Goal setting

Goal setting- Competency building

All of us want to grow in our chosen professional career. It’s just not that; we want to grow fast and faster than others.  What differentiates the successful professionals from the others is the effective goal setting. All of us know what SMART goals are. In this write-up, I am rather going to talk about “stretch elements” that one should consider having in their goals to build their competencies.

Three types of Goals.

We can categorize the goals that we set in three Buckets based on efforts required / skills or competencies required to accomplish them. 

1) Normal goals – These are goals which are within your normal reach of your skills / competencies. These are goals / activities that does not challenge you or your skill level. Hence it provides very less room for improving your competencies.  However, it does not mean that these jobs are not important. All the roles will have good amount of tasks that would fall in this category and it’s not bad.

2) Stretch goals – If you want to build muscles, you cannot be lifting a glass of water every day and expect any result. Rather you need to do weights appropriate to your fitness level and keep increasing the weight to reach the next threshold limit.

These are goals that necessarily require good amount of stretch efforts without which it’s not possible to accomplish them.  It challenges you to give the best of your efforts.  On completion, it gives you a sense of accomplishment and it makes you more competent.

Conscious decision to take up such activities will help you acquire new competencies / take your existing competencies to higher level which is the only recipe to grow in the career.

3) Non-comfort zone goals – These are goals that you normally do not want unless its given by your boss and you push yourself to take it up because it is outside your comfort zone ie., you feel that you are not competent to do it or your confidence level is at a very low level. For example, you may be good and comfortable in preparing all the MIS / doing Data analytics, however, not in presenting it to a group of people.  

These goals, even if it’s not taken by you, may not affect the career growth since you are delivering on most of the expectations. However, identifying and taking up such tasks that are outside our comfort zone shall ensure fast track career growth. It will help you discover the new YOU in you in terms of what you are capable of doing.  It can build muscles in quantum leap in your competency and confidence level.

Right mix of Goals – when we are doing a job or at regular interval, we should ask ourselves what is the percentage of time they spent on all the above 3 types of goals. If the answer is very less percentage of stretch and Non-comfort zone goals, it’s not good. One should ideally spend 20-25 of the time in Stretch goals and 5-10% on non-comfort zone goals.  The cumulative efforts will result in big improvement in the competency level over a period of time.

Have a relook at the goals. What is a stretch goal today can become a normal goal later since you’ve already done it / done it many times. Hence one should consciously review and keep pushing the Stretch goal to normal goals and non-comfort zone goal to stretch goals and keep setting new goals / raising the performance bar.

A simple test – Let us ask ourselves when was the last time we did something for the first time ? ( I came across this caption in one of the TV ads long time ago and I just loved it)

Performance failure:  Not all goals can be accomplished.  Some of the primary reasons for failure could be lack of drive, unrealistic goals or insufficient efforts which only call for having a relook at the goals rather than giving up.  Quote to remember by Thomas A Edison - I have not failed 10,000 times, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that will not work.

Every failure should help us do self-introspection and work on what went wrong.

Final note: The complexity level of the goals depends on one’s competency level. What is a normal goal can be a stretch goal for someone else and vice versa. Hence, realistic assessment / self-introspection is a must while setting the goals.

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