By Jeff Diana, Chief People Officer

Clearly establishing goals is an essential first step toward improving business execution in your organization. When your employees know what they’re navigating toward and why they’re doing what they’re doing, they’re more motivated and do a better job. Setting meaningful goals doesn’t have to be hard. Start with these five steps:

1.     Have at least five goals, but no more than 10:

• Do not oversimplify what you actually do.
• Focus on what matters the most instead of cataloging everything you do.
• Create goals that are easy to remember.

2.     Define what you do and what makes your job important:

• Someone who’s never actually seen your work should be able to use your goals as evidence of the contributions you make to the company.

3.     Make goals that are independent of each other:

• It should be possible to achieve one goal without achieving another.

4.     Avoid listing personal development objectives in your goal plan:

• Goals should drive personal development, but they must reflect business needs.
• For example, instead of “Learn C++,” write the business needs driving this development objective, such as: “Support Project X, which will require learning C++.”

5.     Personalize cascaded goals to your job:

• Change the names of cascaded goals to make them relevant to your role.
• Tasks or deliverables associated with cascaded goals may become your actual goals.
• Several different goals on your goal plan may support a single goal cascaded to you by your supervisor.

Want to learn more about setting effective goals? Download the SuccessFactors white paper “Doing the Right Things: Using Goal Management to Drive Business Execution.”