Organisations and Individuals must set targets

I get invited as a keynote speaker for many sales conferences. It’s a great platform for the people in the organisation to meet, introspect and celebrate past achievements and set the milestones for the future. It’s strange that all goes well until the new targets are disclosed. For the longest time, I have wondered why people get upset and dread them. I feel that people should be happy because when targets are set, they align your work and set you up for achievement; and yet people sit in the conferences like war victims waiting to be persecuted endlessly for the year to come.

Targets are a good thing and most organisations and individuals set them. But when they are not backed up by purpose, they hold no value for the individual who is actually expected to work to achieve them. Have you not faced mutiny at home when you tell your kids to study and pose unpleasant consequences if they fail? You emphasise on the penalties and the benefits of their actions and seldom the purpose of their study.

The government charges taxes, and because people can’t see the purpose or because they don’t agree to them, they avoid them. There has to be a purpose for life and for work. When people don’t know the purpose or when they don’t agree with the purpose, there will be confusion and conflict.

Lack of purpose and over emphasis on the target is what infuriates people, let alone employees. Often, the purpose is known only to the set of people who set the target but when it is passed down to the team that will run with work, the target is emphasised and not the actual purpose. How can you expect people to work hard and to set their eyes on the goal for the whole year if they don’t know why they must do so?

If you are looking at driving people to create magical results, here are some points you may want to have them consider with you.

1. Purpose: Why one must do it is a more powerful drive that what one must do. What is the purpose? What will it do for you and everyone involved? How will the impact of your work benefit the people it touches?

I suggested to my client, an FMCG company, to open their sales conference with the purpose of launching their new product and that they declare the following: We want people to have stronger teeth and grow old in their original set. Beautiful smiles for a lifetime was their purpose. They did a small video highlighting the purpose and they had the sales team hooting for the new targets.

What was amazing was this; when they had finished selling the purpose to their sales team, the sales team had set their own target, much higher than the company had set.

2. Ideal scene: If you can explain to people the ideal scene of accomplishment and paint the exact picture of what you are hoping to create as a result of their efforts, chances are they will align well with your vision. When my friend explained to his 11-year-old son about his own struggles and difficulties and expressed that ideally he would want his son to grow into a rich, powerful and influential young man, his son concluded on his own accord that in order to fit into the ideal scene he must start getting good grades immediately.

It’s amazing how people have the instinctive drive towards progress but it somehow dims away behind authority and instructions. When purpose is lacking, confusion and discontent breeds. When the purpose becomes prime, the target becomes an inner drive.

Writer is Corporate trainer & best-selling author of ‘I Am Another You’