Camille Rapacz: Are SMART goals SMART? Why is this acronym S M A R T so well known yet not well used? Today, we're going to talk about how SMART goals are and what might the alternatives be?
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: /Hey, George. Are you feeling smart today?
George Drapeau: Hey, Camille. I thought I was going to maybe feel the alternative, but I don't know what the alternative is.
So yes, I'm feeling reasonably smart today.
Camille Rapacz: That's good. Cause I need your brain on this podcast. So. Okay. I'm here. I'm here for it. Just half, just half your smarts would be good.
In our last episode, we did the strategy versus goals conversation. Which comes first? All that good stuff.
And I think we touched on this idea of smart goals. I know you and I definitely talked about this and I had thoughts so because I had thoughts, I thought, well, we should probably talk about smart goals. So here we are.
So this conversation I think is an important followup from the last conversation we had, because.
And it's, it's just saying you have goals isn't good enough. You have to have good goals, so you can just be like, I set my goals and voila, we're done. And I often see this as a little bit of a check of the box activity in an organization. Okay. Everybody set their goals. Let's move on and go do the real work.
But the real work starts with setting good goals. So let's talk about what that looks like. Okay. I'm sure all your goals are perfectly well written, George.
George Drapeau: Complete candor here. I will say that I've been trained in smart goal methodology for so many years that my standard is clear in my head. It's hard to think about anything but smart goals, but writing smart goals is still difficult for me.
So that's the truth. I still, I wouldn't say struggle exactly because I good, but it does work. It's worked for me to write. It doesn't, doesn't come out automatically most of the time.
Camille Rapacz: And I think that's a good thing. Like, I think the whole reason that we want to have this conversation is because if you think that writing the goal should be easy, then you're doing it wrong.
You should be putting more thought into it. That's the whole point of today's conversation is. What does it mean to put more thought into writing a really good goal, why it's worth doing, and what happens when you don't. So, thank you for that.
First let's start with what is a goal? So a goal is a desired end point achievement or target that an organization aims to reach that could be near term or long term. So pretty straightforward.
George Drapeau: Yeah, that's nice. I like that.
Camille Rapacz: what are the makings of a bad goal? How do we go wrong?
The number one issue that I see is just that they're too vague. I see a lot of goals that have some version of sounding like this. We want to increase sales, want to elevate employee performance. Expand our market presence, reduce expenses, increase brand awareness. Like these are all great things we want to do in a company.
And sometimes I'll even see them say like, let's improve quality by 10 percent or reduce expenses by 5 percent or something like that. And they're still too vague, they kind of sound good though. Like I could go for that. I get that we need to increase sales. And maybe I even think increasing them by 10%.
Sure. That, that gives me a little bit more of like a gauge of what I should be doing, but it's still not enough. It's not enough to actually give us clarity in the actions that we should take, what we should do and what we shouldn't do and get everybody aligned. Yeah. And that's where we get tripped up.
Have you ever had this experience where you were in an organization, George, and either the goal that was set for your team or that was set with a broader organization had kind of this, it sounds good, but when you dug into it, you realize, I'm, I'm not really sure if we all know what we're doing though.
George Drapeau: Definitely for sure. I've been in organizations with really shockingly, no goals, just no goals. And I've been in organizations and situations where the goals are just really crummy, I can see it's so crummy that the institution has clearly not taught their employees how to write a goal or what makes a good goal.
I've seen a lot of this that you're talking about. You know what occurs to me when I see the too vague stuff is thinking like a geek. Goals are kind of like a vector and a vector is both a direction and an amplitude. So velocity is a vector. People say velocity when they really mean speed. Speed is just the, you know, the amplitude you add direction, you get a vector.
And these things have one of the two, at least two components of the vector. Increased sales. Okay. That tells me. What kind of direction I'm going to go probably up and to the right, but then by how much, and I guess we're also missing by when those other things, but so these aren't enough. I've seen lots of goals that have one of the components.
Camille Rapacz: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's a great way to describe it too.
