E026: Goal Setting

This is the world of work podcast with James and James, hi. This is

James. Just before we start, I wanted to remind you that you can read our articles, explore more podcasts, and learn about our online personal and management development programs and workshops by visiting our website, www, dot, World of work.io. All right, onto the podcast.

Hi everyone. This is James, and this is James, and here we are again with another episode of a world of work podcast. This week we're going to be speaking about goal setting. This is in the middle of series three. And series three, obviously, as you guys know, is all about behavior and behavior change, and goal setting is one of the key tools that can help people change their behaviors, or help people try and influence and shape some of the behaviors of others around them. So it feels like an important subject for us to get involved in. But before we jump into it as ever, you can get in touch with us. Where can they get us to there you can get us on Twitter, at the WoW podcast, wow podcast. They can get us get in touch with us on our website, which is the WoW podcast.org,

and we're also on most of the other social media. So Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, you can come find us. Yeah, check it out. You'll be able to see us cool. So how have you been getting on? I have been, all right, I've been a bit up and down, if I'm honest, yeah, yeah. I was a bit poorly. I was a bit badly organized,

and I've had a couple of weeks where I've had, like, highs and lows. So I'm just trying to get myself back onto an even keel at the moment. Cool. How about you? Yeah, I'm doing good. If only we had a video of a world could see that I was wearing a very summery shirt today, wearing a bright, bright yellow shirt because the sun is out, and that makes me feel pretty good. I cannot believe the weather we're having. I've overdressed every day this week. I keep putting jackets on, and we joke about sunny Edinburgh, but it's no joke. I mean, it's fantastic, glorious. So, yeah, so I'm doing, I'm doing good. I've had a nice, nice time recently, and doing well, kids. So what we're looking at today, so today we're going to be doing the usual type of run through that we do so the structures were saying. So we'll be, we'll be focusing on a definition discussion, going into a research round up. We'll be doing a list of a week stories from a keyboard, final thoughts and top tips, and then we'll be checking out. So the same thing that we do every every episode, really, but there's a twist right? There is a twist. There's a twist in the tail of this one, and it's something that hopefully we'll be able to manage. We are doing a reverse a Roo, as I'd call it. No idea what reverse roo is, but I am taking on research Roundup, whereas James is going to be looking after definitions and list of the week this week, that's a reversal. You've just defined it very well. Okay, I'm not sure about the reversary terminology, but suffice to say, this might be the one and only time I'm in charge of research Roundup. And next time, we'll provide a definition of reverse a Roo, just to make sure everyone's on the same page. Unfortunately, it's not under definitions this week. That's okay. Anyway, should I do? You want to kick us off with some definitions? Yes, I'll try and get myself back in order and actually talk through some definitions. So this week, we've got a collection of definitions for you. One of them you've heard before, and some of the others are newer and specifically related to goal setting. So the first one, again, we're going to come back to it pretty much in all of these episodes in series three, is motivation. The definition we've got is from psychology and society wiki, and the definition just says that motivation is the reason for people's actions, willingness and goals. Motivation is derived from the word motive, which is defined as a need that requires satisfaction. And in other episodes, you would have heard, you know, other definitions I can need and things like that, but elaborate on that. But that's the core basis of this series. So it's important to come back to that. The next definition we have this week is performance. Is from a Cambridge dictionary, and it says that performance is how well a person, machine, etc, does a piece of work or an activity. So it's all about tracking the quality, pace and all those other types of definitions of doing a piece of work and getting something done. So that's performance. Next up goal. We couldn't have goal setting without goal. Business dictionary.com says that a goal is an observable and measurable end result having one or more objectives to be achieved within a more or less fixed time frame. So what that means is that, you know, a goal is a sort of a longer term thing. It might have some sub steps, you know, sub objectives around it, but it's something that you want to achieve over a broadly fixed time frame. So it's important to understand what a goal is if you're going to be setting some of these goals, next up, we've got two slightly different definitions that are worth running through. The first one is goal directed behavior. And this is from the psychology dictionary online. And what it says is that, in this instance, behavior oriented toward attaining a particular goal is goal directed behavior.

It. The definition goes on to say that it's identified by observing that the animal or person ceases search behavior and engages in detour behavior when it encounters obstacle to the goal. Now that one, I'm not sure I really understand, but we'll pop back to that one in a minute. The next one definition we have for you is goal acceptance, and this is from the Oxford Dictionary of sports science and medicine. So we're getting pretty niche, which is kind of exciting. All right, so what we're talking about goal acceptance. And again, this is a kind of sporting based one. What we say here is that this is the agreement by an athlete to attempt to achieve a defined goal. Goal acceptance may change between training and competition, a goal set in training may well be regarded as too high for competition. So that's kind of an interesting definition, and it's very sports related, but the idea around acceptance of goals is something that's important throughout the rest of this conversation. So it's definitely right that we brought it up. What do you think about that? Well, as you might have noticed, that I slid a sports one in at the end, because I've picked up a little bit of the research later is around sports. And I think, given sports, people have very specific and clear goals quite often, about time, speed, weight, it's really interesting to understand how they do it. And a lot of sports psychologists actually looked at this quite, quite a lot of detail, yeah, so particularly this concept of agreement. So goal acceptance being a a two way agreement, that that can be rescinded at any point. And I think that's really important. So for me, I quite like that one. I think, I think the goal directed behavior one, which admittedly is somewhat wordy, is ultimately about that concept of

