Make your goals SMART: Attainable
August 27, 2008 by Becky Scott
In this next piece of our SMART goal series, let’s talk about making a goal attainable. What do you think is attainable for your business goals? Try for something that makes you stretch a little, but doesn’t put the goal out of your reach. For instance, learning to speak Italian in two months is not an attainable goal for most people. But learning basic greetings and simple words in two months is perfectly reachable.
If you set your goal too high, you can feel like a failure, like you’re not good enough when you don’t complete the task. If you set it too low and you don’t have to work at it, you’ll either ignore the goal or get bored with it. The same goes for your employees. They need to feel that they have a reasonable chance of meeting the goal with a standard or slightly above-standard performance. You want to build their confidence and help them find their strengths.
Have you ever set goals for yourself and then realized they weren’t really attainable? How did you feel? Did you adjust the goal to something more reasonable, or did you just scrap the goal entirely?
Find previous SMART goal posts here: Part I: Specific and Part II: Measurable.
Image: Newscom