Set Your Own Employee Goals to Accelerate Your Career
You may be tired of hearing the mantra, “set goals.” However, setting, committing to and measuring goals remains a beneficial, effective and useful technique. Forget the cliché attributes of this advice. Remember, clichés only achieved the level of boring, tired clichés because they bespoke truthful, real world conditions.
Whether you are the newest rookie on the organization chart or a C-level executive, you need personal goals to maximize your career options. There are few better career tools than establishing attainable, measurable and written personal (professional) goals.
Certainly, day-to-day tasks, however exciting or mundane, become tedious over time. When you work in the “trenches,” even if you supervise others, this reality can challenge your creativity, innovation or goal setting. Overcome this temptation. Do you want to accelerate your career? Of course, you do.
Take pride in your performance and establish your own employee (personal) goals. The bottom line: What do you want to achieve in your current position and what do you envision your future career track to be?
Be Aware of Other’s Goals that Can Help Set Your Own
Vision is a critical component of personal or organization goals and objectives. Vision also forms the foundation for setting company or personal strategies that work.
You can use your employer’s goals as a benchmark for setting your own objectives. If you can “fit” your personal goals into your company’s stated objectives, you might design more reasonable, workable targets for yourself.
Some proactive employers take a “hands on” approach to employee goals, offering suggestions, templates or, even, specific staff objectives for the coming year(s). The most forward thinking employers will offer management advice, encouragement and guidance to help you set goals that are achievable, measurable and valuable.
If you have co-workers that you admire and respect, you might ask them about their own goals. Getting input from other respected sources can help reinforce the validity of your own ideas, suggest other ideas that hadn’t occurred to you or encourage you to think a bit differently about the goals you favor.
Knowledge is power. Use investigation, knowledge, and data to help you set workplace, career and performance goals that will advance your objectives. Whenever possible, particularly if you enjoy your job and your employer, think about how you can merge your personal goals with those of your company.
In all situations, use career tools wisely. For example, if your employer offers management advice to help you set goals, accept and think about their suggestions. Their ideas may—or may not—fit your personal vision of what you want, but having and considering this information is always more valuable than having no input at all.
How to Set Your Career Goals
Remember, company goals are just as important as your own. Always display respect for your employer’s goals, even if you privately disagree with their choices. You will find it much easier to structure and achieve your personal goals if they integrate with those of your employer—there is a natural match.
Unless they directly conflict with corporate objectives, discuss your goals with supervisors and managers. For example, if you want to set career goals to improve your performance by 20 percent and become a candidate for team leader in the coming year, tell management. You probably will not receive any guarantees of promotion, but you may learn about opportunities for new team leaders that management foresees. Conversely, if your primary career goal is to find a new, more promising job elsewhere, rethink this suggestion and disregard it.
Learn all you can about your employer’s goals and strategies. Understanding the focus, intent and background of your company’s goals helps you set your objectives, using this valuable management advice and information. For instance, a corporate goal of dominating the market and strengthening the brand globally, may not help you use career tools to attain a C-level position, but may give you ideas that match your employer’s thinking, while also accelerating your job progression.
Think, think, think. Spend as much quiet, quality time as you need with yourself to design goals that target what you want. Before management, co-worker or family agreement on your goals, you must agree on your objectives with the "face in the mirror." Too many employees view their jobs as “trading hours for money,” without thinking about what they really want. Learn what you really want from your career. You can only do this by spending quiet time alone to organize your thoughts and professional “cravings.”
Re-visit, measure and modify your goals regularly. As always, setting no goals, stuffing them in a drawer or lacking a willingness to modify your objectives is much worse than setting a hundred bad goals. Even poor goals have elements of value, allowing you to modify, improve, change, and enhance them. For example, you may receive additional management advice or information that leads you to scale back or ramp up your original goals. Instead of starting over, creating new goals, you can simply modify your original road map to make detours that still get you to your destination.
Employee goals are valuable career tools that will help you improve your job situation—sometimes, dramatically. Using honest management advice, quality alone time and keeping your "eyes on the prize" to improve your performance and position always works.
Source: http://www.ginaabudi.com/best-practices-for-setting-employee-goals/