Be Smart!!!

How Important are Goals for an organization? Imagine a cricket or a football match or any sport for that matter without a goal or a score to be achieved. We watch it keenly so as to see the goals to be achieved. But are organizations equivalent to sport? Well, the fact is Organization play a bigger sport. Effects of a sports match could be seen only on field for some time after it. But Organization reflects society. We can imagine the catastrophic effects that an organization can cause if they operate without goals. It's important for the existence & the purpose organization serves to set goals for it.

Now the question is what kind of goals should organizations have?
How do we know what kind of goals to set? The whole point of setting goals, after all, is to achieve them. It does no good to go to the trouble of calling meetings, hacking through the needs of organization, and burning up precious time, only to end up with goals that aren't acted on or completed. Unfortunately, this scenario describes what far too many managers do with their time.



The best goals are smart goals — well, actually SMART goals are more like it. SMART is a handy acronym for the five characteristics of well-designed goals

• Specific: Goals must be clear and unambiguous; vagaries and platitudes have no place in goal setting. When goals are specific, they tell employees exactly what is expected, when, and how much. Because the goals are specific, one can easily measure One's employees' progress toward their completion.
• Measurable: What good is a goal that one can't measure? If one's goals are not measurable, one never know whether employees are making progress toward their successful completion. Not only that, but it's tough for employees to stay motivated to complete their goals when they have no milestones to indicate their progress.
• Attainable: Goals must be realistic and attainable by average employees. The best goals require employees to stretch a bit to achieve them, but they aren't extreme. That is, the goals are neither out of reach nor below standard performance. Goals that are set too high or too low become meaningless, and employees naturally come to ignore them.
• Relevant: Goals must be an important tool in the grand scheme of reaching one's company's vision and mission. It should be Relevant to the society which it is reflecting and to the employees that it has.
• Time-bound: Goals must have starting points, ending points, and fixed durations. Commitment to deadlines helps employees to focus their efforts on completion of the goal on or before the due date. Goals without deadlines or schedules for completion tend to be overtaken by the day-to-day crises that invariably arise in an organization.

SMART goals make for smart organizations.
Goals are often unclear, ambiguous, unrealistic, unrelated to the organization's vision, unmeasurable, and demotivating. By developing SMART goals One can avoid these traps while ensuring the progress of one's organization and its employees.

GOAL SETTING + GOAL ACHIEVEMENT = PERFORMANCE

Goal Achievement should impact Goal setting positively and goal is not meant to reach ,on the other hand they inspire , motivate to reach them

People pick up on, or consciously or unconsciously read, these expectations from their supervisor.
People perform in ways that are consistent with the expectations they have picked up on from the supervisor.

The Pygmalion effect was described by J. Sterling Livingston in the September/October, 1988 Harvard Business Review. "The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them," Livingston said in his article, Pygmalion in Management.

The Pygmalion effect enables staff to excel in response to the manager’s message that they are capable of success and expected to succeed. The Pygmalion effect can also undermine staff performance when the subtle communication from the manager tells them the opposite. These cues are often subtle. As an example, the supervisor fails to praise a staff person's performance as frequently as he praises others. The supervisor talks less to a particular employee.

Livingston went on to say about the supervisor, "If he is unskilled, he leaves scars on the careers of the young men (and women), cuts deeply into their self-esteem and distorts their image of themselves as human beings. But if he is skillful and has high expectations of his subordinates, their self-confidence will grow, their capabilities will develop and their productivity will be high. More often than he realizes, the manager is Pygmalion."

Can you imagine how performance will improve if your supervisors communicate positive thoughts about people to people? If the supervisor actually believes that every employee has the ability to make a positive contribution at work, the telegraphing of that message, either consciously or unconsciously, will positively affect employee performance.

And, the effect of the supervisor gets even better than this. When the supervisor holds positive expectations about people, she helps individuals improve their self-concept and thus, self-esteem. People believe they can succeed and contribute and their performance rises to the level of their own expectations.