Let’s take a moment or two to focus on your goals—both in and out of the office.
I’m not going to do what I usually do. I’m not about to ask you how you are doing on your goals this year to date. Rather, I want you to consider whether or not you are working toward the right goals.
This might require some rethinking and some restarting. If so, I’ll challenge you to do both, but first let me explain why. Today’s topic is about goals for this year and well beyond.
At the beginning of this year (yes, just a few short months ago!), I was coaching someone and we were talking about what he had accomplished last year and what his goals were for the future. He’s in sales, and we talked a lot about his production goals for the year. He told me he wanted to increase his sales by 10% over what he had accomplished the year before.
This was a pretty typical goal. Traditional thinking says to look at what you did last year and simply set a goal of doing more.
Then I asked him: Where do you want to be in five years?
That question—and the conversation it started—changed everything.
He said that in five years he wanted to be averaging a minimum of a half million in fees and revenue every year. Talk about a good goal! When he told me what he wanted to do, I reviewed his sales production over the past several years and pointed out that to meet his big, long-term goal, he would have to have at least a 30% increase over his best year ever. (And his best year ever was before the recent recession.)
In short: To achieve a minimum of a half million each year in five years, he would have to change the way he does business … dramatically.
The thing is, when he was talking about his five-year goal, he said a lot of things differently. He described a better way of working. His consideration of a five-year goal (rather than one year at a time) changed just about everything he was originally saying. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just about doing more and selling more. It was about a different and more productive way of approaching his future.
So I challenge you to think about where you want to be in five years.
What do you want to be doing and achieving then? Now, consider your current goals. How good are they? Will the goals you’ve set for this year get you where you want to go? Or are your current goals just you “doing better” than what you did the previous year?
Next time, I’ll offer examples of things you might want to do differently in light of a five-year plan.