Tips for setting goals, as a manager, for yourself, your team and your employees

Whether you are an organisation, a manager or an employee, every goal starts from "the vision", says Joost. The question of what you want to achieve overall, what you want to fight for, why you do everything that you do.

That is the first thing that you have to get clear. And generally that is easy to do – or may be done for you at the organisational level. From this, you can tease out sub-goals, so that you can chop up the journey into steps which you can bite off individually while keeping an overview.

But that is not the only thing that needs to happen.

For example:

Take a classic staple of many TV programs, starting a new life. Imagine a family, two parents and two children. The parents have a dream of opening a Bed & Breakfast in Hungary, a country where they love to spend their holidays. On a whim, they have bought a run-down farm there, in the middle of nowhere.

Packed and ready, and full of good intentions, the whole family returns to Hungary a few months later. The parents have quit their jobs and have enough savings to live for a few months. During in this time they plan to rebuild the B&B and get ready to open.

You can probably guess what happens next: the children don't speak the language, struggle at school and miss their friends. They are unhappy and become difficult. The father is busy fixing things day in, day out but fails to get the permits organised, the remodelling goes on and on and it costs far more than expected. Especially in bribes. The mother is unhappy with all the stress all around her, is lonely and misses the comforts of life in the Netherlands.

After six months of muddling through, all the money is gone, the plan fails and they return home disillusioned.

What went wrong here? The dream is clear: running a successful B&B in Hungary, away from all the pressure, in a place where the kids can grow up surrounded by nature, in a country they adore.

There are, however, many interim steps they appear not to have thought about. There was no real preparation, they did not look at all the things that needed to happen before a B&B can be successful. From applying for permits before remodelling, to setting aside a budget to learn Hungarian. What they totally forgot about is what forms the foundation for achieving any major goals. This foundation comprises four things:

• Good health: If you want to focus on a single goal, then you need to make sure you are living a healthy lifestyle. Before you pour energy into anything, you first need to have it.
• A supportive social environment: If you are working towards a goal that - even temporarily - takes up a lot of your time, then you need to have support from those around you. Otherwise you will get into tension and fighting.
• Relaxed finances: Make sure that you are prepared for the costs that you will have to incur to achieve your goal. Ask yourself what happens if you just don't have the money? What do you need to do, or not do, to achieve this? Here too, involve your social environment if that is relevant to them.
• Awareness of your core values: If your goal is to rise in the political arena, but one of your core values is that you always want to say things bluntly and be honest, then it is quite likely you will run into problems. Some situations simply require tact and biting back on your words. So you need to decide in advance whether you can live with this or not. When you will deliberately stand up for your core values, and when you will choose not to do so. Who might you involve in helping you with this dilemma?

You can apply the Pareto principle, or the 80-20 rule to these core values. If you maintain 20% of your core values perfectly, you will achieve a return of 80%. Or 8 out of 10. If you make concessions on this 20% of your core values, then your return will fall off.

• Self-knowledge is the root of all wisdom, and that also applies when setting goals. Be aware of your own patterns of behaviour. Are you impulsive, and your heart sinks to your toes if you have to set SMART i i SMART The letters SMART stand for: Specific: is the goal unambiguous? Measurable: when, by what observable measure is the goal achieved? Acceptable: are these goals acceptable to the target group and/or management? Realistic: is the goal achievable? Time-bound: by when does the goal need to be achieved?  goals? Then just get going and be aware of how you bypass or remove roadblocks along the way. Do you feel uneasy if you don't have any kind of structure before you start? Then make sure that you plan one in for yourself.
• Think in advance about how much you "touch" others with your goal. Are you on your own and your goal is purely your own affair? Then go your own way, above all. Maybe your goal will affect your family? Then shoulder your responsibilities towards them and involve them.

As a manager, you not only decide your goals for yourself, but also for your department or team. This means that employees are always going to be "touched" by them, and you therefore need to involve them. Look together at what the organisational goals are and what contribution you can deliver as a team. Then work together to convert the team goals into individual goals.