Learning the art of GOAL Setting and Achievement

Objective: Learning the way of setting SMART Goals and their achievement

Dr. Mandi always has a very innovative way of teaching concepts and ideas, and I always find them to be with such an approach that the idea strikes directly into the mind, no need to go deep into the books to understand better. Today again he started in his own way. He wanted to make us understand the importance of setting right goals and their achievement. He gave us cubic blocks of wood and students were asked to build a tower with certain set of conditions- single cube base, no support can be used at any point of time. A student was asked to come and build a tower. The part I loved here that the there was an open bidding process for building it, and a student paid Rs 500 to be there ( the tune of socho socho – beecho beecho rang into my head - a total business approach J). With an objective of around 15 blocks in mind he was able to make a tower with 16 blocks which I considered a good performance.

Continuing on this Mr. Mandi gave us an approach which I will remember throughout my life now. I always thought that goals should be “realistic”, but after his class I realised that goals can only be Low/ Average/ Tough. What is low for one person may be very tough for another person. It all depends on the difference in confidence of a person.

So points to remember while goal setting is that-

·         ALWAYS SET HIGH GOALS; AVOID SETTING AVERAGE/LOW GOALS

·         STEPS SHOULD BE TAKEN TO MAKE TOUGH GOALS TO AVERAGE/LOW OR WHAT YOU SAY POSSIBLE

Goal Achievement should be planned after thinking about how to make goals ‘realistic’.

Here the concept of JUGAAD- Indian innovation, can come to help us and we Indians are considered really excellent in this.  

Goal Setting and Achievement can be better understood with the help of the following diagram—

A= Goal Set

B= Potential

C= Goal Achieved

D= History

So here I should also talk about a new concept I learned which is 

‘Pygmalion Effect’ or ‘Rosenthal Effect’-

low expectations lead to a decrease in performance.
We understood this better when we did this task after understanding the above concept.  With a new set of Goals, a target of 40 blocks ,the team was not only able to break the previously achieved record of 27 but was able to build a tower of 28 blocks.

  Goals achieved are meant to lesser than or equal to the Goals set.

        

When I was working for my company and saw the APP(Annual Performance Plan) targets, I always considered that the targets were to high based on the historical performance, and I felt that under-achievement of the targets brings low confidence. But now I realised that they were meant this way.

So to summarize –

More to follow soon. Keep learning…. :J