There's certain components that you need to make the goal complete. And that's where this smart goal framework comes in, that's why it was created. So I want to talk through that a little bit, but first I want to talk about the impact that these bad goals have on a company's performance.
Cannot I wait to hear this! You know what the impacts are like, you've experienced this, you've been in a company where this happened, so I'll name a few. And as I'm doing this, I'm sure you'll have a few to add to this, but just like the big picture is when you have poorly written or, I mean, let's just not even go to the don't even have goals.
So don't have goals. Definitely all of these things are happening. But having them, but having them not be well written is also still hurting performance. It's a step in the right direction, but it's still hurting performance because number one, it can mean that the priorities really just aren't clear. So what, what are we all supposed to work on first?
I have a million things to work on, but what's the most important thing to work on? If the goal lacks clarity, then I don't know how to set priorities, which leads to also misalignment. So, if a goal is too vague, it's up to interpretation. George gets to decide what he thinks that goal means, and I get to decide myself what I think that goal means.
Yeah, you realize, Oh, we're, we're both trying to kind of accomplish the same thing, but not really. And that will also lead to lack of motivation. If it's vague or, or sometimes that's just an unrealistic goal, it's so unrealistic and out there that seems like, whatever, this is not even make sense for us and it's demotivating. People don't even want to work on the goal.
And then the last one I have was just around resource allocation. So you can just be throwing, you know, money and people at all sorts of different things because you're not really clear what goals you're supposed to be working on. They're too vague. And so you're trying too many things.
You're working on too many things. You're wasting resources, basically.
George Drapeau: Yeah, that's true. You talk about not being on the same page. On goals, so I, will have conversations with staff about coming to a common understanding what the goal is.
And I'll be clear. I don't need you to like it. We're not talking about whether you like the goal or not. We're talking about whether we both agree on it the same way or not. Let's do that first. Then we can maybe decide whether you like it or not, maybe, but that's those are 2 separate concepts to tease apart.
Camille Rapacz: Yes, you have to have clarity first. It also made me think of the other way to think of this is just productivity. Employee productivity is just going to tank because. They're not motivated or it's not clear what they should work on.
They might be spread across doing too many things when, if we were more focused in setting the goal, we could focus our resources on fewer things, be more productive. So productivity also takes a hit.
George Drapeau: The other thing about it is look at it from the management perspective. It does that classic saying you can't manage what you can't measure.
And so if you do have goals, if you have bad goals, it's hard to measure them. It's hard for you as a team to assess where you are. What kind of dashboard can you build that tells you where you are if you don't have clear measurable goals? And the upside is if they are well written, then you can measure progress, which means you can diagnose where problems are more easily and fix them, which is great.
Camille Rapacz: Yes, that's totally right. And I think that even you think about that for an organization and then you think about that when you're setting your individual. So if you're a leader in a company and you're having goals set in your performance or your bonuses tied to that, I see really poorly written goals at that level, which basically means it's just up to, it's subjective.
It's just up to your boss, whether they thought you did enough to warrant your bonus. It's not measurable and it's way too vague.
So let's talk about how do we know if our goals are good? Oh, great. Okay. That is the purpose of the SMART Goal Framework. It is a way to see if your goal is good or not, and to make it good.
So the SMART Goal Framework, it stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevance, and Time bound. Sometimes I see people have the R be realistic and that's incorrect. I mean, that's what attainable is saying. And sometimes attainable is achievable, but those are virtually the same idea. But it's relevant, not realistic.
In the SMART goal framework. let's walk through these just a little bit to define this for our audience. Maybe for those of you who haven't heard of SMART goals before or aren't as familiar with them, this is what we're talking about. Or maybe you do think you know what SMART goals are, but you want to listen in to see if your understanding is correct.
The specific means that the goal has a specifically defined desired outcome. This is the outcome for the thing I'm going to go do.
Measurable is, I can put a number to it. So just what you were talking about, George, it's quantifiable. I can measure this goal. I can measure how the progress or the achievement of this goal, there's a number to it.
Attainable means it is something that we can imagine achieving. It's doable, maybe with a lot of effort, but it is a doable goal.
