P B - MY BIG IDEA

Keeping track of your goals on a goal setting worksheet makes staying on top of your targets possible.

If you’ve developed your goals using the SMART system, your goals have specific, measurable qualities that are easy to monitor. Your goal setting worksheet allows you to see, at a glance, exactly where you are with your progress.

When should you review your goals?
Everyone’s goals will be different, and the timelines will be as unique as your goals. There is no set-in-stone formula for checking the progress of your goals, but there are a few guidelines for helping you keep on top of your success.

Know your end date
When will you have achieved your goal? Each goal should have a target completion date attached to it. Once you’ve established the end date, you should set benchmarks for yourself at regular intervals. Breaking your goal down into manageable sections will not only keep you motivated, it will help you to track your progress.

Set check-ins
Many people find that monitoring their progress weekly helps to keep their goal at the forefront of their thinking. The specifics of when that occurs is up to you. Want to start the week motivated? Check on your benchmark progress every Monday. Want to see what you’ve accomplished? Use Friday afternoon as your goal monitoring day. Establishing a pattern of weekly ‘check-ins’ can inspire you to work more effectively at reaching those benchmarks.

Look for progress
If your goal is to lose weight, for example, your weekly check-in may be to monitor how much weight you’ve lost during the preceding week. Are you regularly losing one or two pounds? Are you keeping on track to reach your goals? A successful check-in will have you moving toward your ultimate weight loss goal.

Adjust your goals accordingly
While tracking your progress, you may notice that you’re moving faster (or slower) than you had anticipated. If this becomes a pattern over the course of a few check-ins, don’t be afraid to modify your goals to reflect your adjusted timeline. Moving fast? Change your target end date, or up the goal. Moving slower? Extend the timeline or reduce your target. The purpose of a goal-setting worksheet is to help you reach your goals, not shackle you to a timeline or to make you feel badly. Use the worksheet to help you track your progress and inspire you to reach new levels of success.

Changing your goals
Let me share an analogy. When sailing, you have little control over the wind. You may know where you want to go, but can’t control the way the wind is blowing. What you can control are the sails. You adjust the sails to accommodate the shifting winds, and reach your destination. If outside forces change, it may be necessary to adjust your goals.

Take this analogy into real life. Has the market shifted? Suppliers failed to meet the demand? New competition moved in? Whatever the reason, your benchmarks may need to change, or the tactics you are using may need to change mid-course. Simply make the adjustment on your goal worksheet and continue moving forward.

A goal-setting worksheet is an invaluable tool for making progress. By keeping a record of your successes, it will motivate you to keep working on any type of goal: professional or personal. Regular check-ins can make the difference between setting a goal and reaching a goal. Use your worksheet to keep you on the path to completion.

Large corporations benefit from the use of team building activities. It gives employees a chance to get to know one another, creates a bond between members of a team and helps to generate cohesiveness among departments.

What about smaller companies? Within a small office, everyone knows each other and work well together. Is there really a benefit to doing team building?

Within a small company, individuals can have a huge impact on the effectiveness and the morale of the other employees. The addition of even just one new employee can severely alter the trajectory of a company. This makes it essential generate a culture that promotes corporate unity and success – no matter how big (or small) the office may be.

In addition, companies with little employee turnover can find themselves in a rut, operating under the assumption that they’ve reached the pinnacle of productivity. Both examples can benefit from strategic team building and may find that they reach new heights of success as a result.

What benefits are there from team building in a small company?

Reduce Conflicts

In a small office, there are few secrets. If there is tension between employees, it can become ‘the elephant in the room’. When this happens, everyone can quickly take sides, creating an environment that derails productivity.

Particularly in an office with several personality types, conflict can escalate quickly and hurt feelings can linger long after an incident occurs. The use of team building can help ease tensions between employees and offers the opportunity to repair any damaged relationships.

Regular team building activities promote team cohesiveness among the employees, helping to form bonds that translate into improved work relationships. This in turn can reduce the number of conflicts that arise, and eliminate productivity loss due to strife in the office.

Improve Communication

Often, communication between employees can be reduced to a bare minimum, due to conflict or tension. On the other hand, employees may spend so much time in non-work related conversation that they fail to be productive. How can you improve both problems in a small company? This can be achieved through the use of team building activities that focus on effective communication. Working together to pool resources and ideas to complete tasks helps demonstrate the necessity of using communication as a tool for success.

