include high-level goals in financial, customer and employee areas. Part of your job as a lower level manager is to translate these larger objectives into organisational goals for your own department or team.
For example, if the company sets a goal for a certain profit margin. The sales department will then need to hit a certain revenue goal and the operations department a certain cost of goods sold in order to deliver the desired profit which is the larger goal.
Another example would be if the company set a goal of assessing the quality of its products and the efficiency of the quality management system in place when the beginning of each quarter roles around. This process may entail updating ISO 9001 to make sure your quality management system is compliant. New managers can click here to see Description of ISO 9001 and keep on top of the game and make sure they have the up-to-date documentation, templates, and forms so the company can run efficiently.
Try to engage team members when setting goals. The better employees understand the overall mission, vision, strategy and top-level goals, the more creative they will be in figuring out what needs to happen locally and the more committed they will be to achieving those ultimate goals.
Goals Need to Be Aligned and Meaningful for All Individuals
In setting the departmental goals – and certainly once they have been accepted – it’s important for you as the manager to identify the ‘how’ of obtaining the goal at a local level. This can’t be just acceptance of a top-down goal assignment. Instead, it is a shared articulation of a target based on existing and planned functional capability. If there is a significant gap between current performance and goal, it’s not going to close by wishing for better results.
Tactical plans for any gap closure are needed. This ultimately cascades to goals for each team and individual in the department. Ideally the goals will be clearly related to the organisation’s strategic goals.
It’s relatively easy to set a numeric goal for machine operators to make ‘X’ number of good parts to meet the organisation’s customer output commitments. It’s harder to define how the people sweeping the floor or manning the company canteen contribute to the overall organisational goal. Yet it is part of your job as manager to help each individual understand the importance of his or her work to the team and to have measurable targets for performance.
For example, the floor sweepers might have a target for maintaining a high level of performance on a cleanliness audit, with the cleaners understanding that high standards of cleanliness are directly tied to the delivery of very high quality product.
The canteen workers may have targets related to customer (i.e. other workers) satisfaction and food delivery efficiency, both contributing to effectiveness of the operators delivering customer output.
In addition to individual contributions to organisational goals, you will help your team members set personal development goals. These are often related to demonstrating performance on defined tasks or mastery of new skills for potential futureworkstreams. They can also tie to closing identified gaps in required job-related traits, such as teamwork, communications or leadership.
Make Smarter Goals, Not Harder Goals
It’s not enough to say ‘Try hard’ or ‘Do your best” when setting goals. This kind of direction actually provides no direction. In the area of goal setting, you may have heard of SMART goals. Let’s break this down. Goals need to be:
Specific: Define unambiguously the what, how and why of the objective to make expectations as clear as possible.
Measurable: A subjective goal does little to help individual performers or the organisation. The goal must be such that an outside observer can measure performance and say whether or not the goal has been achieved.
Achievable: It’s important that the performer believes that he or she can actually attain the goal. If it is not attainable, the goal will lead to demotivation, as the team member will be frustrated as they will feel they’ve been set up for failure. See this article from HBR for more on setting attainable goals.
Results-focused: The goal is not to be busy at one’s job, but to complete the work required to deliver results to the customer.
In some cases the individual’s customer will be the next internal operation. In all cases, these goals and results should tie to overall organisational strategy and objectives.
Time-bound: While measurable helps employees know ‘how much’ to do, time-bound helps them know ‘when’ the work must be complete.
Putting these SMART elements together, we can create several sample goal statements.
Operational worker: Make 2,000 units of product X meeting customer specs, with delivery of 40 units per week.
Floor sweeper: Before 8 a.m. each workday, complete steps 1 to 10 of the area cleaning guideline, with cleanliness level confirmed by arriving shift supervisor.
Build in Rewards for Goal Achievement
While goals can be intrinsically motivating for some individuals, they become much stronger motivators when they are tied to recognition and celebration of goal achievement. This doesn’t mean breaking the bank by giving out awards with large monetary value. Often the best motivators are team celebrations with sincere words of praise and opportunity for all to participate in a discussion reflecting on the job well done. The infographic below from Acuity Training gives a good overview for new managers.
