Search Results for: goals

What Happens When You Talk About Too Many Goals

February 28, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Matthew Pritchett's cartoon: Labour For the Many Brexit Positions Not the Few

To supplement this illustrious sketch by the British cartoonist Matt Pritchett, an excerpt from HuffPost’s article on “How Jeremy Corbyn Lost The Election,”

One big problem was the sheer size of the [Labour Party] manifesto and the number of policies on offer. Candidates complained that they didn’t have a single five-point pledge card like the one Tony Blair made famous. While the Tories had a simple message of ‘Get Brexit Done,’ Labour lacked a similarly easy ‘doorstep offer.’ “We had so much in the manifesto we almost had too much,” one senior source said. “It felt like none of it was cutting through. You needed to boil it down.”

“We tried to give a retail offer and also a grand vision and ended up falling between the two stools. To get across ‘you’ll be better off with Labour,’ we should have made our position clearer much earlier.”

Idea for Impact: Distill your goals into simple messages that others will find relevant and timely. When it comes to persuasion, clarity and conciseness are critical. Weak messages meander. Smart messages immediately express what’s important and help rally your resources towards your mission.

Achieve Your Fitness Goals in the New Year

October 3, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

After deciding to get back in shape, we are often discouraged by the question of where to start. Reaching your goals is possible if you have a plan and quality equipment. For everything you will ever need please check it out here, and regarding the perfect program—we got you covered! The goal of this fitness program is to provide a well-structured workout plan that will get you to your goals in less than a month.

Day 1

These exercises are meant to be done without any breaks between them. After you are completely done, repeat them two more times. First, start off with 20 squats. Push your chest out as far as you can, keep your back straightened, and bend your knees at a 90-degree angle. It is just like when you are trying to sit down.

Next, you should do some push-ups. You can do them on the floor, or try to do inclined pushups against the table. You should do 15 push-ups and then move to the bridge pose. With your back to the chair, rest your forearms on the seat, feet firmly on the floor. Lift your hips to form a bridge. Tighten your abdominal and buttocks muscles and stay in this position for 45 seconds.

Day 2

This day is scheduled for cardio. All you have to do is choose an activity that you like. It can be running, brisk walking, swimming, cycling or anything else that suits you. You should do cardio for 30 minutes.

Day 3

From day to day, you should increase the difficulty of exercises and the number of repetitions to help your body reach your every fitness goal. You will again start off with 20 squats and then you will move to step aerobics. Place your foot on a chair (or a step) and lift yourself by shifting weight to that leg. As you do this exercise, imagine pushing your raised foot down instead of pushing yourself off the floor. Repeat this exercise 15 times with both feet.

Take light weights in both hands and bend your elbows at a 45-degree angle. Lift the weights towards your shoulders while keeping your elbows close to your body. This bicep exercise you should repeat 15 times.

Lie on your back, bend your knees and rest your feet on the floor. Arms straighten beside you. Lift your legs so that your knees touch your upper body and your pelvis moves away from the floor. Repeat inverted sit-ups 15 times.

Day 4

The third day is always a day off. You have been working hard and it is time for your body to rest. Eat foods rich in vitamins to strengthen your immune system and boost protein in your diet to help your muscles recover faster.

Congratulations!

Your journey to the finish line is paved with these four days, which you will repeat constantly for 2 to 4 weeks. You will be fascinated by how much a daily commitment to training can do in such little time.

Shrewd Leaders Sometimes Take Liberties with the Truth to Reach Righteous Goals

April 12, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Shrewd Leaders Must Sometimes Take Liberties with the Truth to Reach Righteous Goals Duplicity must be decried when used to justify the attainment and exercise of power. However, sometimes, even principled leaders must put on an act to realize noble ends—infuse optimism to surmount hopelessness, win followers’ devotion to audacious new ideas, for example.

In the Zen parable that follows, a warrior motivates his followers in the face of desperate odds. He persuades his outnumbered army by flipping an unfair coin and proclaiming that they are fated to win the battle.

A great Japanese warrior named Nobunaga decided to attack the enemy although he had only one-tenth the number of men the opposition commanded. He knew that he would win, but his soldiers were in doubt.