Even in a small office, improving communication can dramatically affect the success of a team. Creating opportunities for employees to talk outside of the work environment can allow employees to see each other as real people – not just as another cog in the wheel or an industry title.

Informal conversations can be prompted by encouraging teams to take breaks together, promoting shared activities, and setting up an environment that makes it easy for team members to collaborate on tasks.

Promote Teamwork

It seems counterintuitive to suggest that small companies need to promote teamwork. However, many employees in small companies become pigeonholed in their roles, causing a stalemate of productivity. When people are locked into their job role, it limits creative problem solving and can hamper success. Using team building to generate opportunities to step outside their normal roles gives employees a fresh, new perspective on what’s possible.

Even small companies can benefit from team building activities. Look for opportunities to get involved in community projects, taking work-related field trips or simply closing down the office to take everyone to lunch. These simple events can payoff in big ways, and provide long-lasting benefits to both the success of the company and the unity of your team.

Michele Bailey is the Founder of My Big Idea™. The My Big Idea™ Professional workshops have been used by 50+ small businesses as their corporate team building activity. Find out when our next workshop is offered. Or, book your own by contacting us.

Management and growth are essential to the survival of an insurance team.

While this may seem obvious, what is less obvious is the most effective means of maintaining growth both individually and corporately within the organization. Want to establish a pattern of success for your team? Develop a series of goals.

Setting goals

Using goals to help your team perform better gives you measurable markers on your team’s success. Within the insurance industry, there are many avenues that can be goal oriented. You can track both new and renewed business. Establish a goal for both personal and commercial business. Break down the commercial goal into business size: small, medium, and large.

Set goals that reflect each aspect of the insurance business, and monitor progress regularly. Adding goals that correspond to each type of product sold can help to generate a more balanced book for the team member, and increase company performance. This is also an excellent way to target specific areas where the company may need to generate additional revenue.

Team goals

One of the best ways to promote team unity and success is to set large goals for teams. This allows everyone to work together to reach the targeted sales goal, and allows for everyone to share in the success of reaching the goal. Use the larger, team goal to focus attention on overall corporate goals.

These goals can be based on any aspect of the business that needs to be improved. Want to increase sales? Set a target sales goal. Need to improve customer satisfaction? Establish a goal to increase the number of satisfied clients. Customize the goal to accommodate whatever is a priority for your team.

Individual goals

To correspond with the team goals, establish individual goals for each member of the team. How will each member contribute to the overall success of the team? Break down the larger goal into manageable chunks that correlate to each individual. Have a high producer? Give them extra incentive and recognition for reaching their huge goal. Have new members on your team? Motivate them by celebrating every milestone reached in their individual goal.

Production goals

Instead of focusing solely on generating income, make sure your goals focus on production, as well. While it is important to monitor sales figures, it is equally as important to set goals that focus on improving customer retention, handling customer issues in a timely manner and tracking closing ratios. Ultimately, these will all lead to increased revenue for the company, but will also lead to increased customer and employee satisfaction.

Monitoring goals

Once you’ve established both team and individual goals, establish benchmarks to help track the company’s progress. Meet regularly to assess progress towards the goals. Weekly team meetings can be an effective progress report of how well the company is doing on the overall goal, and individual status report meetings can provide insight into each employee’s success. Make adjustments and changes as necessary to individual goals, and offer assistance in developing strategies for reaching those goals.

Not only will setting individual goals improve productivity, they help to demonstrate the importance everyone has at the organization. By tying the individual’s success into the overall corporate team goal, each person can get a sense of how they support the work of the company.

Unsure about using goals with your team? Start with one area you’d like to improve. Monitor the effectiveness of your goal setting plan, and see how a strategic goal can increase your company’s success.

“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” – Thomas Jefferson

Successful people are often described as ‘lucky’. They were in the right place at the right time. They knew the right people. They had a better education, better breaks, a better start. The most successful people, however, will tell you that the difference between success and failure comes down to goals.

Career goals are imperative if you wish to be successful. Whether your benchmark for success is a specific job title, certain skills, attaining a salary, or other career related milestone, unless you set a goal, you won’t know when you’re ‘successful’.