Relevant means it's aligned to the company's mission and vision. It has some strategic alignment in the organization. It's relevant to what the organization is trying to achieve overall.
And then time bound is just that it has a deadline. We're going to achieve it by a certain time, because without this, this goal doesn't really have any traction. You can spend forever working on this thing. So that framework will help you if you then test your goal against does it have all of these elements to it, that's how you'll know if the goal is good or not.
I thought it would be helpful to rewrite some of these vague goals that I mentioned above into some smart goals to give some examples. Awesome. So, let's take the increased sales one. This is the one that feels like it should be the most, tangible, easy to write goal on the planet, I want to increase sales, even if it, I want to increase them by 10%.
I see this a lot, and it's still not a good enough goal. The way that you make this better is to say something to this effect. You want to say you want to increase quarterly sales revenue by 10 percent compared to the previous quarter. By implementing targeted marketing campaigns and new promotional discounts with the aim to achieve X dollars in sales by the end of the fiscal year.
So you see how I gave you a percent per quarter compared to the last quarter. So it's very specific what you're measuring that's going to get us to some goal by the end of the year. I didn't even really have to add that I could have just said 10 percent quarter over quarter.
And I also added in a little bit of the how, which is to show that this goal has some strategic alignment. It's got this relevancy and attainability by saying we're going to implement new marketing campaigns and promotional discounts. So you got some more guidance in that goal in terms of where you were going to go.
It also has the time in there, this one was at a quarterly increase 10 percent every quarter, yeah. It also had the end of year final goal in it as well. So it actually had two time components to it, but at least it had these time components built into it.
And it is specific. It's about money and revenue, not just any money measure, but specifically revenue. So that's an example for sales that I think people don't go far enough and really defining what they want that goal to look like when it comes to sales.
And it's important to do.
Another example I have is customer satisfaction. For this one, instead of just saying, you know, Hey, we want more happy customers, improve it. You want to improve 15 percent within six months. I mean, that alone is a much better goal. I'm pretty clear what I need to do. Yeah, that's pretty clear.
But you can add, how are you going to measure it to make it better? I say, as measured by post purchase surveys through initiatives, such as reducing response times, customer inquiries, enhancing product quality, and implementing customer loyalty programs. So I'm giving you the, how I'm going to measure it.
Like it's 15 percent increase by this specific type of measure. I'm going to use this post purchase survey to get that 15 percent which is great because now I'm being really clear about how to measure it and then I'm again also giving some here are some of the methods will apply.
George Drapeau: Yeah. What I really like about this is I'm looking at this and I see my target 15 percent proven customer satisfaction. I already have an understanding of what customer satisfaction is because that's my job. So, but then I go on and say, how long do I have to do this? I got six months.
Okay. I'm on a six month clock. Great. So I'm getting more driven and like, okay, how is my manager going to assess it success? What evidence do I need to prove to show that I'm going to be able to do it? And that's the next step in showing me, you know, these kinds of surveys and measures. So all the time, it's kind of self managing.
I, the one who has to implement the goal, see very clearly what's the target, how long do I have, the pressure cooker and what proof I need to prove. Because at the end of it, You wanna make it easy to show that you've accomplished this stuff, and if you, it's in the built into the goal, then every day you can be clearly thinking, I need to be preparing this evidence to strengthen the goal, rather than at the end, well, like, you didn't have this.
And then you have to talk about, okay, how do you prove to me you got that goal? It's much harder if it's not built into the goal. That's what I really like about this one.
Camille Rapacz: I think building it into the goal is so important now what that brought up, what you just said, George, was that also thinking about the way you get to this level of detail, which is that ideally, if I was writing this goal for my manager of the customer service team, I would have collaborated with them on this.
So I would have said, Hey, I want 15 percent increase in the next six months. Let's talk about what the best way is to measure that. And maybe their idea could have been the post purchase surveys. Yep, I agree. That sounds great. So this should be a collaborative conversation to get to this level of granularity.
And I think it's one of the reasons organizations don't get them to this level of granularity. The people writing the goals are so high up and far removed that they can't put this level of detail in that's really important. They're not taking it, walking it down the organization to get it to this much more specified level that makes it easier for everybody to execute.
