Take Care With Your Goals

Is there a dark side to setting goals?

Let me be clear -- I firmly believe that setting ambitious and noble goals is critical to your success. We need targets. We need measurements. We need goals.

It's also true (centered leaders must be comfortable with an occasional paradox) that goals can create risks and temptations that must be avoided. If all we care about is the outcome, we may well break rules and hurt standards -- even other people, in pursuit of those outcomes.

Creative, noble goals consider the needs of others. Chasing a dream with a deadline is important and it is also important to stay within the boundaries of ethical, disciplined behavior. There can be no cheating to hit the metric. There can be no cooking the books to show better results. There must be character.

Achieving goals is our time to show our best use of clarity, courage, creativity and compassion. We dare not let any of them get out of balance.

A recent article from philly.com: Setting Goals Can Sometimes Hurt You points out that in addition to goals, we should also work on our areas of focus. What are the things that we do that bring about the outcomes we are looking for? Often, it is in working on our areas of focus that achieve our goals and in so doing we don't bend the rules, we don't blur the data, and we don't burn ourselves out.

Elevating each employees stretch goals every time they achieve a goal is risky, too. As leaders, let's take care to keep the pursuit of our goals noble and to support our team members in their focus areas as well as their results. In all that we do, it pays to keep the big picture in view: what kind of organization are we building, and what type of people do we want to work with in the long run?

What can you do today to balance your goals and your focus areas?

-- Douglas Brent Smith

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