Goals give you a purpose. No more meandering through life; goals define what you want out of life and enable you to achieve it.

Goals measure your results. When you determine an end mark, you can establish benchmarks to measure your progress. Reaching your end mark signifies success.

Goals prevent procrastination. With a deadline (end mark) looming in the distance, procrastination disappears for many people. Simply adding an end date is enough to encourage most people to push forward towards their goal.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

When you begin to prioritize your goals, everything you do is centered around reaching that goal. Every career decision, every networking opportunity, every conversation is another step in the right direction. Your brain will begin to see connections you may have previously missed, and will start to identify new opportunities, as well. In what seems like an effortless journey, you’ll start to appear ‘lucky’ as things fall into place; thanks to your tuned in mind.

Consider two students in the same college classes, working towards the same degree. One student has a goal for their future: education, family, career. Their path is set. The other has no real goal in mind, but is content to simply graduate and ‘see what happens’. In ten years, you’d expect the first student to have accomplished their list, while the second may still be floundering aimlessly. What made the difference? Their goals.

“You are the same today as you’ll be in five years except for two things: the books you read and the people you meet.” – Charlie Tremendous Jones

Goal setting uses the power of positive thinking to maximize results. In some ways, this can become a self-fulfilling prophesy, as you begin to envision yourself with your desired level of success. The popularity of ‘Vision Boards’ is no accident – there is power in envisioning yourself in your goals. Is your goal to take six weeks of vacation? Begin planning where you will go. Use the inspiration to help motivate you, as well as free yourself to reach for your dreams.

Goal setting isn’t just for corporations. Professional musicians, politicians, students, and athletes can all benefit from the power of effective goal setting. An anecdotal account of Kobe Bryant demonstrates how having a goal can take you to success beyond your wildest dreams. In 2012, Kobe was selected to play on the United States Olympic team.

Kobe had personal goals for his training regime, and would often start training at 4:00 AM in an effort to complete his own practice benchmarks before the team practice. When he was asked about his early practice, Kobe simply remarked that his goal was to complete 800 jump shots. He refused to quit practicing until he had done so. Kobe understood that by concentrating his activity, he was working towards the larger goal of becoming a successful basketball player. He worked relentlessly on perfecting his skill so he could attain his goal.

Don’t leave your future to chance. Establish goals – both career and personal – to help bring you to new levels of success and fulfillment.

Michele Bailey is the Founder of My Big Idea™. The My Big Idea™ Professional and Personal workshops both help immensely with goal setting for the life you want. Find out when our next workshop is offered. Or, book your own by contacting us.

Without a plan, life can become just a set of happenings that you can’t control. With a detailed roadmap, however, you can chart a course for success that will help you be more purposeful with your time and efforts. Want to create a roadmap for your life? It’s time to get SMART.

Where did the SMART process come from?

The S.M.A.R.T. Goal setting process was developed in the 80’s by George Doran, a consultant with the Washington Water Power Company. In helping managers create goals and objectives for the company, he developed this process to improve the chances of success.

His plan worked, and business professionals have adopted his technique ever since. The SMART plan doesn’t just work for business, however. Anyone who wishes to reach their goals can put this plan into action in their own lives and see astonishing results.

What is a SMART goal?

SMART is an acronym that helps define and direct your goals. Instead of vague ideas of what you’d like to accomplish, using a SMART goal setting worksheet to establish clear milestones and objectives can help you bring both structure and accountability to your plan.

The SMART plan is create goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound in order to help you succeed. Ready to get started?

Write down your goal. In as few words as possible, write down the goal that you’ve set for yourself. (It can be personal or professional – the type of goal doesn’t matter, it simply needs to be written down as succinctly as possible.) Once your goal is written down, it’s time to develop your SMART plan.

Specific:

The mission statement of your goal, this is where you will give specific details about what you’re aiming for. Include answers to ‘Who?’, ‘What?’, ‘Where?’, ‘When?’ and ‘Why?’.

Measurable:

How will you know when you’ve succeeded? You need to measure your traction towards your goal. What metrics will you use to measure the progress you’ve made? Complete the sentence, “I will know I’ve reached my goal when …” to help you write this portion.

Attainable:

What do you need to achieve your goal? Are there additional skills you will need to learn? Do you need to schedule time during the day to focus on your goal? Do you need to purchase items to work toward your goal? List any additional resources you may need in this section.

