Lesson 3 | Effective Goal Setting

Transcript: Welcome to lesson three in the Goals to outcomes course. In this Growth Lab course, you're going to learn how to develop effective goals to drive action and outcomes. This is the third of four lessons focused on developing and documenting your business strategy, tactics and goals. If you join me in lesson one, you know that your goals, ideal clients strengthen opportunities when align, inform strong strategy and tactics. In lesson two, we walked through an exercise to help you gain clarity of your goals and prioritization. In this lesson, we'll focus on commitment to your goals. I'm Shauna May, head of Practice Management at SEI. My mission, simple, it's to help you and your team grow. At SEI, we're focused on creating better braver futures together. How can we help you do what you do best? We do that through curated investment solutions, custody solutions and technology solutions, and of course, practice management advice.

Clarity of goals is essential, but without commitment, you may not take the action needed to see results. Both clarity and commitment are important and frankly, commitment's the hardest part of effective goal setting and goal. In this lesson, I will share how you can gain commitment both yourself and with your team by developing smart goals. You may be familiar with smart goals. I want to take it a step further and provide specific ways to test if your goals meet the smart criteria and how to make them smarter if needed. So smart is a pneumonic that was first used in the early 1980s by consultant George T. Duran in a scholarly article titled, there's a Smart Way to Write Management Goals and Objectives. If you have documented your goals in your one page business plan or have them define elsewhere, I want you to take them out or write them down to evaluate if they are smart as we walk through the criteria.

S stands for specific M for measurable, A for attainable, R for relevant, and T for time bound. When I'm working with advisors and their teams, part of my job as a consultant and coach is to help ensure their goals are smart. I'm going to teach you how to do this yourself. Let's take a deep dive into each aspect of a smart goal. Note. If your goal meet these criteria or not, an effective goal is specific. If your goal is specific, it's clear what you're trying to do, what success looks like, why it matters, and who is involved. Again, what are you trying to do? What does success look like? Why does it matter? And who is involved In lesson two, you work through gaining clarity and prioritization of your goals. When you read the goals you've written down in your one page business plan, are they specific enough?

Here's a way to test if they're specific. I call it the wake up test. If I was to wake you or someone on your team up at 3:00 AM in the morning, would you or would they be able to tell me your goals in the right order? Who owns it? When does it need to be done by? Would you be able to confidently explain what success is and why it matters in your business? You can test this out by asking your team to the best of your knowledge, what are our key business goals and priorities? Take a listen and see what they say. As a leader, it's your job to create, document and communicate your goals as clearly and specifically as possible. Again, a goal is specific. When it's clear what you're trying to do, what success looks like, why it matters, and who is involved.

An effective goal is measurable. Are your goals written down? How do you know how you're doing? How do you know when they're done? What we measure and report on, we pay attention to and it tends to grow if we want it to. I asked you in the beginning of this course, do you have documented business goals at this point? If you've been following along, the answer should be yes, and you know the term back, the napkin. We've all heard a story of a business owner who had a vision or a strategy they wrote down on the back of a napkin. Think about this question. What do you think would've happened if they never wrote it on the back of the napkin? Would it have happened? In my experience, consulting and coaching, writing down goals and a plan to achieve them not only makes it more real, but it engages a deeper commitment.

It becomes embedded in our subconscious, which is largely running the show in my experience. By simply writing down a goal and keeping it front of mind, your chances of success increase. How do you know how you're doing? Metrics help us help keep us accountable and focused. You are going to want to define one or few leading and lagging indicators or metrics. In the last session, we discussed leading versus lagging metrics. Leading indicators and metrics are the things that you believe will predict a positive outcome. The most common leading indicators are activities and your pipeline. A lagging indicator or metric are those things that demonstrate the desired outcome you want such as sales or new revenue. However, you're defining success in your goal in the pursuit of growth. A common mistake I see is firms focused on only the lagging metrics. The outcomes really, it's important to maintain control by focusing on the leading metrics.

Those are the things you can control. You can't necessarily control the outcomes to make sure you're really focused on driving the right results and support of your goals. So what are those leading indicators that matter? Again, typically it's going to be activities you can control, the activities you and your team make and how you do them, who you do them with. Your pipeline is going to be a helpful leading indicator because you have some sense on if you're on track or not towards your goals based on what you have in your pipeline. By defining specifically what you want to track, you now know what data you need to capture. I'd asked you to consider can you capture the data easily today, the data that you need to understand how you're doing both from a leading and a lagging perspective. If not, are there other inputs or data points that you have available in your CRM or in your business, or can you start to capture data?

You need to track, report, and review to understand how you're doing to help actually report on the metrics that you want to report on based on your strategy, your tactics, and your goals. I want you to be specific about what are the metrics you can and will track and review. Focus on progress, not perfection. If you are a numbers person or analytical, it's very easy to get over complicated with what you measure. Ideally, you want to be able to quickly understand how you're doing against your goals via a report or a dashboard in your CRM. If it takes a lot of effort to understand the metrics that you've outlined, it's unlikely that you're going to keep up reviewing those metrics. Finally, understanding when you've accomplished your goal is important. When can you check this off as done? This starts by defining clearly what success is.