being able to overcome obstacles. It's like perseverance, yeah? So it's about something. So I assume the animal part of it is, you know, you are going towards foraging for something, and you hit a fence and you dig under the fence, yeah? So you stop going straight to searching, because you recognize that getting under the fence will give you a more opportunity in the longer term. Yeah? So, like, I go into a supermarket and I really want to buy my favorite milk, and they don't have a favorite milk in that supermarket, so maybe I'll go to another supermarket in my own animalistic world. Is that fair? Yeah, I think so. And interestingly, I've just looked at a piece of very briefly, a piece of research that talks about the case for animal human translational models of goal directed behavior. So there's obviously some more interesting stuff behind all of that. For another episode. Well, maybe we could put a link up and people you're interested in animal human translational models. Yeah, a little easter egg. Cool. Well, I'm very pleased to say I believe I've made it through my first set of definitions, my first set of definitions. Yeah. Okay, pretty exciting. Would you like to pick up and do some research? Round up first Absolutely. So in this research round up, we're going to look at the granddaddies or godfathers of goal setting, lock and Latham. We're also going to touch on smart smart goals, because that's something that some of the listeners will be very familiar with, or think whether they've been a manager, whether they work in HR, whether even they're a leader or a CEO, SMART goals comes up quite a lot in the process of performance review. We're going to talk a little bit about something else that comes from sport around outcome, performance and process goals. And we're also going to talk very briefly about what I call the dark world, not i What a number of people refer to as the dark side of goal setting, which sounds very dramatic,

you would suspect. Well, I'm going to ask why I'm doing it last so we're going to start with lock and Latham, as I mentioned, the certainly very well cited

originators of goal setting theory, lock and Latham were two individual researchers. Research started in the 60s, but they came together. One of them looked a lot at task motivation, and the other was looking more at behavior change, things like that. But before it was behavior change, and they came together around goal setting, and did a piece of work that outlined

what needed to be in place for goal setting to be effective, and continued to research and actually really inspire a huge wealth of research around

the validity of goal setting, such that I would say it's one of the most well researched parts of organizational and occupational psychology, and certainly is a wealth of evidence about how in certain circumstances, goal setting is incredibly effective. So I'm going to take you through the five rules or things that should be in place. So the first thing that Locke and Latham argue is that you need clarity. So your goals need to be clear and they need to be concise. They need to be really easy to explain, and if you think about it in simplicity.

Terms for your brain, if you can explain them to someone else, then there is a very good chance that your brain has broken them down into very simplistic

things that need to be done. And if you really understand like everything, if you really understand them, you can always do it in single syllable words, right? The test I always have is, could I explain to my grandma? Yeah. So clarity is really, really important. The second is around challenge. So Locke and Latham argue that a goal should stretch you. It's really interesting one because it's not necessarily what would have been thought of by some of the existing research that was around at the time, particularly Expectancy Theory. But without question, their argument is that if you believe you can achieve that goal, yeah, and it is stretching, you will have a better chance of achieving that goal if you have set it, yeah. So I think that's really interesting, and I think that kind of reminds me some of the stuff we spoke about in motivation, where we said that, you know, people want to achieve, and they want to get that little bit of an achievement kick from doing something. So if it's a bit stretching, you'll get a bit more of a kick. And that kind of makes sense to me, like certainly for me, you know, if I achieve something a bit harder, and if I challenge myself, I feel better for having done it. So I want to try and make it happen. Yeah, and I think, I think that that piece around having faith in your abilities to achieve it is,

is really interesting. I think, because I suspect that is a difficult, honest conversation to have sometimes in the workplace with your manager, I'm sure you know quite often, maybe you don't really believe you can achieve it, but you need to be seen do it. So I think there's lots of nuance around that. It's really interesting. So the third one is probably the one that I find most interesting, which is around something called commitment or acceptance and it gets quite often referred to as commitment, but actually I think acceptance is a more appropriate word, and it's around the idea that you must actually accept as a worker,

accept the goal in order to create that commitment. And that is that there is a process of you identifying what someone is asking of you, or what you're asking of yourself, and that you agree internally to and maybe externally to take that on. Yeah, and I think it's a really, really interesting one. I think it gets missed a lot of the goal setting process. I think we're really able to talk about

why we want to do something, but we don't necessarily have an honest conversation with ourselves and our peers to say, I am actually, you know, I'm not sure about this idea. I get the reason for it, but I'm not sure I can do it, or I'm not sure I want to do it. Yeah, it's kind of buy in to some extent, yeah. And I think it is, and I think, I think, I think that's why the definition was really important, because they talk about athletes being able to rescind it. About athletes being able to rescind it, yeah? And I think that's really important, because I think you can go through the process and actually, if you recognize that a goal is having, not the intention, not the impact that you wanted, or that you no longer feel that it's a beneficial goal, yeah, that acceptance can always be withdrawn. So you can, like, learn about side effects of having achieved, yeah. But also, if you become demotivated, that may happen. And I think understanding the underlying acceptance has to be there throughout the process