So ideally you were already having that conversation before you even got handed this goal. Yeah, indeed.
I have one more example that I think is a good one because it's another example of a goal that can be harder to get your arms around, which is increasing brand awareness.
George Drapeau: , you can't make a goal out of
Camille Rapacz: that. No, I can't measure that. No, there's no way. So this one would be something to this effect. You would increase your brand recognition among a target demographic, whatever your target demographic is, by 25 percent in the next six months. As measured by brand recall surveys and social media engagement metrics.
So again, I've given the, here's exactly what, what the measurement mechanism is going to be. So it's not 25 percent based on what you and I think we might've accomplished, but based on these two measures, and again, also you can add the through we're going to use influencer partnerships and content marketing activities.
Those are going to be our key leverage points to try and make this goal.
George Drapeau: I think it's very clear. I'm going to play with this 1 and add something. So the thing about, like, popularity, brand awareness, recognition. Is that they often have two parts to them. There's the become more popular or brand, but there's also the you've pissed off people.
You could add to the corporate that by saying, you know, increase brand recognition by 25 percent by measuring likes page views or whatever. And spends with a churn rate of lower than X percent. So you Instagram, you add 100, 000 followers, but if you lose 50, 000 of them and then you add another 50, 000, that's not good,
that's a lot of people you lost. You could add that concept here the same way. and also be measurable, you know?
Camille Rapacz: Absolutely. And again, is another reason why you'd want to have the conversation with your experts in the company who are running these programs and doing this work. Cause they're going to say, well, what about The people we might lose in this camp.
Oh, okay. That's great. Yeah. Do we care? Do we have a target around that? How do we want to measure that? And that's how you improve the goal. So I think that this having conversations down through the layers, this is the goal cascade process. I've talked about this before a long time ago, but we should probably do it again.
But there's this cascading of goals in the organization where it's not just sending them down. Okay. Okay. Okay. It's actually having a conversation to improve the goals as you go.
So is this really the smartest way to write goals? What do you think, George?
George Drapeau: Well, if you said it, then yes. I mean, I think what makes it a great way to write goals is when you started talking about really start to be collaborative and what's so let's if we just a little not a role play exactly But I've kind of walked through this last one.
We started talking about how yeah, really you talk with the team about what we're trying to do Let's try to improve popularity on social media. That's what we were one thing We're trying to do to support this goal and then you start asking questions. Like well, what do you see when that happens? Well, there's different ways to get awareness.
We can go to these agencies where you just pay some money and they get you a bunch of likes. But is that really what we're going after? Or are we going after real people? And somebody will ask that question and say, well, we'd really like real people. Well, how do you know the real people and not just bots?
And maybe that leads to a modification of the goal. As long as somebody else says, yeah, but you know, so I see these people were just. Turn into jerks and they lose a bunch of people. They've got a bunch of quitters and they keep on adding more people, but they have a bunch of people quitting all the time.
So it's like, that's the kind of organization we want to be where we're just adding a hundred thousand followers every month and losing 90, And like, so you have a conversation about that and that whole conversation, I think that's what you were saying. That's the way to really write good goals.
You've got the whole organization involved. They're talking about really. Why we're doing this, what we're trying to accomplish and figure out how to measure from there. And then you've got kind of group buy in from the goal because they all created it. I think that's. The smartest way to write goals.
If you can, if people aren't used to writing these goals, I think it'd still be done, but you have to lead that, that group through the process of discussion and say, look, here's why we're having this discussion. Let me show you how it's going to turn out into a measurable piece of the goal because they won't have done it before.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I think that the idea of having the conversation is so important. For every reason that you just said and it made me think about how sometimes you can even write one of these goals and it's and it looks it might meet the smart criteria. And it could still create behaviors in the organization that are unintended.
George Drapeau: Oh, really? Yeah, I mean, really? Yeah,
Camille Rapacz: well, that's what you just described. That's what you just described, like, what if somebody is going for this number? What if we didn't have the conversation around the churn rate? Like, oh, we're gonna have a bunch of people and we might lose people in this whole strategy.
