Coaching for Achieving Goals
Goals are one of the most important yet under-utilised tools that businesses have. Business Coaching helps your goal setting process, providing clarity in your business planning and supporting your progress towards your goals.
Once you have set the main outline of your business plan, you need to develop certain goals for successfully achieving your project. These goals are termed SMART goals. The SMART goals checklist can help employees as well as employers share a certain understanding of how the goals have been set and how they are to be achieved.
A business coach can help you develop and achieve your SMART goals.
SMART goals should be:
Specific: A precise goal has a greater chance of being accomplished than a general goal. In order to set a specific goal you should know what you want. Make sure you specify what needs to be done and within what time frame. You need to ask yourself certain questions like:
- Who is involved?
- What do I want to achieve?
- Where do I need to do this?
- When should I be able to complete it?
- What are the requirements and constraints?
- Why am I doing this?
An example of a specific goal would be some thing like “Increase the bottom line by 10% within 6 months.”
Measurable: Evidence is needed in order to measure the progress you made towards attaining your goals. Measuring your progress enables you to stay on track, to meet your targets and to experience the excitement of achievement that encourages you. While setting up measurable goals you need to ask yourself questions like:
- How much?
- How many?
- How will I know when it is done?
An example of a measurable goal is “Win 4 orders by the end of each working day.”
Attainable: You need to set goals for yourself that are attainable yet stretching. Setting unattainable goals is a recipe for disappointment and failure. Even difficult, long-term goals can be made attainable by planning steps wisely and creating a time frame for yourself in order to carry out those steps.
Realistic: You need to be both willing and able to work towards achieving your goals. This would make it a realistic goal. By setting unrealistic goals for yourself you would probably give up very soon. A goal can be both high and realistic; if you truly believe you can achieve your goal then it would be termed as a realistic goal. Another way of knowing if your goal is realistic is to think back and determine whether you have accomplished something similar in the past.
Timeline: All goals should have a set time in which you choose to achieve them. This ensures that you don’t get lazy and keeps pushing you on further to meet your targets. Also you need to make sure that your timeline is realistic.
See our Coaching and Mentoring section to see how we can help you, or see our other business coaching articles:
For information about how business coaching can help you, contact Mike on mike@mgarnerconsulting.co.uk or ring him on 07885 525221.