you won't. And all of this is about, how do you make it effective as a process, right? And then the fourth one is around feedback, which is literally consistently, where I see systems in or big organizations fall down. So feedback is about, and it might be verbal, but actually quite often it might be data. So it's about, when people are trying to achieve a goal, are they regularly getting information that helps them adjust their behavior or their actions? So if I am a leather worker and I make beautiful, handcrafted bags, and I have set myself a goal to double my my production in a month. If I do not know how many I've produced in that first week, I haven't got an ability to go, Okay, well, am I on track? Am I not on track? How much? How much quicker do I need to work in this next week to catch up? Or actually, am I is my quality dropping so that although I think I've done 20, I've done 20, I've actually only done 10, because they haven't been great, yeah, or you thought that you made them beautifully, but you were sloppy, so the quality is not totally Yeah, and I think, I think this, you this is consistently an issue. A lot of organizations do personal development reviews every year, so they don't get feedback about how well you're adapting or reaching your goals, or indeed they set goals that are difficult to people are it's difficult for them to get a reading in between the year. So for example, a

membership manager I know who was set targets around there how many members they had each year, but there were no metrics in between, because it was a once year review process. So how that person is then meant to adjust what they do during the year is very difficult, and how they adjust their team's behavior. So feedback is really important, because otherwise, that person who's trying to achieve that goal can't then adapt what they're doing. And then the fine final one is not so much as something to do, but something to be aware of, which is around task complexity. If a task is.

Really, really complicated. It is harder for goal setting to have an impact. So something as simple as I will produce five more leather straps for these handbags every week is a relatively straightforward and simple thing. Something like I will reorganize my team such that we're producing 100 more bags which consist of 200 elements. Is a harder thing, yeah. And so the argument is, you need to break those down, yeah, so that they become much more simplistic and therefore then comply with the rest of the rules.

So that's Locke and Latham's certainly their seminal piece, the piece at the beginning that really helped shape a lot of, well, pretty much all of the goal setting material that has come around since. One of the things that clearly has its roots, I think it would be fair to say, is around smart goals. Which have you come across SMART goals? Maybe, yeah, they're quite popular, aren't they? Yeah, every HR department quite likes a SMART goal. So for those of you who haven't come across them, SMART goals, we think were first mentioned in management review 1981 by some researchers, academic researchers called George Doran Arthur Miller and James Cunningham. Arthur Miller, huh? Not that. Art Miller, I don't think actually, don't know it could, yeah, it could be. I might have to go find out. And they argue that good goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based. And you'll see some some elements of those

from have just at least overlap with lock and Latham's work. I see people get that one slightly wrong sometimes. So I quite often hear people say specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time based. So I always like relevant seems to disappear when I hear people speaking about it. Yes, and that's interesting, isn't it, because quite significantly, quite often goals have no relevance, absolutely, maybe they're just fine. And I think that really closely relates to goal acceptance. If it's not relevant to you, you just don't engage with it. And particularly when you're goal setting around back office staff, for example, and they're like, you get a goal, it's got nothing to do. How do I have any impact on that? How do you feel about smart goals?

I think that theoretically, SMART goals are absolutely fantastic, and it's a great, great thing to aim to have. I think,

I think that for simple, simple things, they're probably pretty good. I think that there can be sort of goal fatigue as a result of SMART goals. And I think that we can try and smartify stuff and create lots of goals when we maybe don't need to smartify smart if I like that, yep, smartify it.

And I actually think that I seldomly see them used really well. I think that to do it well takes effort, and I think a lot of people don't necessarily really invest that effort. I think, you know, a lot of goal setting, almost retrospective, in my experience in large organizations, and I don't, I see it just being kind of play this again, as opposed to really used, I guess. What's your view? What's Yeah, I would agree with that. I think, I think I see a lot of it reverse engineered. So this is where we these are the goals we've already decided as an organization. How are we going to break them down? And someone's got to be responsible for some of it. So who's doing what? Yeah, and that's not what goal setting is. It's not, to me, that's not going to create an acceptance of goals by people. So that bothers me, and I The other thing I think, is

I just don't think people spend the time that they need to to really get under the skin of how goal setting can be effective times a scarce resource, and a lot of people in organizations don't feel they have the time to time to actually do it. And if they're not really bought into it, then yeah, I've actually seen a lot of instances where people set goals having already achieved a certain amount of things they're like. So what have I achieved this year so far? How do I turn that into a SMART goal and make it so I'm going to achieve that and meet my goals by the end of the year. Well, and controversially, the reasons you mentioned realistic instead of relevant, yeah? So controversially, people always used to quote that to me. They'd be like, well, it needs to be achievable. Yeah, yes, it does attainable. Yes, it absolutely does need to be attainable, but it also needs to be relevant, yeah. And I just consistently see organizations setting goals that I'm not convinced people see as entirely relevant, yes, to their role. So yeah, I'm much more comfortable with lock and Latham's approach, but I think it's harder, and I think smart works if people understand what they're doing. And I think goal setting is a real skill, yeah, and I'm still not perfect. I don't I've been doing it for years. Okay? So I've also picked out something from bit more recently, and from sports psychology. So goal setting in sport psychology is really big. Positive Psychology and sports psychology have really embraced this. And a I like it because it's an equation. And, you know.