On the way he stopped at a Shinto shrine and told his men: “After I visit the shrine I will toss a coin. If heads comes, we will win; if tails, we will lose. Destiny holds us in her hand.”

Nobunaga entered the shrine and offered a silent prayer. He came forth and tossed a coin. Heads appeared. His soldiers were so eager to fight that they won their battle easily.

“No one can change the hand of destiny,” his attendant told him after the battle.

“Indeed not,” said Nobunaga, showing a coin which had been doubled, with heads facing either way.

Idea for Impact: Moral Leadership Relates to the Integrity of Leaders and Their Intentions

A wise leader must be open to bringing deception into play to smooth the way to sound decisions and noble results.

As long as leaders use these methods to respectable purposes, and until people wise up to their methods, certain ends can justify certain means.

Postscript: The quoted Zen parable is sourced from the celebrated compilation Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings, Shambhala Edition (1961) by Paul Reps. This book traces its roots to the thirteenth-century Japanese anthology of Buddhist parables Shasekishū (Sand and Pebbles) compiled by the Kamakura-era monk Mujū.

Think in Terms of Habits & Systems Rather Than Goals

September 18, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize

Most folks fail to understand how goals work: goals don’t stipulate behaviors.

Goals relate only to the outcomes and results of specific behaviors—they are not about the actions and behaviors that can bring about those results.

In other words, goals can only provide direction and can even impel you onward in the short-term, but ultimately, a well-designed system—when put into habitual practice—will always prevail.

Developing a system is what matters to discipline and self-control. Committing to the process is what makes the difference. As New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg wrote in his bestselling The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (2012,) only a systematic approach works:

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

An example of a goal: “I want to lose 10 pounds before my sister’s wedding.” A habit/system would be, “What dieting and exercising changes can I make with the aim of looking better at my sister’s wedding?”

Another example of a goal: “How do I amass $1 million before I turn 35?” A habit/system would be, “How do I develop financial disciplines and investment methods to get richer over time and achieve a net worth of $1 million by the time I’m 35?”

Idea for Impact: Only by creating habits and systems to achieve goals can you live more of the life you aspire to. As a creature of habit, when you are doing something that is routine, you don’t need to be deliberately engaged in the task in the same way as if you were doing something that is not habitual.

Our Vision of What Our Parents Achieved Influences Our Life Goals: The Psychic Contract

July 14, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Understanding Others’ Motivations is a Key to Building Better Relationships

Psychic Contract Theory: Children are Programmed to Want to Do as Well as or Better Than Their Parents Understanding others’ deep-held motivations involves recognizing what drives them, why and how they want to work, work styles they may adopt in various circumstances, and what levers you have to motivate them.

Take for example Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a motivation hypothesis used widely for several decades now. Represented as a pyramid, this hypothesis proposes that people are motivated to fulfill basic subconscious desires such as food and shelter before trying to fulfill higher-level needs such as affection and prestige. Even though academics have extensively debated its specifics, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has provided a handy framework to value the multifaceted composition of human motivation and to understand how to engage others.

The Relationship between Your Own Vision of Success and Your Parental Influence

One less-known framework for understanding the provenance of people’s life goals—their deep-seated aspirations for want to achieve in life—is the “Psychic Contract” hypothesis, a concept that dominates The Anatomy of a Great Executive (1991) by John Wareham, a leadership psychologist from New Zealand.

According to Wareham, a psychic contract is a set of “deals” we subconsciously strike with our parents early in life. Our life-goals are defined primarily by our own vision of what our parents achieved—and what they failed to achieve:

As we grow we absorb the values of our parents, and are conditioned to improve (albeit marginally) upon their achievements. We strike a psychic contract with them whereby “success” in life is defined by the attainment of a similar social positioning, which we later embark upon attaining, sometimes very consciously, but often entirely unconsciously.

Throughout our lives, we unintentionally adhere to our psychic contracts, despite the limitations they place on us. We use our psychic contracts to not only define and approach our life goals but also think about how we measure success.

We consciously measure success in terms of milestones and standards instilled by our parents.

As a rule of thumb, about three quarters or more of people in westernized culture seek first to equal, then marginally to improve upon the lifestyle or status level perceived to exist in the childhood home.

