Manager, Manage Thyself: SMART Goals

What makes a good goal?¹

Many managers, seeking to be effective, or at least not be seen as ineffective, arbitrary, or worse, start looking to set goals for their employees. Last time we covered why we’re better off focusing on one goal at a time. This time, we’re going discuss how to not only choose the right goal, but craft that goal in the right way to both achieve a result and not waste anyone’s time in doing so.

If you’re a veteran manager, you’ve likely heard of some form of these before, but for those still early in their journey of management, what the hell is a SMART goal? And why do I keep capitalizing it like that?

Well, imagined audience, that’s because it’s an acronym². SMART goals are goals that include and utilize the following five attributes:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable³
Relevant
Time-bound

Let’s break each of these down, not just in the abstract, but tied to a real-world example. Let’s say you’ve got an employee named Josh. Josh is friendly with customers but gets a bit long-winded, with the highest Average Handle Time on your team.⁴ You want to see that handle time come down by 20%, to bring him more in line with the rest of the customer service team.

So, let’s set him a goal: “Be faster on calls.” Naturally he’ll just do that and be great, right?

If only.

A goal like “be faster” naturally raises questions like How? When? and even Why?

Let’s run through each facet of our SMART framework and see if we can make the goal a better one, answer those questions, and leave you in a position to set a good, useful, smart goal.

Specific

A specific goal is one that is clear and unmistakeable in its construction. There is no worse feeling than getting halfway through a month and realizing that your advisor doesn’t actually understand what you’re asking them to do. Compare:

“Make a sandwich”

“Make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with crunchy peanut butter, grape jelly, on wheat bread, cut on the diagonal.”

With the second, you know exactly what you’re going to get. With the first, hell, you might get a hot dog.

Let’s rewrite our goal to be more specific. Instead of “Be faster on calls” let’s try “Take less than twenty minutes per call.”

Not great, but definitely more specific!

Measurable

A goal being measurable means that we can know, in a Boolean fashion, whether or not it was accomplished. We should be able to tell with complete certainty whether or not our goal we set with the advisor has been achieved in each instance of time we’re measuring (typically a single customer interaction, though more longitudinal goals might have a measure that incorporates an entire customer/advisor interaction.

To understand why this is important, let’s empathize with our advisor. No employee wants to be bad at their job. They may not have the motivation or capacity to be great at it, but everyone that does a job wants, at a minimum, to achieve at a satisfactory level.

Our job as managers is to help that employee to achieve that level of success and to continually strive for improvement. If that employee doesn’t understand how their success is being measured, how will they have any way to know if they are doing well or poorly? For that matter, how will you?

You likely have a database full of various OKRs or KPIs or other performance metrics. If you don’t understand what these numbers mean or measure, they’re useless as tools. We should set our own goals to the same standards, and require that not only is it clear what our expectations are, but that we know for certain whether or not we’ve achieved them.

Our original formulation — “Be faster on calls” — is at best vague in its formulation. Our first pass at editing adds a level of measurement in that we’re now defining success as nothing over 20 minutes.

Let’s keep this measurability in mind as we progress to our next aspect of SMART goals.

Attainable

This piece of the SMART model can be deceptive. Many managers will simply ask themselves “Can they do it?” and assume “Yes, they can” and move on. Things are rarely this simple.

The first consideration is “Is this within my advisor’s power to affect?”

Consider the following goals:

– Have a Customer Satisfaction of 90% or above

– Resolve 90% of customer issues on the first call

– Take less than twenty minutes per call (our example goal)

Are these within your advisor’s control? Let’s consider the issues with each:

“Have a Customer Satisfaction of 90% or above.” How are we measuring satisfaction? Via customer survey? Do the advisors have any control over whether the happy customers leave surveys? Whether there are any issues with the surveying system? Whether they get enough volume of surveys to make this a statistically significant sample? There are many aspects related to a purely numerical goal that are outside the control of the advisor.