I love an equation, an equation, and also because it really rings true with some of my coaching and some of the work that I do, and even my personal experiences. So LM lease talks about three types of goals in 2003 and talks about outcome goals.

Now in sports terms, that's winning competitions, winning a medal at the Olympics. It might be coming third in a golf competition. It's about the result,

about performance goals. So those would be measurable, but they wouldn't necessarily be an outcome. So for example, you might set yourself a performance goal of

10 seconds, 100 meters. That may still come last, yeah. So the outcome may not be as relevant, but it is. It is a measurable numeric. You may, if you're a tennis player, set yourself a goal of 80% of your first service. Yeah, right. That is your performance you must have lose. Yeah, yeah. And then Lise talks about process goals, and I think of these as input goals. Okay, so process goals are, what is the process that you are going to execute

and what is the goal you're going to set? So for example, I can't guarantee I'm going to run 100 meters in 10 seconds. Well, I first get

someone can't go, but what they can do is they can commit to a process goal of doing 20 minutes hardcore sprinting every day and five mile run every evening for a year. Right? Injury, allowing, right? Those are things they can commit to the amount of time they spend on something, or the intensity with which they do it. And actually it's really, really important because athletes, I think, and it's a lesson we don't learn often enough, because we look at them as elite specialist beings. They can't control how anyone else performs, right? So it's really interesting to me, a swimmer cannot get in the pool and control the other seven lanes. They can only control what the work is that they've done, and whether that work they have good belief will help them get a performance goal the outcome is completely out of their control. Yeah, in the sense that if someone else has done more work and done something else and has a better, I don't know, wingspan in front crawl. They're gonna, they're gonna be able to do it. So it's a really important way of saying, you know, I've got to control the control controllables. And so in work for me, I have tried really hard when I've been managing people, to set them process goals over outcomes, yeah, because it's something that they can feel is within their gift. Yeah, particularly when it's things like customer service complaints and stuff like that. You know, you just, you cannot control a sewer breaking, yeah, in a major venue, right? But you can control the work that you do around that to support people, yeah? So for me,

it's really powerful. And the equation that they set, how do these goals fit together? P plus P equals O, so process plus plus performance, wow. Performance. Process plus performance, nice equals outcome. Yeah, that's good. What do you think I like it? Yeah, I think it's good. I think with distinctions, good.

I've used the same concepts, I think, with different language in the stuff that I've done before. So when I've worked within organizations trying to help teams and individuals set goals,

we've normally done it through a lens of something like KPIs from a team perspective, and there I've talked about the idea of lead and lag indicators, which I think is very much the same thing, right? So, so when we've talked about lead and lag indicators, we've said that lag indicators are the things that happen at the end. They're the things that are in your instance, almost kind of like your outcome ones. And then we talk about lead indicators, which are, what are the things that I'm doing now that are indicating that I'll reach a good outcome later on, right? So these are my leading indicators, indicators of future success, lead indicators versus lag indicators, being actual measurements of achieved success. And we've certainly looked at that split at an organizational level. So I guess from our side, things, an example could be something like in financial services, again, number of customer complaints for us, that's almost a lag indicator, right? You know, how have we achieved? Well, you know, X number of customer complaints per 1000 customers is a measure of achievement. That's a lag achievement, indicating how we've done. But we can, we can measure some lead indicators of that through things like, you know, number of training sessions for customer service advisors or things like that. How do we invest in training and development? How do we simplify, you know, how much money do we spend simplifying the automated phone systems or whatever it happens to be? So, again, that split between lead and lag in the language I use, I think is helpful, and I kind of like your.

Your triple one there. And I like the sports analogy. I think it's helpful. I think it I think it brings it to life and makes it relatable to people. It's been a start. Actually, it's been really surprising to me how much I have gained. So for those of you listeners who know I'm

very much an amateur dabbling in research, which is why I'm not going to be able to do it, but also I'm studying this at the moment as a master student at Birkbeck CUNY, and it's been it's not sports psychology that I'm studying, but I'm actually picking up a lot from my day job and through talking to some of the sports psychologists that I work with in other organizations. And it's really interesting to see how much simpler some of the analogies are Yeah, and some of the examples are to help me actually think about it from a work contest, because there is a purity of some, certainly some sorts of sports that it's really easy then to pick out what the comparisons are, yeah, measurable in some ways, isn't it? I mean, you can Yeah, well, certainly with with, certainly within the athletic swimming, yeah, the time based things, or the weight based things. I think it's really interesting. So yeah, so I'm gonna, when we put up the links and stuff, I will put a couple of links up some of the sports psychology channels that I've read, because they're really interesting. And who doesn't like reading about athletes, right?

So are you still waiting with totally waiting. I know exactly what's coming up. And I just want to know what the dark side of goal setting Okay, so the dark side of goal setting is.