Psychic Contract Theory: Children are Programmed to Want to Do as Well as or Better Than Their Parents

Our Vision of What Our Parents Achieved Influences Our Life Goals: The Psychic Contract In The Anatomy of a Great Executive, Wareham goes into depth explaining how we can know our own psychic contracts and how we can reset our goals to give ourselves permission to succeed. Here are some other prominent learning points:

Our psychic contract is based on our birth order, our parents’ birth order, and roles we play relative to our parents in our families.
The so-called “prime parental injunction” sits at the heart of our conscious. We go through our lives trying to become the people our parents wanted us to be. Even people who spend their lives trying to become exactly the opposite of what their parents wished are still influenced by this injunction.
Every person has a pre-programmed financial comfort level. Most of us strive to reach this level; but once there, we slow down—not because we are lazy, but because we have fulfilled our inner desires and don’t need more. Wareham cites the example of commission-based sales people who, after earning adequate commission to reach their financial comfort level, tend to be less aggressive in selling cars to customers for the rest of the month.

Idea for Impact: “Psychic Contract” is a handy and thought provoking—if unsubstantiated—hypothesis to understand how your and other people’s deep-seated life goals are established. It can give you one more data point in trying to figure people out.

The Power of Sharing Your Goals

October 21, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Seek the Positive Effect of Goal-Accountability

This research from the Dominican University of California suggests that writing down your goals, sharing them with friends, and sending your friends regular updates about your progress can improve your chances of accomplishing your goals. The research implies that

People who merely thought about their goals and how to reach them accomplished their goals less than 50% of the time.
In contrast, people who wrote down their goals, enlisted friends for them, and sent them regular progress reports succeeded in attaining their goals 75% of the time.

Let Your Goals Guide You

Put your goals in writing. Writing down goals can be a strong motivator. Use the SMART technique to avoid being vague about your goals. Connect each goal to a larger purpose, be specific, use action verbs, include measurable outcomes, and stipulate target dates for completion.
Enlist the help of others. If you can identify a friend or coworker who may share a goal, team up with them. Convince the other person to go to the gym, quit smoking, or share healthy meals with you regularly. A partner can help you stay motivated and committed.
Seek a mentor. Look for role models who may have struggled with goals similar to yours or already achieved the goals. Ask them for advice and suggestions.

Idea for Impact: Seek the Positive Effect of Goal-Accountability

Committing to friends, family, or coworkers on goal-directed actions and making yourself accountable can impel you to stay on course and reach your goals.

Write your goals down, share them with others, provide them regular updates, and ask them to keep you on your toes.

Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize

January 12, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One of my blog readers asked me to write more about goal-setting and performance against goals. In response, I studied the work of University of Maryland’s Edwin Locke and University of Toronto’s Gary Latham, two renowned researchers on goal-setting. Here is a summary.

Effective Goals Can Challenge, Motivate, and Energize

Goals Impact Performance in Several Ways

Goals can help direct: A person’s goals should direct his/her attention, effort, and action toward goal-relevant actions at the expense of less-relevant actions.
Goals can help motivate: A person’s goals can motivate him/her to pursue specific outcomes. The person can be motivated only when his/her goals are sufficiently challenging and can nudge him/her to put in special efforts.
Goals can help persist: A person is likely to persist at his/her efforts when his/her goal is worthy enough to attain.
Goals can trigger learning: Goals can either activate a person’s knowledge and skills that are relevant to performance or induce the person to acquire such knowledge or skills.

