M10

In the western corporate world it is nowadays quite common for employees to take a more active role with their manager in creating their own personal and career development plans. When I first started doing early versions of these plans nearly 20 years ago, the emphasis was more on my training and development -- very rarely did it involve setting a work goal of any consequence. This article describes four key elements of the setting and completion of a work goal.

Even though much organizational training and development expertise goes into setting up and maintaining employee career development and performance review programs, the onus is still fairly and squarely on you to figure out how to make optimal use of them. What frequently happens is that employees leave everything until they get a warning reminder e-mail from their manager; and they then rush to enter goals and objectives into the system before some looming cutoff date.

This is a recipe for disaster because in their haste they will be tempted to enter poorly thought out goals in order to meet the deadline. Or even worse, to add too many goals in order to somehow impress the various managers who hold the promotion, salary or bonus keys. And remember - the unwritten secret of all corporate performance review systems is that 50% of the essential goals, projects and effort that actually arise in any given year will not be on anyone's radar at the start of the year -- simply because they haven't come into existence yet. So it is definitely in the employee's best interests to have a minimum number of concise goals, rather than a mishmash of weakly conceived ones.

What if you understand the message in the preceding paragraph but still struggle in coming up with appropriate work goals? The key word here is probably "alignment". Whatever goals you create should be in alignment with both your own vision of your career and life, and also with that of the organization itself. If you're fortunate, your company will be one that has clear and well communicated statements of what it is about, all the way from boardroom down to divisional and perhaps also departmental level. Should that not be the case, then you will need to do some discrete investigations of what is expected from you - perhaps from other departmental managers who do know what is going on.

Let's say you have created your work goals and they're pretty much in alignment with both the company's vision and your own vision of where you want to be and what you want to be doing. And you have supportive management! What then?

Well, here lies another potential trap. Because people are so busy with the 50% of urgent and important projects that are invariably rarely on anyone's agenda or planning tool, you might be tempted to conclude that there just isn't time to focus on career development objectives whose deadlines are at the end of the year; and where the next performance review with your manager is at least six months away!

Such thinking is defeatist and, over time, may habitually condition you to focus exclusively on the "urgent and important", at the expense of the "not urgent but important" goals that typically are on career development programs.

The solution to this dilemma is to break down the career development goals into the smallest elements you can think of. And then at least once a day to spend 5 to 10 minutes in moving the goals forward. For example, if the work goal is to complete an external quality assurance certification which would advance your own career prospects and also be of benefit in building trust with customers, then even though there is an enormous amount of work to be done in order to actually get certified, your very first step may be to find the telephone number of a company which provides appropriate training to help you. Or perhaps it's to get the list of books you need to study into the Finance department's procurement system for management approval and sign off.

These numerous five-minute steps will add up over time (certainly after six months) and if you keep electronic or paper folder records of all the proactive steps you have taken to move forward on the work goal, then your next midyear review with your manager is likely to be more enjoyable, rewarding and productive.