In the example we used in lesson two, which was growing by $20 million in new assets next year, it's easy to know if you've accomplished that goal or not. Not all goals will be as easy to quantify. Consider how you can draw a line in the sand to turn a qualitative goal into a quantitative goal. The goal of growing the doctors may become growing with six new doctor clients that fit our ideal doctor client persona. As you can see, this subtle shift from growing with doctors to six new doctors that meet our persona helps provide another level of clarity as to what you consider success and when you are actually done achieving that goal. An effective goal is attainable. There is nothing more frustrating than a goal that is not attainable in one of the best ways I know how to gut check. If your goal attainable is to back into what does this require, let's go back to that $20 million growth goal example.

If you manage $10 million, growing by $20 million in net new assets may not be attainable. However, if you manage $250 million, that's a very different story. How do we know if a goal is attainable? We backtest it just like you do for your client's financial goals. The goals to outcomes worksheet, which is available on the goals to outcomes course page, is a tool that will help you do this. I will review this tool in depth in the next lesson. So how we backtest your goals with your goal in mind? Start by looking at your track record. Is this goal, desired goal in line with what you were able to achieve in the past? Specifically, we want to look for clues such as conversion rate, how many right fit leads you're getting. If you know you want to grow by $20 million with doctors that have say a million dollars in AUM or more based on your ideal client persona or profile, do you have a network of doctors you can go to?

Do you have a strategy that's strategy and tactics that have worked in the past to generate $20 million in new assets under management? In this case, you're going to need 20 new clients with a million dollars or more. That's just about two new clients a month or five new clients a quarter. Is that realistic? Another aspect of attainability is buy-in. Do you buy in or believe it's possible? What about your team? It takes courage to do bold things as a leader and manager. That starts with providing clarity and empowering your team to believe in your vision and goals or even better to encourage them to have skin in the game and be part of the process and the solution. It's worth asking your team, what do you think about these goals or about this goal? Is it realistic? If so, follow up with how can we ensure that we succeed?

If not ask, what do we need to adjust or solve for to make it more realistic or attainable? An effective goal is relevant at the top of the one page business plan is space for purpose and mission. Talking about buy-in there needs to be alignment with your and your firm's values. In my experience, one reason we don't have commitment to our goals is because they're not aligned to the things that matter most to us, meaning we're out of coherence. However, when our purpose, mission, and goals are aligned, when we are focused on something that lights us up that we are passionate about, that we believe in, we tend to have necessity. Necessity is the internal driver motivation to act, which by the way is an attribute of high performers. What's the purpose of what you're doing? Is it relevant? How is it impactful to your clients?

How is it impactful to you? How is it impactful to your team? A way to test this yourself for you and your team is to add so that at the end of the goal, if you can't articulate and believe in the impact of successfully completing the goal, then it may not be relevant. For example, I want to grow by $20 million, so that complete the sentence. In my experience, one of the greatest threats to advisor firm firm growth is busyness. The advisors I talked to are almost always busy. I'd assume at some point in the year you'll get busy if you aren't already. Now, if your goal or goals aren't relevant, what is going to keep you focused on taking action? So again, check in with your values and mission are your goals in coherence with what matters to you, what matters to your clients, and what matters to your team? Last but not least, an effective goal is time bound. So how do we know when we're done? We talked about this in the measurable section. Do your goals have deadlines?

We already know we need to be specific. Time bound means we know what we are accomplishing by when. In my experience, the smaller the goal, the more we break it down, the more likely we are to take action and achieve it. Do you know what you need to do today, this week, this month, this quarter to achieve your goals? That's what we're working towards. In order to make progress, a goal should be broken down into the smallest task possible. It should be really take no more than a quarter if you can't accomplish what you're looking to accomplish or break down a larger goal into a smaller goal and can accomplish it quarterly. You need to break it down farther. EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system outlined in the book, traction by Gino Wickman is a popular business management framework, which focuses on quarterly goals, or they call them rocks.

This quarterly cycle is important. It helps. It's how we as humans track seasons. We think about stuff in quarterly buckets. If you start to break down your goals in the largest timeframe, quarterly, you will start to make more progress. Ideally, you want to even further break them down into what does success look like this month, this week, even today? Okay, ready for your third assignment? Take a look at your goals. I want you to go through and literally check off if they are smart. Are they specific? Are they measurable? Are they attainable, relevant, and time-bound? Go through each of your goals and review those five criteria. I also want you to do this with your team. If your team feels like, no, we need to be more specific, or, I don't understand what success looks like, or we can't track these metrics, they aren't smart yet. In the last lesson, we are going to tie everything together to help you identify your tactical plan to take action toward your goals. Imagine knowing what you and your team needs to do today, this week, this month, this quarter, I'll see you in the final lesson where we will review how to use the goals to outcomes worksheet, to outline your tactics to support your business strategy and goals. Thank you for joining me. Great job showing up to work on your business and not just in your business. Let's grow.