If somebody doesn't know that that's not a desired outcome. And they think all I have to do is hit this number and the rest of it. It doesn't matter about the other part. All I need to do is grow this one number, then they could go about it in all sorts of different ways. And you, they, you could end up causing them to, and they don't know that it's not the right thing to do.
So whether it's intended or not. You can create behaviors from people to go for hitting specific numbers that have, negative ripple effects elsewhere in the company. So you've got to have these conversations and hone in on exactly what are we doing and not doing. And this starts to speak to again, now the pulling strategy back into it, then how are we going to approach this and how do we make sure we've written this goal in a way that reflects exactly what we want the outcome to be as well as we can define it.
Because you are trying to avoid just that. You're trying to avoid any of these unintended consequences of what the goal may actually bring about. Yeah, and you cannot do that in a vacuum. You have to do that in a conversation.
So I think that these smart goals the framework is. I think having that as a way to think about how are my goals good enough is great. But it doesn't quite go far enough in how to come up with the goal, which is everything you and I've been talking about. The whole process.
That has to happen. You have to have conversations. Me just writing a smart goal in my little office by myself is not going to be nearly as good as if I engage my team in writing those smart goals together. No.
But there are some problems with the smart goals that can show up as well, just looking at them just, just directly.
So I kind of want to talk about this to just give people a like what to look out for besides I didn't talk to my people. So some things that can go wrong. One of them is that sometimes these smart goals can they can be really limiting cause you to play it too safe, or they can just be too rigid.
They might limit your creativity and flexibility because you're just trying to. Overdo it a little bit. I always tell folks that I want them to have this appropriately stretchy goal. should hurt a little bit. It should be a little bit scary to go for the goal you're going for, which is where we kind of bump up against the attainable part.
It should still be attainable, but that doesn't mean easy. don't translate attainable into, yeah, that goal is a no brainer, got it. Because what's the point? If the goal isn't hard to attain, why are you bothering to set a goal in the first place? You don't need it to be a goal.
You're just going to go do that. So I think just this idea that it can cause you to either make it too easy or box you into too small of a space, it could be a problem. So you just have to look out for it. Yeah. That's good. You know, I once had a client who we were talking about goals and they were adamant that they had to set very achievable goals.
They did not like the idea of stretchy goals. They just felt like it just, it had to be a very obviously achievable goal in order for them to feel motivated to work on it at all. They were like, if I think for a second, I can't achieve that goal, I'm just not even going to work on it. I was like, wow.
I thought that was fascinating. What do you think about that? I,
George Drapeau: that is fascinating. Okay. So this reminds me of how in a previous group, I would structure our quarterly bonus goals. And what I would say, and we had a system where. You could get paid anywhere from zero to up to 125 percent of your bonus target.
And I told people, look, I assume that you're all putting in our weeks are a hard quarter. And if you do that and you do a reasonable amount of work, you're probably going to get a hundred percent. There's very little risk to that because of the work that you get. I make sure you have a full pipeline of work.
Just do that stuff. Unless there's something bad that happens, you're going to get a hundred percent of your bonus. I was lucky to be able to say that, but what I said was, but as you start self-assessing toward 125%, I wanna see more risk. So I wanted you to work a little harder to get 105% of your goal.
I want you to work hard to get 120 10% of your goal. 125%. I want to be possible, but rare. I mean, there's a lot of risk that I want you to be taking to get 125 percent of your goals. So I guess I agree with them if they also have risk built into it. If they say, I don't want to take a goal that I can't achieve, but we understand that we don't want learned helplessness.
We want you to achieve your goals, but. I also want to attach an incentive that encourages you to do what you're saying, which is to stretch yourself. I would say to them, sure, I want you to achieve your goals. I'm like, I don't want you to just achieve your goals. I want you to stretch. So let's agree on some mechanism that gives us both what we want.
Camille Rapacz: And in this case, the person that I'm talking about, there could be no stretch in it and there could be no risk in it. Like that's what he meant by attainable because he so it was very hard for him to think about setting a goal for himself that had any component to it if things he didn't have control over.
