Setting goals that work

Breaking down goal setting to accomplish meaningful work.

How do you set business goals that have meaning? Goals, objectives, and strategies are confusing. There are many descriptions about what each mean, and often they don’t have the WHY behind them.

I once was given a goal to “increase social media presence as measured by increase in retweets.” For context, Twitter was our weakest channel. 

I had lots of questions.

1.    Why do we want to increase retweets?

2.    What outcome are we trying to achieve?

3.    How will increasing retweets achieve our bigger goal?

4.    How will we increase our retweets?

5.    By what amount do we want to increase?

6.    Is increasing the right metric?

7.    When do we want to achieve our goal?

8.    Who is the audience we are trying to reach?

Did you notice a basic formula here? Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How are from elementary school. They are the basic questions you ask when gathering information or problem solving. 

Increase retweets may be a KPI but if there is no specific metric, you could increase retweets by 1 and be successful, and it wouldn’t have provided any meaningful business growth. 

Goals vs. Objectives

Goals are simple, brief statements. They do not say how you will do something. They say what the result will look like. 

An Objective defines actions you will take to reach the goal and is measurable. Objectives should be SMART - specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound.

A metric or key performance indicator (KPI) is the measurement you use to determine if you met your goal.

Strategies and Tactics - the supporting cast

Strategies and tactics do not need to be included in your goals and objectives statements. They are important, certainly, and should be documented, however, they are too specific to be included in a goal statement. Instead, keep a table of your strategies and tactics and track them toward your progress. (I love Airtable)

• A strategy is the path or method to get you there. An example of a strategy would be to use a PR firm to reach a broader group of trade journalists.

• A tactic is the tangible thing you create. An example of a tactic would be to create an email newsletter for patients.

Breaking it Down

Keep goals between 3- 5 to focus efforts. You can add multiple objectives underneath each goal if you have the resources to implement them. 

In this example, I’ve included three objectives.

Goal: Develop outreach with legislators to support government action for our cause.

Remember, a goal tells you what the result will look like. If we achieve this goal, we will have more legislators advocating for our cause.

Objective 1: Identify a list of legislators who already support our cause and identify a list of 10 new legislators who may support our cause by February 2020.

Objective 2: Develop a steady twitter content stream to reach legislators online and increase legislative followers by 20% by December 2020. 

Objective 3: Increase media mentions in national outlets by 15% by October 2020.

Remember, objectives are measurable. If we meet our objectives, we will have increased our reach to a new group of legislators, increased legislative followers on Twitter by 20%, and increased media mentions by 15%. All of this will have worked toward our goal of reaching legislators who are may support our cause.