It got called out in 2007 in a paper by Lisa ordinez, a paper called goals Gone Wild, which I just thought was brilliant. And I've got to say massive thank you to

my Birkbeck lecturer, Judy Dickinson, who sets our reading, because it was just fascinating. I actually picked this up during my reading in my in my degree, and I just thought it was so brilliant. And ordinance and her co researchers argues that, and it's, I mean, there's some seriously contentious language in it, but the upshot of it is that there is acknowledgement that goal setting works and is powerful as a psychological tool. Yeah, and therefore,

probably could, it could be done with a little more care than it currently does now, or what kind of stuff. So the argument is that we probably need to be more careful with it, knowing that it's as powerful as it is now that we know. And I would argue that's no different to any other psychological tool, but certainly it kicked off a huge discussion, and I think probably because it works, right? So organizations were using it. So ordinaz and her co writers argue that there's a number of criticisms, and there since then, there's been lots of other critiques that have come out. The four kind of main comments are, if it's too specific, it's really easy to get stuck on a goal and lose sight of the overall aim. And I think that's particularly true when a goal of the sub goal, and you become obsessed with chasing that goal, even if it's no longer helping the organization. And when you start linking performance pay to that, then you start to get huge problems, because if your pay is related to achieving X number of unit sales, but actually that unit is no longer productive for the organization, you are going to continue selling it, unless someone tells you that you're going to be able to get your pay. So if you make a loss on each unit sale, you probably don't want to keep selling them. All right, yeah, but someone might want to, because they're targeted, yeah, too many. So when people have too many goals, they tend to concentrate on the easy, on the easy ones, or just get spread too thinly, too soon, my personal favorite, and I think this one's the most

concerning for me at societal level. So if goal, goals tend to be set according to a period that is measurable, and quite often that is an annual cycle in business,

or even quarterly, and it is a four year cycle in government and policy, quite often in this country, four to five years, right? The concern of that is, if you are always thinking in that short to medium term and never thinking about the long term, you will never make good investment decisions. So if you think about, for example, heavy capital infrastructure and investing in machinery, if you are only thinking in that short term and setting goals around it, someone has to be having an eye over the horizon. Someone has to be looking further forward and saying, How does this fit within a longer term strategy? And I don't think, I don't think that happens in organizations where there's been huge amounts of goal setting quite often, and certainly with governments, we see it all the time, right? Because their reward is potential re election. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so they will set deliberate goals that they can achieve and then be able to trumpet them in front of their Yeah, exactly in front of their electorate. And then also a big criticism, one that that they talk about quite heavily in the paper, is around the temptation. So if you create additional

motivators for people to achieve goals, you is argued that you are in cheap you are increasing the motivation to potentially unethical behavior. So the examples that are given are things in large corporate organizations where people have been so heavily incentivized to achieve goals that they've lost sight of what organizations values and behaviors should be, yeah. So you might have been speaking about the industry, but I've been part of maybe, yeah. Okay. I mean, actually, funnily enough, the the examples they give yeah are not predominantly from the finance industry, although they do mention it, but they talk a lot about,

they talk about the Enron disaster, for example, and how unethical behavior potentially was allowed to continue because it was because the organization becomes so fixated on short term goals, yeah, and they just weren't looking at what was happening. There's a there's a really great piece that one of my fellow students passed me on to, which is by someone I really liked, Margaret Heffernan, who talks about willful blindness, yeah. And she, she talks about when people just don't want to see, yeah, they don't want to see what's going on, because right now it suits them not to Yeah. And goal setting, I it was a huge echoes of goal setting for me. If you, if you haven't got someone acting as a moral compass for the organization and checking the bigger strategy, then you could end up in a lot of trouble. Yeah, you might have had some of those examples. Yeah. I mean, I guess the industry that I've been part of for a long time has had a whole lot of these things. And I guess the sort of moral ambiguity of the gray areas between what is legal and what is ethical is a really complicated area. And if somebody's incentivized to do something that's not illegal but might be morally dubious, then they'll do it. And obviously, in my industry, people cross straight over into lots of things that kind of are illegal. So we've had all kinds of stuff. So what popped to mind when you were speaking about that last piece around the sort of attractiveness of goals was things like the LIBOR rigging. Yeah, it's funny. That was the first one that jumped into my head above all of them, because it's where you have an ability to influence the rules of the game. Yeah, yeah. So that's almost a collusion aspect. Yeah, there is an ability to get the result by by fixing the game. That's an extraordinarily Yeah.

So that's a really funny one. Yeah, interesting one. And then then, I guess, obviously the other big ones that people will know about in the UK is PPI, which is payment protection insurance, which basically is Miss selling of an insurance product bolted onto a retail product to people that don't need it. The banking industry in the UK has spent years trying to fix that through a series of remediation projects and ultimately, compensation. And I think it's cost of banks over 50 billion pounds now. I mean, it's a huge amount of repayment for unethical behavior. And of course, in the US recently, you had Wells Fargo here, we're just creating accounts for people because that was their incentive structure, and that's, I think they're probably the best, simplistic example of what a disaster. Yeah. I mean, you just, you just do it. So, yeah. So I, you know, the way I, what I took from

some of the critique of goal setting is, there's a critique there because it works. Let's, let's not get away from that. The reason people are critiquing it is because there is evidence that it works. But you know, in the words of superhero, with great power comes great responsibility. If you understand and know how to set good goals, be wary of what you're doing.

