When setting goals for yourself and your organization, it’s not enough to simply have an objective in mind — you must also ensure that your goals are crafted to promote success.
In this guide, we’ll discuss common goal-setting mistakes that can inhibit you from achieving your objectives and how to avoid them.
In This Article
- 3 Common Pitfalls of Goal-Setting
- Improve Goal Setting & Attainment for your organization with AchieveIt
3 Common Pitfalls of Goal-Setting
Knowing how to avoid common goal-setting pitfalls and why they’re detrimental to achieving success can help you create successful objectives.
Be sure to steer clear of the following goal-setting faux pas.
1. The Goal isn’t Measurable
Your resolutions should be measurable, meaning there’s a feasible way to quantify them. Without this element, it may be impossible to determine if and when you’ve accomplished your goals.
For example, maybe you are a content writer and want to improve your quality of team’s work. There’s no way to tangibly measure the goal “improve quality of work” or determine when the task will be complete. A better goal would be to “reduce the number of requests for revisions received each month”.
2. Lack of Accountability
Your goal-setting may revolve around challenging objectives that push you out of your comfort zone. While these goals have a great payoff in the end, they can be daunting now, causing you to lose motivation and return to your usual ways. In short, it’s easy for your goals to slip through the cracks when you don’t hold yourself, or your team, accountable for achieving them.
There are many accountability measures that can help you stay on track with your goals. For example, you can visually display your teams goal and progress to keep everyone focused and accountable for the same goal.
3. Unrealistic Expectations
While your goals should push you to some extent, they should also be possible to achieve. Setting realistic goals will help individuals from feeling overwhelmed, frustrated or discouraged.
Ensure goals are more achievable by breaking them down into manageable objectives that you can complete little by little as you work toward your larger goal. For instance, if you have an individual goal to run a marathon, don’t just have the simple goal to run a marathon. To achieve this objective, you can first aim to run 5 miles, and then 6 miles, and then gradually expand on that until you’ve finally completed the race.
Improve Goal Setting & Attainment for your organization with AchieveIt
You can obtain the tools you need to accomplish your objectives and avoid goal-setting pitfalls with strategic planning and execution software from AchieveIt. Our innovative platform automatically collects updates, creates reports, generates dashboards, and more to help your organization succeed.
Book a demo of our software today!