Realistic:

Given the resources you have available, evaluate if this goal is realistic. It may seem unnecessary, but there is power in physically writing down your goals. Written statements such as, “I can achieve my goal of losing 20 pounds.” can be an effective motivator.

Time bound:

Deadlines are effective. Put a deadline on your goal, and set up some mid-point benchmarks to help you track your progress.

Now that your goal is SMART, you can get to work on reaching it. Keep your SMART worksheet where you can see it, and use it to motivate you as you work towards your goal.

Are you a high achiever? Do you pride yourself on getting things done? Are you looking for a way to harness your productivity and accomplish more through goal-setting? It’s time to get SMART about your goals.

Team building exercises have become a buzz word in corporate circles. Done effectively, they can help improve morale, enhance leadership skills, and increase productivity. Employers routinely use team building as a way to promote corporate development and encourage teamwork. Which team building exercises are most likely to exact change in an organization? Which exercises are most effective for organizations?

There are dozens of team building exercises that can be used effectively depending on what you want to get out of it : ropes courses, community involvement days, cardboard regattas and more. Each exercise has its own strengths and weaknesses, and can be used for a variety of situations. However, the most effective strategies have common characteristics that can be identified.

What are the criteria for successful team building?

They take place at a neutral location. There is something powerful about taking employees to a neutral location that helps them focus on the task at hand. Simply changing locations for your team building activities will ensure that you have everyone’s attention, and communicates that the activity is serious enough that you are willing to sacrifice worktime to ensure they attend. It is easier to let your guard down and try something new when you are in a neutral location.

They don’t push people beyond their capabilities. There is a difference between being unable to accomplish something and being unwilling to do something due to fear or embarrassment. Finding the balance between the two is essential. You want to encourage your employees to stretch, but you don’t want to set unattainable goals for them. Before planning your team building, take into consideration the physical limitations your employees may have.

They have clearly defined expectations. Want to promote cooperation? Choose activities that require cooperating with others for success. Need to stress attention to detail? Look for activities that offer opportunities to think small (in a good way!). Clear goals and expectations will lead to greater team building success.

What are the components of a successful team building exercise?

Communicates your culture
The core values of your organization are what drive your success. While your employees may be able to relay the specifics of their job descriptions, would they also be able to explain the what the company’s values are and how their job relates to those values? Want to build community within your organization? Plan team building exercises that identify and reinforce the key components of your core values.

Aims for 100% contribution
An effective team requires 100% buy-in and participation. Anything less than 100% will hamper your success rate, and can breed animosity, resentment, and frustration. When your company has total participation, you will reach higher levels of success. To facilitate a company that includes 100% commitment, use team building exercises that focus on working together. To encourage cooperation and determination, structure the exercises so that success is measured in task completion, rather than beating other teams.

Promotes both your culture and your team
It is impossible to build a team around a shifting corporate culture, and it is equally as difficult to find success without teamwork. Once you have established your corporate culture, you can focus on strategizing activities that support both components.

Team Building Success Stories

In one example of astonishing change after team building, an organization found itself facing losses of over $2 million a day. A series of events led to the walkout of over 1500 employees at a large manufacturing company. Determined to regroup and recover, the organization identified key personnel to attend a custom designed team building exercise.

The outdoor, survival-type program identified a weakness within the organization that led to the walkout. During the team-building exercise, strategies for defusing potential problems in the future were developed and implemented in the workplace. As a result, there have been no more mass walk-outs and confidence within the workforce is high.

A second example demonstrates the power of team building during a corporate transition. Taking a group of employees from various backgrounds and converting them into brand enthusiasts has been mastered by the United States Marine Corps. The Marines bring busloads of new recruits to their training facility and through highly regimented team building exercises, they turn them into Marines in less than 100 days.

They take them to a neutral location, communicate the core values of their organization and then promote team unity by highlighting the rich history the organization has. In addition, they stress corporate buy-in by 100% of their new employees. If a potential problem is identified, they address it immediately and take steps to correct it. In some instances, it is necessary to remove someone from the Marine Corps if it becomes obvious they will not align themselves with the Marine value system.

Does your organization seem disjointed? Are you facing issues within your company that are hindering your success? Plan a well-thought out team building activity to help generate team enthusiasm and promote team building.