Your Guide to Setting and Reaching Your Business Goals

It’s time to focus and set business goals — but you don’t want to just write down a bunch of broad ideas that will never be achieved or will be forgotten in a few months.

You need to set business goals that you can actually achieve, that will inspire your team to work together in a singular direction, and guide your decision-making for the year ahead.

“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”
– Tony Robbins

Here’s what you need to do to plan for the year ahead with purpose.

Review the business goals you set and work you did in the previous year

Before getting started, ask yourself these questions:

• Did you set business goals or have a business plan last year?

• Did you follow the plan?

• Did all the goals that you created get accomplished or did they fall by the wayside?

• Were the business goals that you set achievable?

• Did you even set goals?

Take a hard look at the goals that you set for the previous year and be honest about if they were achieved — or even achievable — if they were realistic goals for your team, and if any of the goals that you set could be reused or carried into your goal setting for the new year.

How do you know if your goals are right for your company? Revisit your company mission

Don’t confuse your short-term goals with your long-term company-wide business goals, but make sure that you re-familiarize yourself with what the company’s official mission is.

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” — Pablo Picasso (source)

Ask if the goals you are setting for the new year align with your company’s long-term plan, and examine if anything you, or your team, did last year threw you off-track.

This is the perfect opportunity to refocus and realign everyone’s priorities.

Involve your team and customers in the goal-setting process

Employees need to buy into the business goals that they will be responsible for, so before deciding on your strategies, talk to your team, your employees, and anyone else in the company that you can to see what they think you need to accomplish.

Hold a company-wide goal setting brainstorm (Stormboard can help with that!) and even talk directly to your customers to find out what they want more of, and what their goals are. This will give you an opportunity to align some of your goals with those of your customers, making you a more valuable asset to them going forward.

Keep business goals simple and specific using a SMART framework

Broad sweeping, generic goals are not going to be easy to achieve.

Set specific, achievable goals that you can use as milestones for your company and team. Most importantly, set deadlines for these goals.

Consider using the SMART goal framework — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely — while creating and reviewing your goals.

Each section helps you think through what you are trying to improve on and what you need to do to create that change.

• Specific
  Identify a specific area that requires improvement or change.

• Measurable
  Decide how you will measure progress or achievement as you work on your business goals.

• Achievable
  Make sure the goal is actually doable by the person or people assigned to it, in the allotted time.

• Relevant
  The goal must be aligned with long-term business goals and the company mission overall. Goals can be great — but if they don’t align with your company, they will actually be working against you.

• Timely
  Specify when the goal will be achieved — set a deadline and hold yourself and your team to it.

Make your business goals a priority

Some goals may need to be achieved in a specific order or they will conflict with each other. Make sure your goals are ordered based on importance and are assigned to people who have the time and skills to execute them so no one is left waiting.

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal."
– Henry Ford (source)

Also, make sure your business goals are visible. It’s common to spend a lot of time creating goals and then rolling them up in a flipchart, losing them in meeting minutes, or forgetting to keep them top-of-mind when making decisions later in the year.

Find a place where you can keep them visible — on a wall, whiteboard, on your desk — and make sure that you review the status of your goals on a regular basis.

Don’t toss away business goals you don’t use

Keep track of the goals that you come up with that DON’T align with your company’s mission.

They may be fantastic ideas, but because they don’t align they might throw your team off.

It’s important to come back to this list every month, quarter, etc. to make sure you aren’t being distracted by these ideas.

Your business goals planner: use Stormboard to set your goals

Stormboard has multiple templates that can be used for setting your business goals, or we can customize a template for you if you have specific needs in your company.

You can save time by setting up your goal-setting meeting beforehand, capture, organize, and discuss ideas in real-time, and then assign tasks for better results and monitor progress. 

Storms (what we call your digital workspace) can be added to any time, from anywhere, making it easy to hold a company-wide goal setting brainstorm with remote teams or different offices, and to return to those ideas that aren’t used, whenever you want, throughout the year.

At the end of your business goal setting session, you can instantly export all of your work into a PowerPoint, Word, or Excel, document to be used as meeting minutes, presentations, or reports. 

Apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 devices are available and work in real-time on any device with a web browser from your 4” phone to your 85” Microsoft Surface Hub.

Interested in learning more about how Stormboard can help you set your business goals? Schedule a product demo with one of our enterprise specialists today.

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