As many people know I am a massive fan of having goals.  I believe goals are dreams with deadlines and I believe you can achieve anything you want if you put your mind to it.  I find goals give me a structure and I think the best things I have ever achieved are the things I have set as goals.

I have discussed the format of my goals in my management blog – planning and actions using this format will enable you to structure and format goals.  Furthermore, I break these goals down into weekly and daily goals or actions of which I want to complete.  As soon as I finish one I take real pleasure in ticking the action or goal off.  This is probably due to my personality type (Myers Briggs ‘J’ Type), and I love ticking things off that I have completed.

As a manager we may have a number of goal themes and these could be areas of management or personal areas we wish to achieve.  Typical goal themes for managers could be:

Delegate more – many managers don’t delegate enough, and if we make it an action to delegate two key jobs per day, it will get us into the habit.

Deal with conflict – many managers don’t deal with conflict, they hide or pretend it isn’t happening. You could have a goal to have a conversation with a difficult person.

Manage time effectively – this could be dealing with time bandits or avoiding going on social media for too long.  Anything that will enable you to make the most of day.  For example, you could have a goal only to check your emails 3 times a day 09:00, 12:00 and 16:00.

In our own lives, we could have varies goals to make it better such as:

Run 40 minutes today or run 3 times this week – great for promoting a healthy lifestyle and really fantastic when you tick it off!

Build a really positive relationship with my son by… – statements like this are positive for promoting a healthy relationship with a family member, friend or work colleague.

Of course, these are just examples, goal setting is only limited by one thing, your imagination.  Remember goals are dreams with deadlines and we can have weekly and daily goals to help us get to where we want to be.

Ralph Moody is the founder of Target Training and specialises in trainer and management development.  You can read more about him here.  To see courses where Ralph delivers see our website here.