“Resolve 90% of customer issues on the first call.” Similar to the above, how are we measuring resolution? Customer surveys? Do customers understand that their issues are resolved or do they answer “No” because they’re waiting until later in the day (after they got surveyed) to confirm the issue was resolved? What if there’s a network outage affecting the whole system? Can your people resolve that for each caller themselves?

“Take less than twenty minutes per call.” This is a sneakier goal regarding achievability, in that, if a single call in the month goes over twenty minutes, they’ve failed. Is that the intent of your goal? What if your advisor hung up on every caller after 19 minutes. Would they have achieved the goal?

Incentives are important to keep in mind, and poorly written goals create poor incentives to achieve. Instead, we should write our goals seeking outcomes that the advisor has direct, demonstrable control over and can achieve through their efforts. By doing so, we’re asking something of them that they are able to achieve, that is attainable for them.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t easy! If it were, you wouldn’t be hundreds of words deep into an article explaining the difficulties of writing good goals.

Consider the following constructions:

– Rather than “Have a Customer Satisfaction of 90% or above” try “For each survey rated 3 out of 5 or below, review the call notes and indicate what steps we could have taken to improve the customer’s experience.”

– Instead of “Resolve 90% of customer issues on the first call” what if we asked “At the conclusion of each call, ask the customer if we have resolved the issue they called in for help with.”

– And our example: “Take less than twenty minutes per call” could instead be addressed as “Within the first two minutes of each call, confirm with the customer that you have a clear understanding of the issue they are asking for help in resolving.”

Each of these new formulations moves away from measuring a goal’s success in terms of a reported number and toward a specific action your person is taking, that can be directly observed and measured. The goals are Specific, Measurable, and Attainable, and there isn’t any ambiguity as to what is being asked of the employee to accomplish.

We can enhance the goal even further, if needed, by adding even more specificity to it, addressing what to do if they cannot Gain Agreement with the customer on what is being addressed on the call, adding: “If your understanding of their issue does not match the customer’s, ask additional probing questions to confirm and agree upon the issue they are seeking assistance in resolving. Do not progress further on the call until confirming you and the customer agree on what issue will be assisted with during the call.”

Relevant

Relevancy tends to be a little more obvious than achievability, but it’s an important aspect to consider carefully.

Credit to my old boss Greg for this analogy: If I set a goal of “Each workday morning for the next three weeks, stop by the local gas station, buy a copy of the local newspaper, cut out the headline of the top article on the front page, and place it on my desk.” that goal is very specific, can be measured in its achievement, and is attainable (as well as time-bound, which we’ll touch on in a moment).

Does it have anything to do with your employees job?

Probably not.

It’s important to set goals that are important to your people, to the successful functioning of the business, and to the overall performance of both. There are many goals that can be set that don’t have direct relevance to your person’s job role or your company’s core functionality, that can nevertheless be “good” goals.

Relevance should act as a filter check. Are you setting the right goal, for this person, at this time? Or are you just setting the same goal for everyone, regardless of whether it’s specific to this employee’s opportunities and needs?

Does this goal align with the business’s overall direction and reflect any coming changes or growth you’re working within? Or is it ignorant of what the business cares about or is trying to drive?

Do we expect this goal to address a specific need or achieve a specific outcome? How?

For our example, by requiring the advisor to gain agreement with the customer on what issue is being addressed on the call, we avoid wasting time (and increasing Average Handle Time to no productive end) trying to fix the wrong thing, as well as help the advisor to find the right resources to fix this specific issue in a more timely manner.

Take a beat at the R of SMART to ask yourself if you’re setting the right goal, for the right person, at the right time, for the right reasons. If you’re not sure, maybe there’s a better goal to set for now?

Time-bound

Goals, to be effective, need to be achieved. If we set a perpetual outcome for a person to work at, we’ve created a directive, not a goal. In order to know if we’ve achieved a goal, at some point, we have to check and see that we’ve done it.

