Commonsense Leadership

Chapter 4Goals and Leadership

In Chapter 2 you examined your assets and liabilities and recognized the fact that you need people around you to offset your liabilities. In Chapter 3 you examined your personality traits and determined which ones are necessary to be in a leadership role. The next step is to establish goals.

It's always been a bit confusing to me when companies write five-year goals and then they revise them every year for the next five years. It's always made much more sense to me to set goals for no more than a year at a time and to be able to reflect on them so that everything you do every day relates to your 12-month outcome. This avoids the possibility of wasting energy by getting off track and having to recover. But, more important, by setting goals every day, I think you become much more focused, you know what you need to do and when you need to do it. To do this, you need to make sure that your goals are such that you can examine them every single day and determine whether or not you at least made progress.

To do this there are basically four characteristics goals need to have. The first is that they need to be specific. Doing the best you can is not a goal. Working hard is not a goal. Even working 12 hours is not a goal. Goals are specific when they give you direction.

When I work with corporate individuals and I see overly general goals, then we go back and reexamine them, break them down, and analyze them so we may try to come up with very specific things ...