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Self Management ProjectMGT 494

Lecture-11

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Recap

• Step 3: Write a vision statement– Sample Vision Statement

• Step 4: Prioritize Your Life Dimensions

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Sample Vision Statement

• Career: I want to be successful at my life's work, in my career, in my job. I want to learn all I can about the world in which I live.

• Community Relations: By living a moral, principled life, I want my life to set an example and be influential in my community.

• Family: I want my life to be filled with love, me for others and others for me. I want a family (spouse and children, as well as parents and siblings) to hold and to hold me.

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Sample Vision Statement• Financial: I want to earn enough money through regular

income and investments to make me and my family comfortable and secure.

• Material Goods: I want to house, clothe, and provide things for me and my family that are considered important to a "good life."

• Personal Values: I want to live a moral, principled, physically fit life and be an influential model to my family and my coworkers.

• Social Relations: I want friends whose lives I treasure and who treasure mine.

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Prioritize Your Life Dimensions (Step 4)

• Sorting our lives into dimensions adds an advantage for planning we wouldn't otherwise have: If we lay out the dimensions and the goals we want to achieve in them side by side, we can easily recognize where goals conflict with one another.

• However, those conflicts don't demand that we eliminate one or another; rather, setting priorities permits us to achieve as many of the goals in the different dimensions as we can.

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Prioritizing Dimensions

• Rank them in terms of:

(1) their importance to you right now;

(2) The importance you would like them to have five years from now; and

(3) Their importance to you as you would like them to have twenty-five years from now.

• These three separate rankings will allow you to emphasize one set of goals at one time and different sets of goals at other times, thus allowing for conflicts and resolutions without abandoning one or another.

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Today’s Lecture

• Goal Setting (Step 5)– Three Elements of Well-Formulated Goal

Statements

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Goal Setting (Step 5)• People talk about developing action plans, they refer mainly to one of two

activities:

(1) writing a list of goals, or

(2) writing a list of things to do. However, an action plan consists of goals, objectives, and activities all expressed as statements (goal statements, objective statements, activity statements).

• A complete plan also identifies the resources needed for executing the plan and the barriers that can be foreseen that could prevent a person from achieving his or her goals.

• The existence of a plan doesn't ensure success, but it does help.

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Goal

• A goal is an end point, what you want to accomplish.

• A goal statement describes the end point, when you hope to accomplish it, and, in general, how you want to get there.

• When you get there, activity toward the goal comes to an end.

• You move on to achieving a new or different goal.

• To simplify the language, use the words goal and goal statements interchangeably.

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Criteria of Well-Formulated Goal Statements

• The values that constitute each dimension of your life are just words until you do something to fulfill them, that is, use them to direct the goals you want to achieve.

• You begin by asking yourself how you might fulfill an important value;

For example,

• ''How can I fulfill the value of having managerial authority?" One answer might be, "Earn a promotion to management"

• This answer is the first step in writing a well-formulated goal statement

• A well-formulated goal statement is specific, measurable, observable, realistic, and time bound (though inelegant, the acronym is SMORT).

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Specific

• Goals must be specific to be useful.

• "Earn a promotion to management in three years by succeeding as the team leader, attending management classes, receiving high ratings on my performance reviews."

• Not only is that example specific, it's also simple.

• It obeys the KISS principle: Keep it Simple and Straightforward.

• Eliminating ambiguity helps identify the priorities you want to achieve and reduces goal conflicts.

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Measurable or Observable• As for being measurable or observable, some people say that in

management, if you can't measure it, it never happened.

– I won't go that far, but I will say that unless you can observe a result, you can't measure it. If you can't observe it, you can't know if you ever reached our target.

• However, some observable events are not measurable or at least not easily measured.

• You can observe that a person is angry or that she is happy, but you would have to have special devices to measure the degree of anger or happiness.

• Supposing a person achieves his goal or gets a promotion to manager. The promotion is observable, and the raise that comes with the promotion is measurable, whereas the promotion itself is not.

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Realistic• The word's standard definition, in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10th

Edition), says that to be realistic means to refer to facts and to reject the impractical and the visionary.

• Rejecting the impractical means that a realistic goal is achievable.

• If a goal is realistic, a person should be capable of achieving it; contrarily, if it isn't realistic, it isn't achievable.

• At the same time, the standard definition of achievable is to be capable of successful completion, which is to say that an achievable goal is realistic

• Goals can and should reflect one important sense of the word visionary: having or being marked by foresight or imagination, invention.

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Targets

• For a goal statement to reflect a realistic target, the target should:

– Fit with previous experience.– Fit within accepted bounds of knowledge.– Recognize personal physical, emotional, and psychological

limits.– Recognize limits placed on you by the world in which you live.– Realism is a matter of degree.

• The more a goal falls outside the parameters listed above, the more you risk achievability.

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Description

• That doesn't mean you can never achieve a goal that doesn't fit with previous experience or fit within the accepted bounds of knowledge.

• By no means. No discovery, no new horizons, no new paradigms would ever exist if we use the criteria that define "realistic" to straightjacket our minds and spirit.

• So-called "stretch goals" are a minimal recognition that you must try to exceed the probable in order to achieve the possible.

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Three Elements of Well-Formulated Goal Statements

• When writing a well-formulated goal statement, you need three elements:

(1) a target, (2) a time frame in which the target is to be reached, and (3) Means and conditions that will help you reach the target.

• Let's examine the goal statement:

"Earn a promotion to management in three years by succeeding as the team leader, attending management classes,

receiving high ratings on my performance reviews."

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Targets• Express the target as a description or as a description and a quantity. • "Earn a promotion to management." That's the descriptive target of the

goal that states what you want to accomplish; the result is observable. Getting promoted is the observable outcome that determines whether or not you achieved the goal.

• Express a target both descriptively and quantifiably. A quantifiable target states both what you want to accomplish and how much value that target has.

For example, " Earn a salary of $50,000." In this example, "earn a salary" is the what, $50,000 is the how much. Another example: "Increase productivity by 12 percent." Increase productivity = the what; 12 percent = the how much.

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Time Frames• The most obvious quantifiable expression of a goal, the time in which you

wish to achieve it, is also the second element of a well-formulated goal statement.

• The target of a goal pulls you toward the future. The time frame that you set for achieving it, pushes you.

• Every goal statement should therefore include a realistic time frame, with a start date and an end date, that you use as one measure among others of success.

• A deadline provides a measurable outcome that, like a target, has to be realistic to be achievable

"Become a millionaire in one year"

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Summary

• Goal Setting (Step 5)– Three Elements of Well-Formulated Goal

Statements

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Next Lecture

• Examples of Goal Statement• Prioritize Goals and Performance Ranges (Step

6)