Setting goals with employees can be the key to unlocking growth opportunities for them to get out of a rut in their careers.
We all want to move up in our careers whether it’s a promotion or increased salary or deepened satisfaction with meaningful work. You, as a leader, can help propel your employees toward success in the workplace. Setting goals and writing them down provides your team members with tangible proof they are moving forward in their careers.
In this episode of “Beyond the Rut with Jerry Dugan,” we delve into the power of goal setting and how it can help employees like you see incredible growth opportunities at work.
Get ready to help your team break free from monotony and embark on a journey of personal and professional development. Let’s dive in!
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Engage with employees in a way that reduces turnover
- Lead in a way that helps employees feel cared for and see growth opportunities
- Help your employees create goals that connect with their career growth
- Establish check-in conversations to guide employees to success
Table of Contents
Download a free goal-setting toolkit for yourself and your team.
Most people aim at nothing and hit it with amazing accuracy. You and your team don’t have to be like most people.
Setting Goals With Employees for Everyone’s Success
In the fast-paced world of business, it’s not uncommon for employees to find themselves in a rut, and begin looking for a job that offers career growth. As a leader, you can help your team members break free from this cycle and reach new heights of success. One powerful tool at your disposal is goal setting. In this episode, we’ll explore the importance of setting goals with your employees and how it can transform their performance and overall satisfaction.
Rewarding and Celebrating Desired Behaviors and Goals
One effective way to motivate your employees is by rewarding and celebrating their desired behaviors and goals. When you catch them doing something you want them to do, provide specific feedback and praise that highlights the positive impact of their actions. By acknowledging their efforts, you not only boost their confidence but also reinforce the importance of those behaviors within the team and organization.
When your employees develop personal goals that also incorporate performance standards, there is alignment between what they want to accomplish and what you want to see them doing. It’s all written and agreed on, so you can reference it together in the timeframe for those goals.
Creating Goals for Employee Success
To help your employees achieve what they want and align it with the organization’s objectives, it’s crucial to have a dedicated goal-setting meeting. This meeting should allow for open and honest discussions, lasting anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes.
During this time, share your observations of their strengths and discuss your own goals. By establishing a collaborative environment, you can set the stage for meaningful goal-setting that benefits both the employee and the organization.
Navigating Towards Success
While it’s ultimately up to the employee to decide if they want to grow and succeed, as a leader, you can play a vital role in helping them navigate their journey. Goal setting becomes a powerful tool in this process. By setting clear goals, providing support, and regular check-ins, you can help your employees stay on track and achieve their desired outcomes.
The Four Ingredients for Goal Success
To ensure goal success, it’s important to remember the four key ingredients:
- Having a written goal
- Committing to actions that build momentum
- Sharing goals with someone (Hey! That’s you!)
- Regular progress check-ins.
By incorporating these elements into the goal-setting process, you create a framework that fosters success and accountability.
Building Retention through Employee Engagement and Trust in Leadership
Engaging your employees and building trust are essential for retaining top talent. By creating an environment where employees feel cared for, have growth opportunities, and love their work, you can reduce turnover and increase retention rates. Trust-building, empowering, navigating, and thriving together are the four stakes that form the foundation of effective leadership.
Setting goals with your employees is a powerful strategy for helping them break free from a rut and achieve their full potential. By rewarding desired behaviors, creating meaningful goals, and providing ongoing support, you can empower your team members to thrive both personally and professionally. Remember, as a leader, your role is not only to guide but also to celebrate their milestones along the way. So, let’s embrace the power of goal setting and lead our teams to success!
Chapters
02:58, The importance of helping employees navigate toward their own success
03:37, The significance of having goals
04:10, The four ingredients for successful goal achievement
04:58, How to have a goal setting conversation
08:28, Regular progress reports and updates from employees to ensure accountability and progression towards their goals
10:01, Celebrating wins and not just focusing on shortcomings
Resources
Subscribe on your favorite podcast player.
