br />Goal Setting: A Managers Role vs. the Employee Role
How do you get your employees to perform better?
Are your employees focused, motivated, organized and driven?
What goals have been established for your employees?
These are a few of the many questions I asked to multiple managers within the company
that I work for. Being a relatively new employee, working there for a little over a year, I
wanted to ask these questions. Not to see how different managers felt about specific
employees, but to get an overall view of how their jobs as managers directly affected each
and everyone job performance.
Management is a science of how an individual works with a group of people, oversees
their performance, and tries to effectively and efficiently get them to exceed the goals set
forth by the company. It is a science that has guidelines and rules to follow, but varies from
one employee to the next.
There are four basic pillars to success when it comes to managing your employees: plan,
organize, direct, and monitor . These pillars can be incorporated into many different
aspects of management, but no other aspect is more important than that of goal setting.
Management starts with planning, and good planning starts with the formation of goals.
Without a proper plan in place the achievement of goals will never come and if
they do they wont be repeatable. An effective manager will figure out what the goal is and
then figure out the best possible way to achieve the goal. I asked our sales manager late
last week (Hodsdon, Len Personal Interview, May 10, 2005), Would you agree that
planning is the first step in forming goals? He answered:
I would have to agree. Planning is a very important part of goal setting, if not the most
important. If you dont have a good plan of attack and knowledge of company direction,
you wont succeed in setting forth either obtainable or stretch goals for your employees.
Once you have a plan the next step is to organize everything you need to execute your plan
and prepare your employees for the goals you have established for them. As a manager you
have to ask yourself, are your employees prepared to do their part in order to accomplish
the goals that you have set forth for them? If you answer yes to this then it is important to
relay these goals to them and ensure that they are properly informed and understand the
