Talent Management Goal Setting: Empowering Employee Growth
Goal setting is one of the most important organizational skills that any person or company can master. Not only do goals give people challenges to work towards, but they also provide direction and focus. Staying with a direction and developing a laser-beam focus is often very difficult for anyone. In our world of today, we are constantly distracted by every nuance you can think of. For instance, businesses often lose track of their core product or message and end up falling through the cracks because they failed to establish a plan of action. In other words, those businesses that fail often do not know about a time tracking software, let alone go through the talent management goal setting software process. Or they may understand the values of goal setting but lack the tools necessary to keep their goals at the forefront of their operations.
Creating Your Goals
The most obvious first step to creating your goals is to be realistic! Don’t set goals that you feel are unattainable by your company. Let’s look at a scenario:
You are the proprietor of a new security company looking to establish yourself within the marketplace. More than likely, you already know that the market for personal and business security is difficult to get into what with all of the well-established competitors. So, you would not set a goal like this:
“Team, we need to bring in at least $1,000,000 of sales by the end of this year. Make sure to do everything you can to reach that goal. Let’s talk again at the end of next week to see how we are doing. Back to work!”
If you told your team this, then they would probably look at you like you were getting way ahead of yourself. Not only is it very difficult for any type of business to get a million dollars worth of sales by the end of the first year, but this company is the security industry…I’ll let that sink in for a moment. A more appropriate talent management goal setting process for the team would be something like this:
“Guys, since we are new to the security industry, I think it is realistic for us to try and get 10 clients by the end of the month. This way, we are getting our foot in the door without biting off more than we can chew.”
Although this talent management goal setting strategy is going to be difficult for the team, it is much more attainable than the previous strategy of earning a million dollars within the first year.
Implementing Your Goals
Now that you know what your goals are, it’s time to think about how to implement them. More specifically, what action steps are you going to take to ensure the completion of your strategy. But what are action steps? And how important are they to goal setting?
Essentially, action steps are the building blocks towards your goal. Comparing your high-quality product with your competitor’s product, showing how your product can save your clients time and money and establishing your credibility within your industry are all great examples of practical action steps. These action steps that you establish are vital to the success of your goal setting strategy. In fact Forbes Magazine states that “the value of the talent management goal setting is not the goal itself, but the determination of the action steps most likely to lead to achieving the goal.” This means that unless you establish the proper action steps to go along with the goal, you cannot hope to achieve your goal in the first place. (Click here to read the full article on goal setting by Forbes)
Organizing Your Goals
Creating your goals and implementing them are important steps to the goal setting process, but organizing your goals is highly important as well. You never want you or your business to lose sight of your goal, therefore you need something to hold and show off your goals and action steps for everyone to see.
Here at Edmego, we offer precisely this type of tool. With our Learning Management System, you get access to a highly customizable Goal Setting tool that will store your goals in the cloud for all to see. Not only that, you can add training material to go along with your goal if it is to have all training material completed by the end of a time period. And just like a hard copy, you can check off when your goals are complete. All of these essential strategies and implementations are done within the cloud and away from the office clutter. If you want to learn more about how to get organized with your goal setting strategy, click here!
*add link to goal setting tool information video*