Setting Transformational Goals: The SMART and SMARTER Ways

There are two goal-setting frameworks that have become helpful to me over the past few months. The SMART and SMARTER frameworks. They’ve both brought clarity into how I think about achieving results at work and in my day-to-day life.

SMART Goals

SMART is an acronym that acts as a mnemonic and framework for setting objectives and goals. It was introduced by George T. Doran in There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives from the 1981 issue of Management Review.

• Specific: It targets a particular defined area for improvement.
• Measurable: It’s either quantifiable, or suggests something quantifiable, to provide an indication of progress.
• Assignable: It states who will complete the objective.
• Realistic: It outlines attainable results with available resources.
• Time-related: It includes a timeline for the expected results.

Not every management objective will be able to have all five criteria but the closer you can get the smarter your objective will be. With the likelihood of you achieving results increasing at the same time. That said, ultimately, what’s most important is the combination of the objective and its action plan.

The establishment of objectives and the development of their respective action plans are the most critical steps in a company’s management process. When top- and middle-level management are indecisive or set inadequate objectives, errors in judgement will compound themselves throughout the entire organization.

— George T. Doran

Goal setting can be hard. As Doran notes in the article, “it requires scarce time, and to some it is an unpleasant experience that generates much stress.” That said, when the variables that go into the objective are under your control and you’ve brought defined clarity to it with a SMART goal you’re setting yourself up for success.

When you start hearing managers and the supervisors saying, “Are your objectives smart?,” you know that effective objective setting is becoming a way of life with them. You will also know that you have taken a step to introduce management excellence into your organization.

— George T. Doran

SMARTER Goals

Since its introduction, the SMART framework has expanded from its original business management context to include personal goal-setting, with subtle changes along the way.

Assignable becomes Achievable and Realistic changes to Relevant, helping to form goals that answer the question, ‘Can I achieve this goal, and is it relevant to my life right now?

For personal goal-setting I’ve recently become excited by author Michael Hyatt’s variation, SMARTER. Just like SMART, it’s an another acronym.

Specific

• This shouldn’t be general or vague. Specific goals are motivating and it’s hard to determine the first steps for vague goals.
• Your goal should identify exactly what you want to accomplish with as much specificity as you can produce.

Bad: Write a book.
Good: Write a book proposal for How to Set Effective Goals.

Bad: I want to learn photography.
Good: Complete John Smith’s Fundamentals of Photography course.

Measurable

• Quantify the result you want with a number, a dollar amount, a percentage or some other measurement to make it measurable.
• If a goal isn’t measurable you’ll never be able to know if you’ve actually achieved it and you should be able to break it down into specific milestones to track progress.
• You should be able to know you’re on track to complete your goal and whether or not you’ve actually hit it.

Bad: “Earn more this year than last.”
Good: “Earn $5,000 more this year than last.”

Actionable

• Use action verbs like, “quit,” “run,” “finish,” “eliminate,” etc. in your goals to ensure your goals have defined the specific action you’ve taken.
• Don’t use to-be verbs like, “am,” “be,” “have,” etc.
• If you don’t have an action verb in your goal you don’t have a SMARTER goal.

Bad: Be more consistent in blogging.
Good: Write one blog post per week.

Risky

• If you set goals that are easy to achieve you’re not trying hard enough, stretching yourself, or rising to any challenge. There should be a risk of failure.
• Set goals that are just outside the edge of your comfort zone. It should make you twitch a bit. You want to be a little bit uncomfortable with it.

Bad: Increase sales by 2 percent.
Good: Increase sales by 10 percent.

Time bound

• Make sure your goals have a deadline.
• Successful goals have a sense of urgency provide by a calendar deadline, a frequency of repetition, or a time trigger in the day.
• Every goal needs a date associated with it and should end with a by when date.

Bad: Lose 20 pounds.
Good: Lose 15 pounds by August 9th.

Exciting

• Your goals should be personally exciting and motivating for you. You should be pumped up and excited by the idea of achieving them. It should ignite your imagination.
• If it’s not exciting you’ll face even greater challenges completing them when obstacles to your goal appear. (They will.)

Bad: Take another one-week summer vacation.
Good: Take a thirty-day sabbatical this June.

Relevant

• Before committing to a goal make sure it’s appropriate to your life circumstances, values, and the reality of what you need to achieve at this season in your life.

Bad: Start a new business at the same time you want to get a masters degree.
Good: Do one or the other.

What I especially like is the interplay of Risk and Excitement and how they replace Achievable and Realistic in variations of the SMART framework.

If you’re stretching a bit, just outside your typical comfort zone, while also comfortable learning from failed experiments this chan change the process of goal-setting from something that can generate “much stress” to something that generates Excitement. Personal goal-setting becomes something you’ll give up that “scarce time” for.