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PrintGoals and your Personal Mission Statement
A little background on how goals work
Goals are cascaded throughout an organization, where an individual’s
goals are a sub-set of their boss’s goals and so on up the
hierarchy. So achieving my goals helps my boss achieve her goals,
helps her boss… and so on.
Goal results are set to meet business needs covering areas like
meeting shareholder performance targets, customer servicing levels
and employee satisfaction. A company with a performance related
pay system will use an individual’s goal achievement results
to allocate pay increases; if you exceed your goals you receive
more money.
This is one incentive for an employee to work hard for the company.
For this and other reasons, goal setting in the workplace can be
an emotive issue and requires careful management to ensure equity.
Without goals, both good and poor performance goes unnoticed
Conversely, lack of meaningful goals can mean disaster for a business.
Individuals can end up doing their own thing, working at cross-purposes,
or overlapping effort. Both good and poor performance goes un-noticed,
as no one really knows what that is. Sensible companies invest a
lot of time and effort in the goal setting process, as they want
to succeed.
Goals and your personal values
You will get the best results if your goals are in line with your
personal values. But what are your personal values? Articulating
what you are about is a good starting point for understanding your
motivations in life and you can do this by writing your own “mission
statement.”
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of
things which matter least” Goethe
Your personal mission statement
Most companies have a mission statement encapsulating what the company
stands for, translating aspirations into employee actions. However
they are often made meaningless in the quest to make them politically
correct or contain the latest management jargon or look great printed
on giant posters. Don’t let this put you off!
The meaning of life is a million dollar question. Let’s make
it easier to answer by narrowing it down, and figure out the meaning
of your life. What will your epitaph be?
Start by writing down a few words or sentences that best describe
your aspirations, meaning or guiding principles.
You could think of these in terms of the different roles you have
(wife, grand-father, manager, coach, son etc) to get a rounded,
holistic view of your life. You might want to keep this private
as the act of explaining it to someone else may make it lose its
meaning. On the other hand, sharing your personal mission statement
may provide additional insight. The choice is yours!
Here are a few examples to help you get started on this task;
- I am a healthy person who has the wisdom to know what I can and cannot control in my life, and act accordingly.
- I work to live and provide for my family. This means financially, emotionally and spiritually.
- I am respected in my professional life as being knowledgeable, accessable and eager to learn.
Stick with this phase through all the soul searching and ambiguity, as in the words of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland...
"If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter which way you go." Indeed!
Next, Writing SMART Goals
