Most companies, at least once per year, go through an annual goal planning process. As part of this process, you are expected to have some number of company-focused goals as well as some number of personal goals. Company goals are usually related to revenue, profit, sales, projects, or initiatives. Your personal goals, however, have more freedom in what they target.
With the company goals, you'll want to start by analyzing how you can personally impact them. This may take a little bit of creative thinking. For example, if you are in the facilities organization and the corporate goal is related to profit, it may seem like you have no impact on the goal and it shouldn't apply to you. However, there are aspects that you DO have control over that impact the bottom line. If you are responsible for negotiating building leases, a cost savings there could lead to higher profits.
Before you start writing goals, pick a goal framework. There are several available, but by using a consistent framework, your goals will be clearer and have defined success criteria. A few popular frameworks are OKR - Objectives and Key Results, SMART, and Backwards Goals.
- OKR - Objectives and Key Results is a popular framework where you take high level objectives (for example the corporate strategy) and provide measurable results that you can achieve that leads to that objective. In my earlier example, renegotiating a building lease to reduce costs by at least 5% could be a key result that supports an objective focused on profitability. A strength of the OKR framework is that goals (key results) are immediately traceable back to objectives.
- The Backwards Goals framework takes a long term objective and works backwards by consistently asking "if THIS is to be achieved, then THAT has to have happened by WHEN". Personally, I find this framework to be better suited for more targeted objectives than larger corporate strategy. If you have followed my earlier episodes covering the Individual Development Plan it follows a Backwards Goals approach toward defining your career path.
- SMART goals is another framework based on the attributes of the SMART acronym - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound - to provide all of the components that a good goal needs, ensuring that the path to success is understood by everyone. The strength of the SMART framework is that it provides a path for refining goals ensuring that you reach buy-in by all impacted by the goal. Additionally, SMART goals can be combined with OKR or Backwards Goals to ensure that your plan can lead to success.
Using the framework you select write your company focused goals using the defining statements where you have personal impact. Be sure to include the appropriate success criteria to ensure that it is clear when the goal has been met.
