What finding success means to you and how to get there
Sarah Arnesen|14 January, 2022
2 Minute Read
Setting goals at work is an important yet interesting balancing act to perform. On one hand, the goals you set need to fall in line with your company mission. On the other hand, they must also be their own. Otherwise, goal-setting is just a way of conditioning, a check-the-box exercise which is fruitless.
First off, Think SMART
Goals help you to provide a sense of direction, motivation, a clear focus and find the right targets to aim for. A SMART target is used to help guide goal setting.
SMART is an acronym that stands for:
- S Specific (Significant)
- M Measurable (Meaningful)
- A Attainable (Action-Oriented)
- R Relevant (Rewarding)
- T Time-bound (Trackable)
Therefore, a SMART goal incorporates all of these criteria to help focus your efforts and increase the chances of achieving that goal.
Perform a SWOT
The ability to assess yourself is something that will give you a powerful competitive advantage in your career. Successful professionals will continually self-evaluate, whether the subject is their career, their professional development or their progress in relation to life plans and objectives.
A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning technique used to help you identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to business competition or project planning. Completing a SWOT analysis is an effective tool for helping you to evaluate your skills or marketability so that you can take practical steps to improve both.
Personal Development Plan
A personal development plan helps you to structure your thinking by constantly planning and thinking ahead. It is a process that consists of defining what is important to you, what you want to achieve, what strengths you already have that help you to achieve your goals, and what help you need to improve and develop.
Having these career-shaping tools will help you to better understand where you’ll want to be within your business and the support and goals you’ll need in order to achieve this. You will also be more productive with a clear focus on the targets ahead, which will benefit you, the rest of you team and the company as a whole.