Goals Setting

How Important are Goals for an organization ? Imagine a cricket or a football match or any sport for that matter without a goal or a score to be achieved. We watch it keenly so as to see the goals to be achieved. But are organizations equivalent to sport? Well, the fact is Organization play a bigger sport. Effects of a sports match could be seen only on field for some time after it. But Organization reflects society, we can imagine the catastrophic effects that an organization can cause if they operate without goals. It's important for the existence &  the purpose organization serves to set goals for it.

Now the question is what kind of goals should organizations have ?

How do we know what kind of goals to set? The whole point of setting goals, after all, is to achieve them. It does no good to go to the trouble of calling meetings, hacking through the needs of organization, and burning up precious time, only to end up with goals that aren't acted on or completed. Unfortunately, this scenario describes what far too many managers do with their time.

The best goals are smart goals — well, actually SMART goals is more like it. SMART is a handy acronym for the five characteristics of well-designed goals

• Specific: Goals must be clear and unambiguous; vagaries and platitudes have no place in goal setting. When goals are specific, they tell employees exactly what is expected, when, and how much. Because the goals are specific, one can easily measure One's employees' progress toward their completion.
• Measurable:What good is a goal that one can't measure? If one's goals are not measurable, one never know whether employees are making progress toward their successful completion. Not only that, but it's tough for employees to stay motivated to complete their goals when they have no milestones to indicate their progress.
• Attainable: Goals must be realistic and attainable by average employees. The best goals require employees to stretch a bit to achieve them, but they aren't extreme. That is, the goals are neither out of reach nor below standard performance. Goals that are set too high or too low become meaningless, and employees naturally come to ignore them.
• Relevant: Goals must be an important tool in the grand scheme of reaching one's company's vision and mission. It should be Relevant to the society which it is reflecting and to the employees that it has.
• Time-bound: Goals must have starting points, ending points, and fixed durations. Commitment to deadlines helps employees to focus their efforts on completion of the goal on or before the due date. Goals without deadlines or schedules for completion tend to be overtaken by the day-to-day crises that invariably arise in an organization.
  
  SMART goals make for smart organizations.
  Goals are often unclear, ambiguous, unrealistic, unrelated to the organization's vision, unmeasurable, and demotivating. By developing SMART goals One can avoid these traps while ensuring the progress of one's organization and its employees.
  In experience of Prof. Mandi in NITIE, goals should also be like an Fibonacci spiral which should be increasing arithmetically with feedbacks of past to challenge the future.