Best Practices for Goal-Setting and Performance

Specific, difficult, but attainable goals lead to better performance than easy, vague, or abstract goals such as the general-purpose exhortation to “do your best.” Hard goals motivate because they require a person to achieve more in order to be content with his/her own performance.
Goal specificity and performance share a positive, linear relationship. When a person’s goals are specific, they direct and energize his/her behavior far more effectively than when they are vague and unspecific.
Performance is directly proportional to the difficulty of a goal as long as a person is committed to the goal, has the requisite ability and resources to achieve the goal, and does not have conflicting goals.
Taking on excess work without access to the necessary resources to realize the goals (“overload”) can moderate the effects of goals.
A team performs best when the goals of the individuals on the team are compatible with the team’s goal. Therefore, when an individual’s goals are incompatible with his team’s, his/her contribution to the team will be subpar.
The goal need not be in focal awareness all the time. Once a goal is accepted and understood, it resides in the periphery of the person’s consciousness and serves to guide and give meaning to his/her actions.
While long-term goals are relevant and helpful, most people find short-term goals more effective because they channel a person’s immediate and direct efforts and provide quick feedback. This suggests that it’s best to divide long-term goals into concrete short-term objectives.
Self-efficacy plays a key role in the achievement of goals. A person is much more likely to buy into and pursue goals if he/she believes himself/herself to be competent enough to reach those goals. The most effective goals must therefore embrace a person’s strengths—such goals help him/her strive towards success by leveraging the best of who he/she is and what he/she can do.
One reason a person may lack self-efficacy is his/her past failures with undertaking similar goals. Such a person may believe that he/she may never reach his/her goals and should first undertake a series of small, near-term goals instead of difficult, distant goals. The person’s success with a series of smaller goals can boost his/her confidence and can inspire him/her to undertake larger goals. For example, a chain-smoker will find the goal of smoking cessation daunting. He should therefore focus on smaller goals like gradually cutting down the number of cigarettes he smokes every day. Experiences of goal achievement can build up momentum to tackle the larger goal.
Goals are not effective by themselves. Feedback is the most important moderator of goal-setting because it tracks the progress of performance towards goals and creates new sub-goals. If a person finds his/her progress towards a goal unsatisfactory, the feedback he/she receives can drive corrective efforts to develop new skills or pursue the goal in a new way.

“Goals Gone Wild”: The Use and Abuse of Goals

July 7, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi 2 Comments

The Use and Abuse of Goals

An article in The Economist (7-March-2015 Issue) discussed the side effects of goal setting, more specifically the perils of overprescribing goals. This article echoes my earlier commentary on “The Trouble with Targets and Goals.”

The Economist article mentioned a Harvard Business School paper titled “Goals Gone Wild” by Lisa D. Ordonez, et al. This engaging literature review discusses many of the predictable side effects of goal setting on individual and organizational performance:

When goals are too specific, they can narrow people’s focus. People tend to fixate on a goal so intensely that they overlook aspects of a task that are unrelated to the goal. Even if unrelated, these overlooked details may be significant enough to warrant attention.
When people are assigned too many goals, this can encourage them to concentrate on tasks that are comparatively easier to achieve.
When goals aren’t afforded an appropriate time-horizon, they can distort long-and short-term priorities. Short-term goals can steer people toward myopic behavior that harms their organization in the long term. Conversely, long-term goals can be vague about the immediate course of action and obscure what’s required in the short term.
When goals are too challenging, they can discourage risk-taking. As a result, people may use deceitful methods to reach their goals or even misrepresent their performance levels—they may exaggerate their feats, conceal underperformance, or claim unmerited credit. The authors acknowledge the complexity of setting goals “at the most challenging level possible to inspire effort, commitment, and performance—but not so challenging that employees see no point in trying.”
When goals are complex, specific, and challenging, they can push people to focus narrowly on performance and neglect opportunities for experiential learning.
When goals are comparative, i.e., when goals pit employees against their peers, goals can hinder cooperation between people and even create a culture of unhealthy competition within a team.
When goals, by definition, try to increase extrinsic motivation, they can subdue people’s intrinsic motivation. Goals can challenge some people far more or far less than necessary if the intrinsic value of the job itself is already deeply motivating.
When goals fail to consider individuals’ skills or prior achievements or when they are not tailored enough, they can be too easy for some and too difficult for others. On the other hand, customizing goals can lead to feeling of discrimination or favoritism.

A Warning Label for Setting Goals

The authors propose a clever cautionary graphic sign and conclude,

For decades, scholars have prescribed goal setting as an all-purpose remedy for employee motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision.

Idea for Impact: Set objectives that are not only well designed, but also challenging and attainable.