So all you listeners out there, you're all superheroes now, because you know all about goal setting, and just remember to which superhero which side you want to be. Oh yeah, that's the question, right? Yeah, are you gonna do it for good? But force is strong in this one, she

said there's like half the audience that's in there going, I have no idea. Yeah, exactly, but yes. So as Star Wars references aside, I was actually thinking of X Men also not Star Wars bringing more and more superheroes more. Okay, so there you go. That's my research. Round up. We've talked a little bit about lock and Latham. We've talked about smart goals, goal setting and sport, particularly around the concept the role of process goals. And then we've finished off with some dark side, dark side. What do you think? I thought it was great. I liked it. I think he did an excellent job of research round up. I think there's some really intriguing stuff that was feedback. It was timely. Do you want to board? Have you got for us this week, for list of the week? Yeah, list of a week, list of a week. I've got a seven point list for you this week.

And it's, it's another great name. We had Victor room last week, and we've decided to skip a little bit further along the alphabet and hit you with another double opener with Zig Ziglar. So actually, what we've got is a seven step process around goal setting from Zig Ziglar. And again, this is kind of, hopefully a helpful process that people can go through to set some goals for themselves. It's done.

And it's kind of in the language of last week, sort of a practitioner type approach to things. And we'll just read it and see what you guys think. You guys can go off and use it, but there are seven steps to it. The first step is to identify the goal. It sounds like an obvious thing to do when you're goal setting, but if you identify you know roughly what the goal is and what you're trying to do, then that's a really helpful, helpful stage that you can build on

in terms of your approach to trying to reach out. So once you've identified what your goal is, the next thing to do is to step back and think about the benefits, right? So we talked earlier, or you touched in your your Roundup, about the importance of acceptance and things like that for girls. Well, this is part of that, right? So you need to start to visualize the benefits associated with a goal. So you know what? What's what's in it for you, what will change as a result of achieving it? How will you be better as a result of achieving your goal? And that'll help make sure that it's something that you want to achieve, and help drive some of that motivation. The next thing to do, having capture the benefits, is to step back and think about what are some of the obstacles or challenges in relation to the goal. So what would you need to overcome if you were going to if you're really going to achieve that goal? What are the barriers in the way and and to some extent, how are you going to get past those and how much effort will it take to help you achieve that goal? So by this stage, we've done the first three steps. So we've identified what the goal is, we've identified the benefits of achieving it, and we've identified the identified the obstacles we need to overcome together. The next thing to do is to say, Okay, well, we know the benefits and obstacles. What are the skills and capabilities and knowledge that we require if we're going to achieve that goal, you know. So what do we need to have in our toolkit? Use that phrase again, what are the skills and knowledge that we need to know and to be able to use to help us get to that goal? So that's stage four. And then the next stage is to spend a bit of time and say, Well, you know, we're not looking at this on our own, you know, no man is an island and all that kind of stuff. Who are the other people or groups that we need to work with to help us get from our current state to where we want to be to the achievement of that goal. So by stepping back and thinking about that, we can identify people who can help us, either through donation of their skills, or help us with specific ways to overcome obstacles or help us, to some extent, achieve benefits and things like that. So who can help us achieve a goal that we want to achieve? And so by this stage, what we've done is we've identified the goal, which is the future state that we want to achieve. Then we've looked at four steps. So we've looked at the benefits, the obstacles, for skills and the people. And this is all about kind of a current state, then, you know, sort of, what are the things around us, what are the factors that will affect our ability to achieve it? And having thought about those two sets of things, we can move on to the next point, which is really developing a plan of action. So the goal is that, you know, that sort of distant event in the future, of a distant outcome in the future that we want to achieve. But to get there. You know, we won't go straight there. We'll need to go through a series of steps as we transition from here to there, and those steps form the basis of an action plan. So what we might want to do is, we might want to identify some high level milestones, I don't know, maybe four or five key, key things to achieve between our current state and the goal. And then for each of those, we might break those milestones down into actions. So what are the actions that help us achieve our first milestone? What are the actions that help us achieve a second and so on? And as we do that, then we can move on to the last stage of a process, which is setting a deadline for achievement. So as we go through the planning process, we can look at how long we think each of the actions will take their interrelatedness, at the dependencies between them, and through that, we can start to build out a deadline that helps us say when we'll achieve the actions, when we'll achieve the milestones, and ultimately, based on everything that we've analyzed in terms of the obstacles we'll overcome, the skills we have, the people who will help us when we think we will ultimately achieve that goal. And by doing that, if we go through that seven stage process, then we do, you know, a fair number of things that are called out in some of research earlier. So we can define smart goals. We will get buy in, you know, we'll, we'll get real clarity over what we're trying to achieve. Hopefully, we'll be stretching and challenging in terms of setting the goal.

And, yeah, so that's it. So that's the seven steps of goal setting courtesy of Zig Ziglar. I'll read them again just quickly. Number one, identify the goal. Number two, list the benefits, what's in it for me. Number three, list the obstacles that need to be overcome. Number four, list the skills and knowledge required to achieve a goal. Number five, identify the people and groups to work with. Number Six develop a plan of action, and number seven set a deadline for achievement. What do you think

I like Zig Ziglar list? He like a list as much as you enjoy saying Zig Ziglar a little bit. I don't. He's an interesting character. Actually, he's not. He's not traditional academic at all. He's confident.