Other episodes and articles you’ll enjoy:
Setting Goals to Achieve Success with This One Powerful Approach – BtR 266
The Surprising Truth About a Famous Goals Research Study
JERRY’S SHORT: Stake Your Leadership T.E.N.T. (JS 014)
Connect with me:
Instagram: https://instagram.com/beyondtherut
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/beyondtherut
Twitter: https://twitter.com/beyondtherut
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerrydugan/
Loved this episode? Leave us a review and rating on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, what’s going on red our nation? This is another installment of Jerry Short. These are the short episodes I like to share in the middle of the week to help propel you through the weekend into a brand new week at work at home, whatever the case may be. Now, in this episode, I want to talk with you about goal setting, but more specifically about goal setting with your team members. So if you’re in a leadership role, this episode is for you, I’m going to share in the show notes. This is uh Jerry Short number 19. So beyond the ret dot com slash Js 019, you’ll find links to other Jerry Short installments where I talk about goal setting for you. Uh In the past, I’ve talked about the impact of having goals, writing smart goals, uh the four ingredients that help goals become successful and I might mention those again here. So check out those show notes beyond the red dot com slash Js 019 and you’ll find links to related episodes I’ve done around goals, goal setting and goal achievement.
Now, if you’re a leader, I’ve talked about my, my tent framework, you know, stake your leadership tent and how, you know, tents have been used by the military for thousands of years uh to protect them from the elements. So they can gather information, sort that information out and then share that information with the people they lead, you know, tents are also very mobile and they’re adaptable. However, the best way, the fastest way to set that tent up securely as to with the fewest people possible is to stake out the corners first and then you’re able to pop up the middle and stake everything out and tighten it down. Similarly, your leadership career should be the same. You should have four corners staked out and then you’ll find your leadership tent, pops up and that tent, your leadership tool kit in a sense, uh gathers information in a safe way, sorts it out in a way that is clear to you and you’re able to lead your team in a way that builds trust, engagement and drops re uh not retention drops, uh turnover.
There we go, you wanna raise retention, drop turnover and you do that by engaging your employees so that they feel cared for. They see growth opportunities. They take advantage of both and they just love where they work so much so that they will stay where they are with you rather than take another job opportunity that is offering a little bit more pay. So if you’re tired of losing people to a nickel or a dollar an hour, they’ll stay if you stake out your leadership tent. So those four stakes are trust building, empowering, navigating and thriving together. My past few episodes of Jerry Shortz have talked about the trust building part, having a leadership credo rounding with your employees acting in a way that builds up trust and camaraderie over time. And we’ve dabbled into empowerment where you are rounding with them to learn about them. And then delegation. I believe I have an episode of delegation.
If not, I’ll come back on episode Js 20 or Jerry Short number 20. And I’ll cover delegation and the carry crawl walk run model that, uh, goes with that. So we’re talking about navigating and, and specifically you helping your employees navigate towards their own success. Now it’s up to them to decide if they want to grow, succeed and achieve, uh, and, and continue up a progression of some kind that suits what they want. You can come along and help them navigate that and, and one of the tools is to be good at goal setting.
Now, from a performance management perspective, as a leader, you’re gonna have some goals that you agree on with your organization, uh, some performance metrics, for example, and we need our teams to execute those goals to get those goals done. Basically because if they get those goals done, we all get to keep our job, we get to grow. We get to make more money and we have career success because the organization has success as well. So goals, you probably have some, hopefully you have them written down, hopefully you’ve shared them with somebody.
Hopefully you stay accountable with that person and give regular updates because those are the kind of the four ingredients. Uh So first ingredient is you have a goal, you have it written down hopefully in a smart format, which is uh specific measurable achievable by you uh relevant to your bigger picture and they have a timetable to them. Uh Now, with that, the second ingredient is you need to have a committed action that will help build the momentum for that goal’s achievement. The third thing is you share it with somebody. In this case, the employee is sharing their goal with you. And then the fourth ingredient is that you have regular check ins with progress reports. Those four ingredients coming together help people become successful in their goals.
Now, as an employer with your employees, what you want to do is create goals that help them achieve what they want. And ideally also help you with the organization achieve what it needs. And a great way to do that is have a meeting with one of your employees, I would say a lot 30 to 60 minutes. Uh And because you want some time to really discuss or at least set the stage. Uh So if it’s 30 minutes, you’re setting the stage, you’re giving them some parameters to think about and you do a follow up where you spend another 30 minutes locking everything in or you can spend all 60 minutes right then and there going through this process, what I like to do is tell my employee, my team member, hey, these are the things I’ve seen you excel in. Uh Let me share with you some of the things I’m doing going forward and then I share with them here are some of the things I have and I envision for the next year, five years and so on. But I wanna hear some of what you want to achieve. So tell me, where do you want to be a year from now? Five years from now, what do you want to be doing? What kind of skills do you want to have picked up? Uh And what, what achievements will you have wanted to have made by the end of the year or five years? Whatever either works. Ultimately, you’re gonna get to a one year mark and then break that down even further uh into 12 week blocks, preferably. Uh and a great book, by the way is the 12 week year. Uh So you have that conversation with them, you tell them where you are, what you’re looking to do and you’re kind of sharing your vision, hopefully, that sparks them to think about what, what is their vision? Where do they want to go?