The Trouble with Targets and Goals

March 17, 2015 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Trouble with Targets and Goals

In a well-known 1992 Harvard Business Review article as well as a book on translating strategy into action, Robert Kaplan and David Norton explained the need for a “balanced scorecard.” They encouraged leaders to develop tools with which to monitor the performance of any organization. The authors explained, “Think of the balanced scorecard as the dials and indicators in an airplane cockpit. For the complex task of navigating and flying an airplane, pilots need detailed information about many aspects of the flight, like fuel level, airspeed, altitude, bearing, etc.”

Goals are effective apparatus—a persuasive system indicating what achievements matter the most to an organization. Well-defined objectives, expressed in terms of specific goals, often direct an organization’s performance, sharpen focus on the execution of the organization’s strategic and operative plans, and boost productivity.

In terms of an individual within a company, goal-setting is especially important as a way to provide ongoing and year-end feedback. You can give employees continuous input on their performance and motivate them by setting and monitoring targets.

Still, there are four things to look out for when setting and managing targets:

Some organizations get so overwhelmed with setting and meeting targets that managers tend to adopt whatever behaviors necessary to meet the goals set by their superiors.
Some organizations get carried away and set too many targets. While goals are beneficial, having more of them is not necessarily better. In fact, too many targets can lead to stress, muddled efforts, and organizational atrophy. In this instance, employees feel as if they’re being asked to throw darts in multiple directions all at once. Adding to the confusion, priorities can even conflict with one another—e.g. decreasing production cycle-time while not hiring more workers or buying more equipment. According to a 2011 study by consulting firm Booz (now named Strategy&), 64% of participating global executives reported facing too many conflicting priorities. The celebrated management consultant Peter Drucker famously advised his clients to pursue no more than two priorities at a time:

Develop your priorities and don’t have more than two. I don’t know anybody who can do three things at the same time and do them well. Do one task at a time or two tasks at a time. That’s it. OK, two works better for most. Most people need the change of pace. But, when you are finished with two jobs or reach the point where it’s futile, make the list again. Don’t go back to priority three. At that point, it’s obsolete.

Sometimes, organizations can be so eager to reach a target that they institute an overly aggressive system (unreasonable “stretch goals“) in an attempt to drive people to heroic levels of performance. Instead, it’s best to have goals that represent what senior management thinks ought to happen, not the contents of their wildest dreams.
When grading an employee’s performance depends heavily upon that individual meeting his targets (e.g. bonuses promised to salesmen who achieve certain revenue targets,) it can pit employee against employee. This tends to create an unhealthily competitive environment with colleagues scrambling over each other to get to the client or show off their achievements to management. Conflicts and rivalry between employees is one of the dominant criticisms of the individual performance rating system and the forced ranking system that many companies currently practice.

Idea for Impact: In goal-setting, less is more and simple is better. A few well-chosen, consequential targets and goals can sharpen an individual’s or an organization’s focus and boost productivity. Too many targets can lead to stress and even disaster.

Missing in SMART goals: the ‘Why’

February 8, 2010 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

SMART Goals The ‘SMART’ technique (see this excellent introduction) is a popular framework for effective goal setting. Generally, the acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound requisites for goals. Some people use different denotations and variations; others use the expanded ‘SMARTER’ form or focus only on the measurable and time-bound (‘MT’) characterization of goals.

Quite often, goals—even the SMART ones—fail to stimulate action beyond the initial burst of motivation. The simple reason for this slip is that goals tend to lack visibility for the “true ends.”

Make Your Goals Stick

A goal that lacks an underpinning of meaning and personal significance is likely to run out of steam. Therefore, a goal or resolution can be inspiring only when you can connect it to a larger purpose.

When you define any goal, identify its “true ends”—what benefits you expect to gain by successfully pursuing an idea or goal. For example,

Instead of “Join a fitness center and workout every day,” try “Lose fifteen pounds by 6-June to drop a clothes-size and look and feel better at my best friend’s wedding.”
Instead of “Reduce credit card debt,” try “Reduce expenses and pay off $12,000 in credit card debt in three months so that I can save $135 per month in interest fees.”
Instead of “Attend fewer meetings,” try “Attend fewer meetings or delegate participation to reduce time at work and enjoy more quality time with family.”

Recognizing the true ends of your goals will sustain you through internal and external resistance to pursue your goals.