Editor's Forum - There Can Be Only One

There Can Be Only One

A great saying from an okay movie, but a valuable lesson for your business or career.

Do you have a strong goal set for your business or your career? Say no now, because more than likely, by the time you finish reading this, you’ll realize you don’t.

If I ask a businessperson what his or her goal is, the answer I’ll get is to make money or grow the business, something like that. These are objectives, not goals. Here’s the difference. Think about sports where they use the term ‘goal’ specifically: soccer, football, hockey. Scoring a goal or kicking a field goal does not mean you’ve won the game. That’s the objective. A goal means you’ve performed a series of steps that achieved a milestone, the result of which puts you closer to your objective. See what I mean?

So think of your objective as the big picture. Think of a goal as accomplishing a step toward the objective. That means you should be setting goals every day, even multiple times per day, depending on the objectives you are trying to accomplish.

Let’s break it down a little more. There are four considerations you have to take into account when setting your goals:

Long-term goals suck energy. I’m an immediate gratification guy. If I want to buy something and a store doesn’t have it in stock, I’ll drive 20 miles to the next store and pay a bit more just to get it. Sure, I waste some gas and even more time, but my goal wasn’t to be efficient. My goal was to get that product on that day.

If you’ve set a goal for your staff to finish the month with sales 10 percent higher year over year, that may be too long of a time to keep the staff motivated. A goal that has too many steps or takes too long becomes a chore, and the energy changes.

Conversely, short-term goals drive motivation. If negative energy comes from unrealistic goals, achieving a goal gives you the opposite effect. Break big goals down into smaller goals. Want that 10 percent increase? Make the sales hike the objective, and make the goal a weekly one. That keeps you and your staff motivated toward achieving it. Hitting each milestone gives you a sense of accomplishment that creates positive energy, essentially charging the battery toward tackling the next goal.

Goals are specific. I had a client who wanted to put together an email to promote the company’s show presence. The client gave me some artwork and told me how they wanted the message to include their new tagline, some product shots and a link to download their catalog. “We think it’s cool,” the representative said. “But … you just spent several thousand dollars on this booth, plus bringing your people here, and all of the expenses that go along with that,” I countered. “Shouldn’t our goal be to drive people to the booth to get the maximum return on investment?”

That’s what I mean by being specific. Regardless of how good we think people are at multitasking, human beings can only hold one idea at a time. Present someone with multiple ideas—such as a vague or “too busy” advertisement—and they will latch onto one, and it might not be the one you intended. But present them with one idea and it’s highly likely they will get your message.

If you’re having a sale, your objective will be to have a profitable sale. Your goal is to attract customers to that sale. Another goal might be to clear out your B stock, or sell through high-margin items. Attack each of these goals individually in different ways and you’ll get the specific results you want.

Goals are dynamic. When you’re making your list of objectives and goals, you might be tempted to lay out every detail toward an objective. But you’ve heard the old saying that a battle plan never survives contact with the enemy, correct? It means there are always going to be outside influences that affect your plans. Weather or a sick employee might impact a sale. That’s probably the easiest example I can give you. But here’s one that’s even better: Accomplishing one goal might present a new opportunity that can change your plan altogether.

Think about Facebook. If Mark and his boys had built in restrictions to make it only work in the way it was intended—to share pictures of college students across the country—it would have never evolved into the rich, diverse, worldwide sharing community it is today. Instead, they created the basic structure and let the users define what they wanted it to be.

Take a tip from some of football’s best coaches: Script the first few goals, then maintain the ability to make adjustments as needed. Don’t allocate every minute of time and every resource toward an inflexible plan.

Or, to use my personal saying: Always leave room in your objectives—and your life—for something good to happen.