What do they want to achieve and just let them brainstorm with you and it’s got to come from them. The best way for them to achieve their goals is that it comes from them. And once you’ve heard their goals say great, uh, now of the things I shared with you, is there anything on that plate of mind that you feel if you had a part in that it would help you achieve your goals? It sounds counterintuitive because it’s just easier. If I go up to you and say, hey, I need to boost customer service ratings by 10% you need to make that happen too. And it’s like, ok, uh, do they really own it though? You just kind of mandated it? But if I tell you that one of the goals that I have for my department is to increase our customer service ratings by 25% or to have zero complaints in the first six months or all year, whatever it is, um, or zero refunds, whatever the case may be, uh, whatever your metric, uh, what role would you like to have in that?
That would also help you achieve. Uh, what you’d said to me are some of your goals and let them share that with you. And then from there turn that into a sparkle. Great. You got that. What is the action you’re gonna take every day or week to help achieve that?
Let them see what they come up with and he said, great. Uh What uh what else do you think? You know, asking what else? Three times? Great way. I learned it from fierce conversations. Uh It draws more information out of people. So now you have a smart goal, you have a committed action that’s gonna be done daily or weekly or monthly to get to where they want to go to achieve.
You’ve agreed to it and said yes, that’ll help you and also help me. I love it. Uh Let’s do that. Uh Now they’ve shared it with you. So you got that third ingredient, ingredient there. And then the fourth one, when do we want to check in with each other to see the progress of your goal?
Ideally about every week, some kind of report, maybe you check in in person once every two weeks or once a month, but you want some kind of regular update from them, whether it’s an email, text messages, phone call. Uh but they gotta have that regular progress report to feel that they have that accountability for their progression. So that is my talk around goal setting in a nutshell. Is there a lot more to it? Yes, I believe I spend a lot more time talking about goal setting.
You gotta practice it. It takes a lot to get there. Now, key thing, I’m gonna jump ahead on my tent framework, thriving together what you also want to do as you’re setting these goals is have milestones so that you know, you’re progressing, maybe it’s the daily activity great. If you got five days a week, they got to work on this daily activity.
I would say a winning week is four out of the five days. They succeeded in achieving that activity. And then three out of four weeks in the month, they won the month. And then if you’re going for a year, I would say 10 months out of the year, you got a winning, you got, you got the momentum. So celebrate those milestones, the thriving together part, you may not know this but Zip and a few other organizations have done their surveys and what they found is that 29% of employees have stated they have not received recognition from their bosses in over a year. When we talk about employee engagement, going up, turnover, going up, people just not liking where they work.
Maybe that’s a part of it. Maybe we’re not telling our folks I appreciate the work you just did. Here’s the impact it had, look at the growth that we’re seeing. You’re not celebrating those moments with them. So when you set goals, you’re getting those progress reports. Very important that you’re not just focused on the shortcomings, focus also and a lot more often on the wins that they have as well. Hey, congratulations. You just went five whole days out of five knocking this out of the park.
You’re you’re building that momentum. Fantastic. And if you don’t know this customer, so and so just gave us this feedback and they mentioned you by name. It’s like what when you get positive feedback, do you tend to want to do more of that? Chances are the answer is yes. So share that with your people when you catch them doing the things you want them doing, reward it with praise and specific feedback that talks about the situation you saw the behavior they exhibited and the impact of that behavior on the customer, on themselves, on the team and how it’s building momentum. So gave you a lot of information here all around goals. Uh the four ingredients to make goals successful, uh how to sit down and have a conversation with your employee about setting some goals, tying those goals into some of your own goals if you’re a leader, because you got to achieve those organizational uh outcomes and then the importance of thriving together, sharing and celebrating those milestones. So I hope you found value in this uh installment of Jerry Short. Again, you can find the show notes at beyond the rut dot com slash Js 019. And there, I’ll also link other episodes where I talk about goal setting, goal achievement and so on. Now, I’m glad you joined me for this episode and until the next one, go live life beyond the rut, take care.
