The Goal of Goal setting

 Work on the theory of goal-setting suggests that it's an effective tool for making progress by ensuring that participants in a group with a common goal are clearly aware of what is expected from them.  On a personal level, setting goals helps people work towards their own objectives—most commonly with financial or career-based goals. Goals provide a sense of direction and purpose.

"There is no happiness except in the realization that we have achieved something"-Henry Ford

In business, goal setting encourages participants to put in substantial effort. Also, because every member has defined expectations for their role, little room is left for inadequate effort to go unnoticed.

Managers cannot constantly drive motivation or keep track of an employee’s work on a continuous basis. Goals are therefore an important tool for managers, since goals have the ability to function as a self-regulatory mechanism that acquires an employee a certain amount of guidance

For some time now the SMART techniques for goal setting has been used by authors, trainers, coaches, etc. to create a foundation for actualizing goals. They work and have proven themselves over time. They truly are “smart” – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and tangible or timely.

Goals that are difficult to achieve and specific tend to increase performance more than goals that are not. A goal can become more specific through quantification or enumeration (should be measurable), such as by demanding "...increase productivity by 50%," or by defining certain tasks that must be completed.

Setting goals affects outcomes in four ways:

1.   Goals narrow attention and direct efforts to goal-relevant activities, and away from perceived undesirable and goal-irrelevant actions.

2.   Goals can lead to more effort; for example, if one typically produces 4 widgets an hour, and has the goal of producing 6, one may work more intensely towards the goal than one would otherwise.

3.   Someone becomes more prone to work through setbacks if pursuing a goal.

4.    Goals can lead individuals to develop and change their behaviour.

Now that we have realized the pro's and con's of Goal setting lets get to the reason why we started talking about Goal Setting in the first place.

The Tower Building Exercise

 The tower building exercise was performed in class to teach these Goal setting features mentioned above. The goal setting in this case was to set the number of blocks that a person can put one over the other without making them fall. This is a brief description of what happened-

A volunteer was called on stage. He was made to guess how many blocks would he be able to balance. The whole class population was also asked for their number simultaneosly. The final accomplished number was 17 blocks(which was 7 higher than the volunteers' choice). However, the lesson to be learnt here is the basis of goal setting. If a person can achieve 17 blocks, it is incorrect to guesstimate that he would do only 10 goals. That's where the role of the manager kicks in. To understand what is achievable and what is important for the growth of the organisation and accordingly set a goal. So the lesson learnt here was that a Goal should be set at a HIGHER level than which is possible. only then can one cross his/her limits.

         This was just the first part. In the second part the volunteer was supposed to be blind folded and made to do the same exercise. The same procedure of guessing the number of blocks began. Obviously the number of blocks fell drastically for most of the students. But therein lied the second lesson itself. A good organisation will always try to up-scale its previous performance;irrespective of whatever the present conditions are. That is what was required here. As aspiring Managers we needed to set ourselves higher goals all the time, irrespective  of how bad the situation was. These are the two lessons we learnt from the exercise of Tower Building. And hopefully we will apply them in our future as aspiring managers and succeed.