Motivation and Goal Setting

If you've ever worked in a corporate setting, particularly in a management position, you're no stranger to the idea of establishing goals and their importance to any business that practices management by objectives.

Even if you've never been in a position requiring you to define specific, measurable goals, you may not realize that every single day you've done so. Chances are, by not knowing you were actually setting goals, you were able to achieve them with far less analysis than accomplished through formal goal setting.

The variation between achieving formal goals versus informal goals is one of motivation. Quite often with formal goals, we may make progress towards our objective, but not have a clear understanding of the process required - and we often see a decline in our enthusiasm to continue or to continue effectively.

This is perhaps most often seen in group work environments, where one or two members of the group seem to "Get It", while others just sort of follow along, contributing as asked and simply waiting for others to ensure the goal is achieved at some hazy upcoming point.

Yet as individuals, we are often able to accomplish our own informal goals almost subconsciously. Each and every day of our lives, we plan, act upon and accomplish countless short-term goals, while simultaneously working towards longer-term goals, by establishing patterns of activity.

For example, you may get up a 6:00 AM each weekday, shower, dress, have breakfast and drive to your place of employment. Odds are you've done these thousands of times without giving it a second thought and yet, you are in fact achieving five goals every morning.

You're able to do this for several reasons - first of course, you understand the primary goal of getting to work on time each day at the task level. Next, your motivation for doing so no doubt includes the desire to avoid being fired for continued lateness. Another motivation is simply a need to demonstrate being a reliable member of the organization.

On a longer-term basis, we often plan for and follow through on everything from vacations and holidays to paying off our mortgages and other debts. Here again, we have plenty of stimulus to do these things and we do them subconsciously. And yet we often meet or exceed these goals with little or no effort.

What's most fascinating about this is that in our personal lives, we rarely use any complicated system to track and complete these tasks. No software, no systems and at best we might scribble down a reminder note to ourselves and stick it on the fridge.

If you really sit down and think about it, there's no reason why you could not apply the same approach to your business or work related goals. A task is a task, whether it has to meet with a teacher at 2 pm or having to ensure a critical order was placed and is being tracked.

If you can find your driving force for staying on top of things at the office as you do at home, you'll never again have any serious trouble meeting your business goals!