Time for New Year’s goals, objectives, or resolutions

It is interesting that people use the first of the year to set personal resolutions or goals they wish to attain. Organizations also start off their fiscal year by selecting new goals or objectives for their company success and as standard of achievement for employees or departments. To decide what type of goals to set, you must first look at your past to determine what would be a good future for you. You should also look at the definition for resolution, goal, and objective to determine which best suits your needs especially if you find that a previous method did not work as well as desired in the past. To view the Wikipedia explanations for each, click on the links in this paragraph.

If you want to find out ways to achieve some personal resolutions, check out the dozen or so most commonly set resolutions the US government has recorded with helpful links. It is interesting to note that two of the top resolutions have to do with job satisfaction and work stress.

Wikipedia considers goal and objective the same thing. Most organizational effectiveness professionals would consider them similar but not done in exactly the same way. Therefore, below I provide examples from my corporate and non-profit training materials for “Dynamic Group Development” (copyright 2006) of teams that may be more helpful as a descriptor to decide what to classify your organizational goal planning as. When building company goals, use a defined annual process and be sure to consider making the organizational goals SMART or for team goals consider using the 4 C’s.

• Group goals will be a few sentences relevant to their reason for existence and specifically detail the items the group will accomplish and within what designated timeframe. These goals will also include how the group will measure success. Additionally, to be sure the group can attain their goals, they will not write any that are outside the scope of the group’s current power. Goals may be developed by the sponsor or leader, and then revised by the group or goals may be developed by the group with the leader and approved by the sponsor.
• The sponsor and/or leader typically develop a list of objectives for the group. These objectives may include more than a few sentences and reflect the ideas the group needs to develop or results they are to accomplish during the year or whatever timeline is assigned when their reason for existence was determined. In any case, the objective should be a set of clear and concise statements indicating what product/service is expected or what problem resolution will look like. It will also include how to determine objectives were successfully accomplished and include an approximate time for each objective to be completed.

If you are in charge of facilitating a goal setting session, you may want to review the Blog Label of goals to see archived posts for additional ideas. If you facilitate teams in the coming year, you may want to review the teams label as well. Let us know if you find a goal setting method that works for you and share it with our readers by creating a comment with tips on how you did it.
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