Goal Setting makes things less Scary
I’ve just come back from our six-monthly strategy away days with the Madgex shareholders. Now these are always good events. We get through a lot of stuff very productively.
This session was particularly productive because since we have tightened the focus of our mission to be the global leaders in job board software and services, our ‘flamenco dancing’ of innovation and creativity has significantly step-changed for the better.
Over the last two days we agreed a set of targets for the five years from 1.2.9. We’re into our fourth year of targets set four years ago which we’ve achieved in each of the years. Now this next set of targets should have ‘filled us with the fear’. We’re talking triple-digit millions. Yet it didn’t.
The reason why I think that it didn’t is that we’ve taken the time to plan the scenarios and imagine what it would be like. We’ve done the sales capacity modelling. We’ve got a big A3 map full of our ideas. We’ve allocated responsibilities and modelled in our heads what it will feel like when we’ve got there.
The ‘doing’ is now a matter of fact. This probably sounds arrogant. But it’s not meant to be. What we know is that we can only do as much as we can do to plan and prepare for the externalities. Competition. Market forces. Technological change. As long as we’re taking the time out to think rather than just do/ react to competitor’s ‘doing’, then we’re preparing in the best way that we can.
The rest is just doing, reviewing plans and doing again. As long as we maintain our sensitivity to our people and our clients then we should be able to revise plans on the fly.
The really important bit though is that in planning, setting and imagining the achievement of the goals they became a lot less scary (although I’m not sure our sales director agrees yet ;-)
Just Seven Things 