George Drapeau: Dude, life is hard. We
don't have control over everything,
Camille Rapacz: but this is, this is the problem. And this can be really problematic when you're setting goals like you're talking about that are bonus based. I think if it's bonus based there's gotta be plenty of risk that's why it's a bonus and not what you get paid.
So if it's like, I expect to make my bonus every year just by showing up and doing good work, that's not how that works or not how it should work. I don't think. So, yeah, so that was it was very problematic that he just had nothing can be out of my control. I have to have a goal that I fully have control over achieving.
I was like, wow. Okay. And I'm not sure what we're doing then.
All right. So my second thing that can go wrong, we already reference this a little bit, but it is the idea that if we overemphasize the measurement, that number can drive us to the unintended consequences.
So if we're just driving to some number and we haven't been really clear about, defining more of what this goal really looks like, then yeah, it can have some bad repercussions, like we talked about already.
Another one is that it might prevent you from really pushing towards that long term vision if you're just too focused on a near term goal.
Oh, yeah, for sure. Right. You just get locked into what I'm doing right now and forget about this is where this, again, the stretchy part comes in. I got to stretch a little bit if I'm going to get to this long term vision. So you have to be able to look at both at the same time.
And then my last one is that once that SMART goal is set, sometimes people resist or they're reluctant to deviate or change anything about that goal.
I think to make your SMART goals genuinely SMART, you have to be willing to assess and adapt because what if you set the wrong goal? Are you just gonna just keep pursuing it because you said so? And I see companies get stuck with this too. They're like, well, we already reported that this was the goal we're going after.
And it's like, yeah, but we've just figured out it's not right anymore. The market has changed or something has shifted, but they're like, well, we'll change it next year in the next cycle. No. Change the goal right now. Why would you wait when you already know it's wrong? So that's where I see people can really get boxed in because it just feels like it's so official.
I don't want people to just give up on their goals just because they got hard, but you should definitely, if you've assessed a goal isn't working anymore towards the long term vision, get rid of it and start over. Right. Absolutely And that's rare usually it's more that they just needed to adjust that goal in some way not to make it easier to achieve so I don't mean like oh we're never gonna make that revenue target let's pull the target back no no no don't move the goalposts but definitely adjust how you're thinking about.
You know, well, maybe what we're changing is you know, specifically the area that we've targeted within this goal, some demographic or some aspect of it. So there's ways to adjust these goals without just like giving up on the whole thing.
George Drapeau: I don't know this is covered in what you said, but all this reminds me sometimes I'll run into people.
We're already meticulous, very detail oriented, and they find the SMART goals very attractive because it suits them to think about things as very quantifiable. But the problem they have is they're missing the big picture. So the focus just on the, on the metric and I'm like, can we talk about why you're aiming for this metric?
The problem with the SMART goals for them is it causes them to miss the bigger picture about why.
Camille Rapacz: And really that means they're doing SMAT goals.
Because they're not doing the R, they're missing the R. So the gap you just described is, they're doing, smart, measurable, attainable, and time bound, and they forgot about the relevant piece. And you're right. That's actually one of the hardest ones to do is how do I make sure it truly is relevant to driving the bigger goals, bigger, vision organization.
How do I make sure it's doing that? That's a lot of conversation for a leadership team to have. So yeah, don't be smat.
George Drapeau: We got wicked smack goals.
Camille Rapacz: So make sure you're smart. Smart.
So there is another type of goal that gets talked about every once in a while. It used to get talked about a lot. I haven't heard people talk about this very much recently. But have you heard of these bee hags? Yes.
George Drapeau: I haven't talked about those in a while either, but sometimes, yeah.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. So sometimes there's a lot of other goal frameworks and none of them are very good by the way. So I didn't really bring many of those up. We're talking about goal measurements, but there's also kind of performance measures like KPIs and OKRs, those are useful.
But when it comes to just goals, so these BHAGs are big, hairy, audacious goals. And this is a term that was coined by Jim Collins famously in his book Built to Last, which as it turns out now has some issues since about half of the companies that he talked about as having these lasting traits have had dramatic losses in performance and their reputation.