Kind of sales, but he's an interesting guy, really interesting. And I'd say it's probably three things about that list. One, it's no good listing the benefits if you don't really want them. So I can the example I would give is when I when I changed my relationship with food and started to eat more healthily, I could have spent the last 10 years writing down all the benefits to doing it, yeah, but were they so important to me over everything else? No, the reason I did it was because I wanted to change my relationship with food, and I wanted to stop, I wanted to have more control over what I was eating, and I was making bad decisions all the time, and it was only really that benefit that mattered to me, or the rest could have been, you know, it doesn't be really something that's right, yeah, you've got it. It's really, it can't just be

a list of ubiquitous benefits. The second for me is he calls out, and I think he calls out really well, people you need, people to work with without question. We're talking about goal setting within the context of work. We're also talking about behavior change. None of the goals that I've achieved, I would have been able to achieve without support from the people that were key in that part of my life. So enlisting their help and figuring out who you need to be involved in that process important. And then the third thing that is a question that I always ask myself around goal is, what am I prepared to give up? What am I prepared to do? What lengths will I go to? So very particularly, I quite often put in financial number on it, what would I pay to have achieved this change now, not because I'm going to pay it, but because it's a really good focus point. Yeah, so for example, again, when I started to eat healthily, I made a decision. I was just there was nothing within limits that I wouldn't pay as long as I could afford it and as long as it didn't put me into into debt. And as such, I made some really odd choices to other people. I remember sitting in an Italian restaurant at midday on a Monday because it was the only place I could get a decent chicken salad, and there was just, you know, fast food and sandwiches everywhere. And everyone was like, she's gone to a restaurant on her own during work to sit in a posh restaurant, yeah. And I was like, I don't care. That is the decision that I'm going to make, because that is what I've committed. So I like his list because it helps give some structure. Yeah, you know, one of the things that I was thinking about when I was reading through it is how, how it crosses over quite well with certain aspects of coaching. So certain coaching models, you know, some of the, you know, goal oriented coaching or outcome oriented, solution oriented coaching really covers a similar approach to this. So I'm sure, you know, a lot of people have heard of something like the GROW Model, and we'll do work on coaching at some point. But the GROW Model is another, you know, acronym based model. It's got four stages. The first one is, what's the goal for G The next one is, what's the reality, what's the current state? Basically, the next one is, what are the options? So what are the things that you could do to help you reach the goal? And then the last stage is, Will whatever things that you will do that the person being coached would commit to to help them reach that goal? And again, that's really quite similar to Zig Ziglar model. That's just a bit more depth in it. So it's interesting that this is a model that people can use themselves, but a lot of the sort of Goal, goal design structures and models cross over into the coaching world. Yeah. And I think, I think one of the things I've learned from coaching is you don't have to do it all at once, because you will the first time I did it, it took me weeks to get them right. Now I can do it 20 minutes my annual process, because I'm so clear on where I'm going and where I want to be. But then, oh, to some extent, it's almost at the end of your first year, but you decide if you care about this girl, and start to understand why you haven't engaged with some of them. Okay, cool stories from the keyboard, personal, professional. What you're gonna we're gonna kick off with, oh, that's a good question. I hadn't really thought about that. Um, so why don't I do a personal story about goal setting? Um, so I guess, I guess a couple times when I've done some stuff on goal setting that's helped me two main areas that are in the personal domain that I think are maybe worth touching on. One is stopping smoking. We touched about, touched on this before. Yes, hard thing to do. And I, you know, I stopped smoking years ago, but as I, as I moved towards stopping smoking, I reduced the amount that I smoked at various points. And of course, I'd relapse and all that kind of stuff. But I ultimately ended up setting myself specific goals on in a reducing the number of cigarettes that I smoked in any given period, and then over time, that would reduce and reduce. And then by the time I got to the stage where I quit smoking, it wasn't actually that big of a step. So the ultimate goal was to stop smoking. But I had goals along the way, sub goals that were helpful for me, so I guess that's one. Another one is around running. So every year, I set myself a goal around the total distance that I run in a year, and I find that motivating, and I keep a track of it, and I see how I'm progressing, and I know that it's a bit stretching because of all the other commitments in the world, and I like it. And I've got another goal, which is a total number of half marathons I'll run, because that's.