This isn’t to say that one size fits all here. Some goals may be simple to implement and only need a short period to put in place. Others might be difficult and require consistent, regular effort over the course of two or three months of effort.

Regardless of how long we’re assigning to the goal, we should put it in place with a clearly set timeframe to achieve the outcome. At the end of this agreed-upon period, you and your employee can reconvene and review their efforts, to determine whether the goal has been achieved or needs to be addressed in a different way.

There’s a quote that’s falsely attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry⁵, but is, as many misattributed quotes, helpful and true, that “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Similarly, a plan without a deadline is a suggestion. Agree upon a timeframe, then work with your advisor to put the plan into action.

For our example call, let’s add a time-bound piece to the goal: “During calls this period, within the first two minutes of the beginning of the call, confirm with the customer that you have a clear understanding of the issue they are asking for help in resolving. If your understanding of their issue does not match the customer’s, ask additional probing questions to confirm and agree upon the issue they are seeking assistance in resolving. Do not progress further on the call until confirming you and the customer agree on what issue will be assisted with during the call.”

Does that mean after the period concludes, we don’t care any longer whether they do this activity or not?

Absolutely not! We’re trying to create a new habit; our intent is that the goal we’re setting is focused on heavily during the implementation period before becoming a natural aspect of how the advisor handles phone calls moving forward. We’re merely setting a time period during which we will measure this action specifically and expect a result tied to the goal.

Conclusions

So, we started with:

“Be faster on calls.”

and finished with

“During calls this period, within the first two minutes of the beginning of the call, confirm with the customer that you have a clear understanding of the issue they are asking for help in resolving. If your understanding of their issue does not match the customer’s, ask additional probing questions to confirm and agree upon the issue they are seeking assistance in resolving. Do not progress further on the call until confirming you and the customer agree on what issue will be assisted with during the call.”

To be fair, we intentionally chose a rather vague goal, but it’s not far off from some goals I’ve seen managers set for employees. Does this new formulation meet our checklist?

Specific – It’s MUCH more specific now, both in what to do and what not to do.
Measurable – We can clearly measure whether the advisor takes the step we’re requesting.
Attainable – We’re setting a specific goal within their power to achieve.
Relevant – Presuming as we are that this person struggles with Handle Time, this goal is relevant to reducing the amount of time taken per call.
Time-bound – We’ve set a request period of “During this period.”

Well, alright! We’ve set a SMART goal!

But, ah, what if it doesn’t work?

Our supposition as managers is that taking these actions will result in a number moving. However, is our definition of success that the number moved?

No, it is not.

Our definition of success is that the person consistently demonstrated the action we’ve prescribed for them.

But what if the KPI didn’t move the way we hoped?

If the person achieves the goal we’ve set with them and the number does not change in a favorable direction, instead it means we’ve not found the best way to address the specific issue or set of issues that are creating that undesirable numerical outcome. We set the wrong goal to achieve that change. And so we’ll work with our employee to generate a new SMART goal.

In the end, however, we will have partnered with our employee on setting a goal that is Specific enough for them to achieve, Measurable enough for us to know whether they achieved it, Attainable for them in the course of their work, Relevant to their job and their specific needs, and bound in Time to a reasonable period to implement.

We’ll have set as good a goal as we can manage, which is all we can ask of ourselves and our people to accomplish.

Notes:

1
I’ll begin by noting that I’m not breaking particularly new ground here. SMART goals are not a thing I invented, nor did my former employer. However, there’s something to be said for finding a voice that resonates with you, so here’s mine on the topic.
2
Not an initialism, (meaning, not an Ess Emm Ay Arr Tee goal), but an acronym, a “smart” goal.
3
Some folks use “achievable”, but you’re getting them the way I learned ’em.
4
Friendly and long-winded is my life’s story.
5
Ostensibly in The Little Prince per the misquoters, or Citadelle, but, per Wikipedia, first found in 50 Ways to Lose Ten Pounds (1995) by Joan Horbiak