5 Steps to Achieving Your Objectives

Step1 – Set Impact Objectives

These are the objectives that will create the biggest impact on your business to help drive it towards your vision. What are your top 3 major objectives that will really make a huge difference to your business?

You should only set up to 3 objectives per team, otherwise you will not achieve your desired results. Set too many objectives and you will end up with none complete. Keep it simple.

Step 2 – Build the Team

Select members for your team; make notes of their strengths and weaknesses. Select the leader and have agreement from the team.

Step 3 – Measurable Actions

Develop with the team the measurable actions required to drive the objective to completion. For example, if the objective was to lose weight, the actions would be to reduce calorie intake and increase exercise frequency.

The actions are the drivers, without them the objective could not be achieved, the actions have to be measured and achieved to deliver the results.

Step 4 – Create the Score Boards

There are 2 score board to create:

   1. The Objective Score Board. In the weight loss example you could take weekly measurements and plot them on a graph.
   2. The Action Score Board. In the weight loss example this could be a graph to show how many calories are being eaten each day compared with the planned number of calories to be eaten.

Step 5 – Hold Weekly Workshops

This is the most important step and the one that will help you achieve the objective. This step requires real DISCIPLINE. If you can win the battle between URGENT and IMPORTANT Tasks, you will win the war.

The agenda for the weekly meeting is very simple:

   1. Report on your achievements last week.
   2. Update the score boards
   3. Agree and commit to your tasks for this week.

The meeting should take no longer than 30 minutes to complete. It’s about discipline and commitment. If the objective is worth doing the discipline and commitment should not be an issue. If it becomes an issue then you need to find out what the underlying problems are, deal with them and move on.

Each team member must come to the meeting with the bad and well as the good news. The team is there to support and guide, leave all ego’s at home. The purpose is Objective Achievement.

You can use the Red, Amber, Green (RAG) system to measure actions. Amber sets the action goal, Green indicates action success, Red represents action failure, if something goes RED you must put it into intensive care and bring back to green.

How to become successful at business time management.  Jack Gibson