What I do. So I'm going to run, hopefully 50 half marathons by the time I'm 50, and I'm making great progress. So it's maybe not stretching enough, but it was a good one, right? I like, I like that one, yeah, it keeps me going. So yeah, a few personal, personal reflections. So yeah, goal setting. I mean, as you may have gathered, for me, goal setting has been hugely influential in my work and my personal life, when I discovered and totally discovered by accident, right? So the story goes, and this is a true story. I'm in my flat in London. It's news Eve. I've gotten stinking cold, yeah, last thing I want to do is go out, right? I'm already a bit I've done that thing at Christmas and New Year where we all disappear, yeah, and I've kind of got into that habit of putting my pajamas and watching too much telly. That's a good we'll talk about habituation next time. Well, yeah, and how to break those things so, and I've always, all my life, I've quite liked that period as a downtime anyway. So I'm sitting on my sofa, and I'm like, right? I'm not going out. And then I look at my I think, am I going out? And I look at my bank balance, and I think I'm sure I had more money in there than I thought, yeah. And I decide I'm staying in and I download. So it's kind of been that long ago, but I download every single financial transaction that I've made on every single account for a year. That sounds like a great new year. This is true. This is absolutely what I did. I felt sick. I was drinking lemsip, which is for those of you don't live in England, cough medicine. And I COVID Every single one nice. And I found out where my money was going. Do you know where it was going to a famous Seattle coffee chain? Ah, yes. And, and I'll tell you where it'd come from. It had come from me visualizing a world where I wanted to work in central London and be that cool kid to the walk down the street with her coffee. Yeah. And I could see it. I could see that's what I'd done. So for the rest of the evening, I built myself a budget for the coming year. I was meticulous, which in a way that I am not very often meticulous, and I it's really important to understand the goal I set myself was not to save money. Okay? It was not an outcome goal or even a performance goal. The goal was to develop an understanding of where my money was going. And quite nice, isn't it? So I really believe in this stuff control. What you can control, and what I could control was knowing where my money was. I didn't even have to make any good decisions, right? I didn't even force myself to say, you have to spend your money better. I just said, you should know where your money's going. Cool. And of course, what happened? I started tracking my money, and I would see where it was going, and I would be horrified. And I would be horrified, my coffee budget is crazy. Well, my coffee budget wasn't crazy because it dropped like a stone. And the goal I set myself was I wanted to be able to go out on New Year's Eve the following year. And if someone had said to me, Well, how much money did you spend in x in the last year, I could tell them, yeah, okay. And so for me, really delving into that goal in detail, and knowing everything about what it would take to change that behavior, and really crucially, understanding what I could and couldn't control, was important to me. It was really effective. And then the other one I just want to give a little shout out to is a work goal that introduced me to goal setting. So my boss wanted me to delegate more when I moved up to head of operations, and it's a big shout out to him, because he basically turned around to me and said, I am going to ignore every other KPI and objective you've got, and I'm going to judge you next year on one thing, and that is the performance of your team. So anything you do is discounted.

I don't care how brilliant you are as a deliverer, because that's no longer your job. That's interesting. I will judge you on. So when we come sit down to review, all we're going to do is take your performance reviews with your team and look at those, and that's it. And and he said, you know, of course, you've got to get your job done, but that's what I'm going to judge you on. And it was, it was transformative in the way that I thought about my own performances, that's really neat. Oh so good. Sounds like a fun year. Yeah. I mean, you know, my team went through, my team went through a bit of a frustration with me at the beginning, but then I shared it with them, and that Shouts out to Zig Ziglar point. I can't quite believe I'm referencing Zig Ziglar in this but anyway, it it references this thing of I understood who I needed to get involved, and once I shared my team the objective, and it was about giving them more autonomy, rather than dumping all my work on them. And it was about me supporting and coaching them through that, that they loved it, I think, well, they're still friends with me, so that's better, right?

Yeah, cool. So, yeah, those are my those are my personal experiences, and certainly it's been really effective. Yeah, it's powerful. Thing isn't it? Have you got any, um, final thoughts or top tips for anyone about goal setting? No, not so much a top tip, but kind of a plea, okay, which is, if you're not doing goal setting, and if you don't go through it as a person, as a process, personally do it is incredibly informative about understanding yourself. And by setting goals and figuring out what doesn't float your boat, you get a really clear understanding of actually what you want from life. And if you are doing it, spend a bit more time on it, because I never regret time that I spend on my goal setting activities

and a very specific thing, make sure you physically write it down. And I would say, Absolutely, write it down somewhere.

That is going to catch your eye every so often. Yeah, cool. So that's a pretty good tip, I guess. I guess Mine's kind of similar, but a little bit different. I'm also an advocate of goal setting. But what I was going to say is that what I find when I reflect on it is that, you know, setting goals doesn't just help me achieve those goals. It actually makes me sort of happier more broadly. Occasionally in my life, you know, I feel sometimes a little bit listless, like I'm not really heading in the right direction, or something like that. So I find that if I've actually stepped back and thought about goals and tried to come up with things, to some extent, I'm semi agnostic of what those goals are. You know, I want to achieve them and things like that. But the very act of actually having goals is really powerful in itself. So I'd say that I'd really recommend that. I think it's really powerful just to have them for what they are. Yeah, what they are. So that's my kind of final reflection on the importance of goals. It sounds like we're really into goals. We are pretty intervals independently into goals. We have some mutual goals as well, which is nice. So we check out. Do we think that's kind of done anything? Yeah, I feel like, I feel like that's a really good starting point for goal setting. I think we'll probably come back to it at some point, certainly around certainly around some of the more intricate challenges of particularly with team setting. Yeah, but for now, I think that's a great place to start Cool. Well, let us get out of here and say we'll be back in a in another week. You say we'll be carrying on with season or series three, where we're looking at behaviors and behavior change and things like that. Yeah, enjoy, and good luck with your goal setting. Yeah, tell us your goals. That would be fun. If you come up with a kooky goal that you really want to achieve, tweet it to us or something like that, and we'll, um, we'll probably not do anything with it, but it'll be really nice to have. Well, we'll share it with share it with your ever growing Twitter following. Yeah, cool. All right. Everyone, bye. Everyone,