SMART Objectives
Why we should re-align our thinking on SMART Objectives
Firstly, welcome to my blog. Feel free to
feedback your feelings, and indeed your observations on what I have
to say. I am the Lean Development Manager at Warwickshire College,
and I have extensive Manufacturing Engineering Management
experience within the automotive industry and much more, for a full
biography connect with me, David Gay, on
LinkedIn or simply ask.
I was recently asked the following question by
the CEO of an organisation we are currently working with – “What
would be the real impact of personal objectives on his
organisation’s lean transformation?”.
Now, we agreed with the traditionally recognised
approach that all the objectives cascaded to our teams must
be:-
- Specific – do the objectives specify what they want to
achieve?
- Measurable – can you measure whether or not you are meeting the
objectives?
- Achievable - are the objectives you set, achievable and
attainable?
- Realistic – can you realistically achieve the objectives with
the resources you have?
- Time-bound – by when do you want to achieve the set
objectives?
As our discussion centered on these universally
recognised self evident truths we began to question each one in
turn and to analyse their individual impact.
We could find no reason to disagree with the
first three as your objectives do need to be:-
Specific, during a lean
transformation the more specific the better;
Measurable, otherwise we will
not know if we have attained the objective, and all our decisions
during our drive towards our goal must be data driven;
Achievable, if not there is no
point in setting the objective.
However it was when we got to:-
Realistic, that we began to
doubt the traditional thinking as this appeared, to me, to
re-present the case for an objective being Achievable.
Time-bound could not be argued
against.
So, we found ourselves in a dilemma as two of
our guidelines appeared to mean the very same thing. We now have
real quandary - a universally recognisable mnemonic where two of
the component parts fundamentally have the same meaning.
What should we do? SMRT or SMAT objectives
don’t sound nearly as effective as SMART ones!
We could of course ignore the situation; but we
have decided to re-align our thinking instead.
In future our ‘A’ will refer to Aligned to
ensure that, during any transformation activity, all our personal
objectives are in line with the organisation’s overall objectives
as set by Policy Deployment. We work, therefore, with one
unified goal.
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