William Buist

Many professionals begin the year by putting together their goals only to be challenged to make them S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed – other variations exist but the intention is broadly similar). Usually by about February it’s pretty obvious that some of them won’t be achieved, and some aren’t even needed any more. William Buist, director of Abelard Management Services explains why SMART goals should be replaced with more REAListic expectations.

Over many years of working within and leading teams I have learnt that SMART goals aren’t really goals at all, they aren’t the things that drive us, they lack ownership (many were just written to satisfy the boss’s boss), and the measures and timing virtually guarantee a degree of failure.

SMART goals simply aren’t smart, although the idea and principles make good sense. They are a great way to help people who are inexperienced in goal setting to think through what’s needed, but they have weaknesses too.

As an example, a writer might set a S.M.A.R.T goal to write a book by March and to complete the outline by January. One month into the year a minor delay means the goal is missed, from then on it’s catch up all the way. Motivationally, it’s a poor choice.

I’ve developed an alternative approach that has served me well since then, and we can all benefit from adding a bit of REALity to our goals.

Responsibility

REAL goals are those things we take responsibility for, that we own and understand, they really belong to us at an emotional level. If we are asked we can describe and talk about the goal in detail, we can respond to questions about it. We genuinely feel responsible for its achievement.

If the goal’s not really yours, if it’s just something your boss thinks you should do, you’ll not really put heart and mind behind it, responsibility provides reality.

Effortless

REAL goals are also effortless; they focus on the outcome and not the journey. The process is irrelevant, if you provide what you are asked to provide. That’s not to say that the goals does not require effort, far from it, REAL goals are hard work, but the description of the output shouldn’t set an expectation of the tasks, rather, it sets an aspiration.

Goals that intrinsically describe the effort that’s required de-motivate those who are charged with delivering them before they even start, whereas a goal that describes an aspiration lifts the hearts of those who share it.

Should a sports team set a goal to ‘beat 9 out of 10 of the best teams before Easter’? or to be ‘recognised as playing at their best’?. If they do the later they’ll probably do the former. The former is about the process, the later is about recognition, an output, not the means by which the output is achieved.

Accommodating

REAL goals accommodate early failure without the goal failing. Focus on the output helps to achieve that but the really important thing is to recognise that failure is a critical part of the mix, Winston Churchill famously said that ‘Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.’S.M.A.R.T goals often fail to take account of failure because they focus on the measures and timing. It’s easy for things to go wrong and go wrong early.

If the future was already determined goals would have no meaning – but we know it is not. The uncertainty that we are all faced with means that there is a high likelihood of events diverting from plans almost immediately they are set in motion. REAL goals accommodate that and provide the guidance of a steady point of reference for you in that uncertainty. A navigator’s pole star.

Legacy

REAL goals aren’t short term, that’s a space for tasks and projects. Real Goals run through our lives and give us clarity of aim and dedication of purpose, and for them to do that goals must have an element of Legacy, the stuff you leave behind when you have gone.

Legacy is more important than we are, it provides our conscience and makes us deliver from behind when things are slipping.

This doesn’t have to be world changing legacy though; I’m not saying that goals have to be so massive and far reaching that they become full of effort again.

An example of a REAL goal might be to ‘to become recognised as a great writer’ – provided you take responsibility for delivering it, it has little effort directly associated with it so it passes the effortless test. There clearly is a lot of effort to achieve it, but the expression of the goal drives positive reinforcement of the aim and focuses on the outcome. Not writing for a couple of weeks won’t kill the goal (but might have killed a ‘Write 3 books next year” SMART goal), and it leaves your mark without you because it’s not self recognition that you are seeking.

It’s a good time of year to think of Goals and if you are setting new goals then make them REAL and see the difference it makes. For more information about REAL goal setting and utilising the principles behind them, in teams and groups of people, please contact me or visit www.abelard-uk.com

William Buist is director of Abelard Management Services, a company which specialises in building trust in teams and communities and is president of the Black Star Life Community on Ecademy.com.

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‘Web 2.0’ seems to be the industry’s most popular buzz word these days, but how many organisations are actually utilising this concept to its full advantage? As an expert in building community spirit and collaborative working, William Buist, Director of Abelard Management Services analyses the role of Social Networking as a supporting toolset for developing personal branding and supporting the marketing effort.

When mankind first started trading he developed markets as a place to bring people together and allow them to demonstrate what they had and what they did and decide, there and then, whether to trade. Marketing was via experience of the product at the market. Of course they didn’t have the means of communicating in the way we do today.

Marketing version 0.9

Think about it, no printing, no email, no Internet, nothing. But by word of mouth (and travelling) some markets became popular and, ultimately, international. Where East met West, markets for Spices and rare eastern goods sprang up to satisfy an increasing demand from the west – people were prepared to travel long distances to buy and to sell.

Marketing Version 1.0

Printing came along and then the postal system and Marketeers began to put the technologies together. They had spent time developing advertising copy, collateral to describe their products and services and now they could start to send information to people they didn’t know. They talked about what they knew to people who they didn’t know in the hope of persuading a purchase. More and more Marketing became about putting the product in front of as many people as possible, of taking the known product to the unknown masses. Bringing one thing to many people. 