Yeah. But I mean, not, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So it's not that the whole premise of his book is bad to me. What my takeaway from that was it's just speaks to the significance of what a shift in leadership can do to a company's performance. I think that's ultimately what that story is.
We, we can maybe do that in another episode, but that, that's really what we're talking about. It's not that the premise of his book is so horrible or anything, but what he talks about is that organizations that are genuinely like really striving and excelling, they're like the top in their, markets.
They do that by setting these big, hairy, audacious goals, which he describes as these clear and compelling. They need little explanation like people get them right away and they're just like highly motivating. So his one of the examples is, you know, NASA's mission to the moon. It was a big, hairy, audacious goal to do that.
It meant a whole lot of stuff had to happen, but like, that concept was this, you know, an obvious example.
George Drapeau: Actually, I remember President Kennedy's, the speech in which he announced that goal. It's a pretty well stated goal. His goal, he said, not just was in the moon, he said, by the end of the decade, we will send a man to the moon and return him back to earth safely.
That's pretty great. Like, it's time bound, it's specific, it's got success criteria, it's like, did he come back alive or dead? You know, it was, that guy, the speech writers wrote some good, good, smart goals.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, they did. And I think, I'm glad that you said that because yes, it wasn't just that it was, you know, this generic goal.
It was also smart. It was also smart. Right. But it was really big and audacious. And they
George Drapeau: did it. They made the goal by six months. I know.
Camille Rapacz: 10 years. I know. Isn't that amazing?
George Drapeau: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, phenomenal.
Camille Rapacz: I wish I had been on that team and lived in that era.
Ugh, amazing. the only problem with these goals is that you have to get everybody on board with the vision. You have to build a team of believers. Yeah, right. Because it looks so crazy and out there. I mean, the reason you can get a mission to the moon kind of goal to happen is when the president says you're going to do it, you're kind of got a team of believers who are motivated to do it,
the president said this is it and we got all the money and the funds and the resources. So here we go. If you're just in a little company, it's not as easy. You aren't just the president of a company. You're not this amazing president of the United States who has people writing speeches and selling it.
So you do have to get people really wrapped around this big vision and idea. And some leaders are amazing at doing this inside companies. This is where I say like the performance of the company is so dependent on the leader. Because you know, these leaders who you're like, man, that guy always puts out a compelling vision and everybody gets on board.
Like, you know, think about apple and what they were able to do with the vision. it's just so clear and, and so compelling. So yes, this can definitely be a thing for companies, but it's not for everybody. Not everybody is equipped. With a leader and a leadership team who can pull this off. And I think that's part of the challenge of doing this.
But everybody should be able to get good at writing smart goals. Everybody.
George Drapeau: That's true. This thing, this last one, to me, it ties back to our discussion about trust and risk. I mean, getting everybody, a team of believers, that means high trust. Because going with big, hairy, audacious goals is risky. I think you can't take these on unless you have high trust in your group.
That's the team of believers.
Camille Rapacz: That's right. And that's a high performing leadership team, super high performing leadership team. And if you think you have a high performing team, you can start to consider whether you want to go down this path and start setting goals in this way. But if you don't already write good, smart goals, you probably have no business going to big, hairy, audacious goals.
Yeah, agreed. That's like fundamental. And most organizations I know are struggling to write really good smart goals. And it's not because they're humans that are doing it are not smart. I want to make that clear. So George, you, I know to be a very smart, intelligent man who also has a lot of patience and it has a great learning mindset.
And the fact that at the beginning of this podcast, you were like, I struggled to write good, smart goals. That's my example right there.
I look at these all the time and it's easy for me on the outside to judge a goal than to write my own. But on the outside, I struggle with like coaching them into like, how do we make this better?
I can usually spot when it's not good enough, but getting to the, how do we improve it part. It really requires a lot of conversation and creativity in the room to get there. And a lot of organizations, they just don't have the patience to do that. But it totally pays off when you do. Completely agree.
