Imagine you're a consultant to the New Year's Resolution industry. Your clients are a deeply dysfunctional bunch. Every January, they proudly announce their resolutions. Two weeks later, most have already veered off plan, and by mid-spring, they may not even remember having a resolution at all. To find another set of clients who blow their goals so consistently, you'd have to start serving defense contractors.
If these were goals, mind you, we'd all consider ourselves utter failures, but with our resolutions, we get a pass. So how do you make sure your business is setting goals rather than resolutions?
To sniff out whether your business is pursuing a goal or a resolution, follow the fun. What's fun about goals is the end point, the completion. If your goal is to "grow sales by 13% in the Southeast region," and you nail it, you're ecstatic. What's fun about resolutions, on the other hand, is the announcement. Think of a stereotypical offsite meeting where a team has the sudden epiphany: What we really need to do is "Amaze the Customer!" That's a resolution, and its unveiling probably feels as good to the team members as their new-year illusions of running triathlons or spending more time with their kids.
Resolutions feel good coming out of our mouths, but they lack enforcement. We all know that when congresspeople can't achieve a goal, like passing a decent health-care bill, they'll pass a resolution instead, which allows them to declare how irritated they are about the state of health care. (So next time you miss your quota, try sending around an Email Resolution: "Resolved: I deplore the people of the Southeast and their hateful unwillingness to buy 13% more product from me.")
Add publicity and accountability to a resolution, and you get a goal. At Microsoft, for instance, employees set ambitious goals for themselves each year, called "commitments," that are created in consultation with their peers and supervisors and later made public. Peer pressure, or even just peer awareness, is a powerful motivating factor. So, does your IT director know your marketing director's goals? Is there a public folder for goals on your intranet?
It's possible to turn a lofty resolution--to get in shape, to be a better dad, to "amaze the customer"--into an achievable goal. But to pull it off, your present self may have to outsmart your future self. For instance, if you go on a diet, you'll immediately banish all sugary and fatty snacks from the cupboard. Because you know that in a weak moment, your future self will not resist the Call of the Oreo. It's not easy to change your behavior; it's easier to change your environment, which in turn will change your behavior.
Strangely, it suffices to change your mental environment. The psychologists Peter Gollwitzer and Veronika Brandstätter studied college students who had to write a paper about how they spent Christmas Eve. The catch was that they were supposed to submit the paper by December 26. At this point, the paper is in resolution territory: It feels good to imagine yourself getting a good grade by writing the paper. But, as with January gym memberships, the outcome was not pretty. Only a third of the students got around to submitting a paper.
A second group of students were given the same assignment but were required to note exactly when and where they intended to write the report (i.e., "in my Dad's office on Christmas morning before everyone gets up"). A whopping 75% of these students wrote the report. The act of visualizing yourself in Dad's office, writing your paper, changes the way you respond to that environment when you encounter it. Now when you see Dad's office chair, an association springs to mind: Get to work. You've managed to outsmart your future self.
Dozens of studies have shown similar results. When people took the time to visualize exactly when and where they would do what they needed to do, they met their goals. People took their vitamins more regularly, college students exercised more, and knee replacement patients did their physical therapy more diligently (and walked sooner as a result).
What works for exercise and eating right also works for marketing and operations. So if you're worried that one of your business goals may be a resolution, make it more concrete. Take the time to visualize when, where, and how it will be carried out.
When people take the time to visualize exactly when and where they will do something, they meet their goals. What works for exercise and eating right also works for marketing and operations.
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Recent Comments | 12 Total
January 31, 2008 at 12:33am by Jay Tatum
Universal generalizations aside, I disagree. Following the concluding logic one might be tempted to add to this discussion what I call the alphabetic litany. Just go down the alphabet and add a word beginnng with a, go to b, and so on and you could speculate about a good many things. I am not sold on the differences between goals and resolutions either and that may just be semantics at stake. Regrettably surrounding one's self with reolution achievers may not ultimately produce the desired outcome any more than doing it with Victoria's Secret models, though their presence may be more tolerable in a male sexist kind of way.
Instead I prefer self-differentiating behavior on the part of my leaders that says they are taking responsibility for themselves, know where they are going, what they need to do to get there, and whether the juice is worth the squeeze. At least in this scenario, the if/then reasoning is balanced with some practical measures and milestones.
February 11, 2008 at 1:14am by Carlyle Bradford
What I've found to work is to imagine and visualize a consequence if a goal is not met. For example, if your business goal at the beggining of the year is to increase sales at a gradual rate of about $500 per account per month (goal with specific date and time deadline attached) and if this goal is not reached you are unable to receive a salary and feed your family (consequence), it is likely you will become more motivated to achieve this goal than you would be if there was no consequence. Fear drives people's emotions in their personal life, consequence should drive a business man's actions in his professional life. Set a measurable goal with a time (deadline) and a consequence. Remind yourself to take action, and commit to it. And once you've achieve the goal, reward yourself and your employees. Your business will grow, and you'll get more satisfaction out of knowing your moving forward instead of backward or nowhere.
November 11, 2008 at 9:21am by Eugene Wade
There is a lot of research that this approach is actually the most effective way to accomplish things. A good way to put this into practice on a day-to-day basis is David Allen's Getting Things Done approach. Here is a link to GTD: http://davidco.com/index.php
November 6, 2009 at 11:04pm by Edgar Degas
I always think that resolutions dries up pretty quick because they are only back up by motivations but when you try to make goals you also inspired that why it easier to keep a goal because of your intentions that come from the inspiration and difficult to keep a resolution by psyching up some motivations which don't usually last.
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