Some have called this Marketing version 1.0. Marketing departments the world over controlled the message and the channel. They knew their target audience, but not their actual audience, they know the message they are sending but not the message that is received. They left the closure of the loop, the sales themselves, to the sales teams whose motivation was the deal and not feedback on how the message was working.

Now don’t get me wrong, it works, but it continues to involve huge sums of money.

New technologies (and new regulation) brought us to a new place – a place where email and phone marketing simply magnified the numbers and reach for products and services beyond expectation or our capability to control.

Marketeers realised (at about the same time as the regulators) that blanket mailing, emailing and calling, in the hope of finding the customer with the need and the desire to buy might be counterproductive. Perhaps if they could engage in what looked like conversation and deal with individuals they might make more progress. Segmentation and channel focus became important. Companies started to talk to tighter subsets of their potential customers through controlled channels in a way that made the message look more personal. Ultimately, with full permission based marketing it became possible to talk to individuals about their needs through a segmented advertising and marketing campaign structure. Potential customers effectively told the company about their preferences and chose who to be sold to. Marketing became dealing with selling the known to the known.

Collateral moved from paper to static websites (brochureware) and a web presence became a hygiene factor for businesses. Most people now look for a company and what it offers on the web before they make a decision. This might be called Marketing version 1.5

The Dawn of Marketing v2.0

Blogging, network interactivity, chat, electronic rumours and the rise of social networks are forcing marketing to develop and evolve. What is being launched now is a whole new version with new ways of doing old stuff.

Social network sites with high blogging and electronic interaction do something that companies have never had to worry about. They allow customers to talk in real time about how the company is doing. They work around the globe around the clock. A rumour can become reality before you even know it was a thought. You no longer control the message you are just a part of the message machine with as much capability as everyone else, and as little.

There is a big impact here, if a company does something new and radical it’s often communicated very fast, especially if it is not liked. We now talk about experiences, and we talk about them in places where the words remain long after we have moved on ourselves. 

If we do have a bad experience and we do blog about it, then within a few hours it’s been picked up by the search engines and cached, whatever the company does and whatever we do to blog news about their great recovery, (even deleting the original post) we cannot remove the evidence of our original posting. Perhaps others will have quoted from it, and, more importantly, cached copies exist for a long time and are easily found.

Socially networked marketing (Marketing v2.0) allows anyone to talk about you and your products to anyone without your permission and without your knowledge. Marketing is now about the unknown message to the unknown potential customer. It has become about conversations and communities.

There is only one way to be connected with both and that is to take part in them, to listen and contribute to the conversations and to support the community. In the long run corporates will get the message (and few have done so already) and join the fray, expect it to change. Because that is inevitable, but for a while we hold all the marketing cards for the corporate world.

Smaller businesses and the self employed have taken to Social Networks for support and help and gradually also to enhance their marketing. Your business may be small but your need to compete in the marketing pool for the attention of your clients is as real now as it was 30 years ago. It’s just that right now, we have the tools to do this and we have the knowledge, and we have it way ahead of those with the money to drown out our message. It’s the best time ever to drive personal brand to the forefront.

It’s risky and that’s why the corporate world is slow on the uptake. It’s risky because companies no longer control the message that is being distributed about them. Perhaps the most famous example of a big corporation beginning to get the idea was General Motors who provided the tools and a load of snippets for members of the public to create their own advertisement for a Chevy Tahoe SUV. Many people started taking potshots, but many more enjoyed the opportunity and in the round GM reported significant success from the campaign.

General Motors recognised that they could not censor the content that people came up with,  They chose to let them all run and people respected them for their transparency and openness. The contest generated 4 million page views and 400,000 unique visitors. By most measures it was an outstanding success. Although GM controlled the output they chose to use for traditional advertising these ads are not hard to find and GM have acknowledged that this is an important source of consumer feedback too.

Mastercard ran a similar campaign too, for the ‘Priceless’ ads. Some of the submissions were, frankly, hilarious, but totally unsuitable for television.

The consensus is shifting, before too long the risks of not seeking consumer generated material might be higher than the risks of doing so, in any event it’s likely that consumer generated material will be generated whether asked for or not.

Marketing 2.0 and Social Networking

Everything people do on Social Networking sites are open to comment and challenge, we encourage people to talk about us when we are not there, we make it easy to be found by people we don’t know and have them say things about us we cannot control, but based on what we are, what we do, how we come across and what we write. It has never been more important to be consistent, and it has never been more important to be open and transparent and accepting of others views.

The impact on business

I work with people, business executives and owners – I know that whenever I go to see them, whether to sell to them (and increasingly when being sold to by them too) I see that they have been to my company’s website and searched for me (personally) on Google. They have my Social Networking profiles. I expect them to check me out. The message is that we have to be consistent, we have to know what they will find, and we have to manage our image, our brand as well as we can.

This opportunity to gather material and build brand and knowledge and reach is here now and available for us to leverage through the Ecademy platform, for a tiny cost. Our opportunity to advocate others without being asked, of building and supporting the efforts of others is something that the corporates are only now beginning to invest in. Right now, when it’s done right, people here can reach further and faster than their corporate competitors and those competitors can’t move fast enough to catch us. Fantastic…….

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