I realized I just said that and I'm like, just trust me, everybody. It totally will pay off when you do it. But I think inherently, we just know that, like, you can just see that, yeah, if I just got this goal better. I could see how it would improve things. It actually led me to what I think is going to be our next topic.
So one of my clients recently asked me a question about how detailed their project plans should be. And it, and it brought up this idea of clarity again. So clarity of the goals, clarity of the tasks. How clear do I need to be? how detailed do I need to get in this information? And I think it's a constant struggle for organizations. Do I spend time doing it, or do I just go do the work?
And the tendency is I'm just going to go do the work. I don't have time to get these goals perfect or to create a more detailed project plan, but it's it's problematic that we're not doing it. So yeah, that I think is the next conversation. Okay, cool. Anything else about smart goals, George or goals in general?
George Drapeau: Yeah, I'm going to throw in a comment from. One of my favorite podcasts about management, the manager tools guys, and they have an interesting take on smart goals, which I find, let me see. I like SMART goals I think smart is helpful. I think that the guidance here is exactly right. They don't like smart goals while they like smart goas they like to create MT goals. They say like, when you think about it. But we should all have a pretty good idea of what's specific, attainable, and relevant. The things you really need to focus on are making it measurable and time bound that that's what they focus on.
I don't think they throw out the rest of SMART, but I say to them, the two most important things to get right are MT. So they talk about MT goals. I think they've changed their guidance somewhat since then, but I thought, well, it's an interesting way of looking at it. If
Camille Rapacz: well, I can understand the, the MT, like just work on the MT goals. I would say if you haven't been writing smart goals, just focus on those too. But we already like went through this, if you just write a SMAT goal, it's not going to be good enough, yeah, it won't. So, an MT goal is a good place to start, make it measurable and time bound.
But I do think that making sure it's relevant is really important. Like I would push back on that of, you know, if it's not relevant, what are we doing people?
George Drapeau: Yeah, I think if you haven't done SMART goals, you don't get to eliminate letters.
If you're in an organization that's been doing SMART goals together for a while and like, fine. You all maybe have a common understanding of how you measure what specific, maybe you can focus on the MT. I'm going to flip that
Camille Rapacz: around. Yeah. I'm going to flip that around. I'm saying if you haven't done SMART goals before, just try to get the M and the T right first and then build up to making them full SMART goals.
If you're an organization that's really good at this. I'm not saying you don't have to do all of the letters, S, M, A, R, and T. We're just saying you're probably by default, just really good at doing the S part. So they're not really skipping it. They're just already so good at it. Yeah. Yeah. They're just good at it.
Really, then you just want to focus on the letters that you struggle the most with, do you struggle most with making it measurable? Do you struggle most with making it relevant? Whatever that is. Yeah, that's for sure. I would change the order of that, of what you just said.
Cool. So, you know what? You can take George's advice or you can take advice. Who's the one who gets paid to do this?
George Drapeau: Yeah, that's true.
Camille Rapacz: However you go at this, just start trying to make your goals better by using the framework. And don't worry if you can't get all of it out of the gate, just keep working on making them better.
If all you get is more specific, that's something. we talk about that all the time on this podcast, that you don't need to have perfect be the enemy of good or better. So just make improvement, make your micro moves of improving your goals. This does get a little bit easier over time, but it will always be a bit of a struggle.
If you're doing it right, it should be a little difficult to do. Hmm. That's what I think. If you're writing goals well, they should not come so easily to you. You should have to put some thought into them. If they came easily to you, something is probably missing in those goals. Yeah. cool. Or you just copy pasted from last year.
That's all I have to say about smart goals. I like it. If anybody who's listening has anything else to share with us about smart goals, maybe you disagree with us about smart goals. I don't know. I'd love to hear it. We'd love to hear what you think. So you can go to thebeliefshift.Com and leave us a voicemail.
But also if you want help with writing your goals for your team or for yourself or for your organization, you know what to do. You can just book a free consultation with me coming over past. com slash book a call. All the links in the show notes.
Thank you everybody for listening. And we will be back in your ears next week.
See everybody.
