Your diet can often seem very, very complicated.
You might be eating fresh kale from your garden, dining at a fine restaurant, existing on a stream of home-delivered takeout, or indulging in all-you-can-eat buffets. Your food could be baked, fried, grilled, roasted, or steamed. And if you’re looking to get six-pack abs or live a healthier life, you might be following Paleo, Keto, Vegan, or intermittent fasting.
With so many options, best-selling author Michael Pollan tried to distill his 30 years as a food expert down to its simplest form:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
And what if your goal is to live forever? There are probably 100 things you could think of doing, but in his book Outlive, author, physician, and longevity expert Peter Attia narrows it down to focusing on just four core things:
Exercise. Nutrition. Sleep. Emotional health.
Now that we have your diet and health goals out of the way, let’s talk about your business goals.
Surely there are similar complications. Are you a large enterprise with 100,000 employees, or an aspiring startup? Do you run a multi-national technology firm or a service-based financial company? And what about all the acronyms, from KPIs and ROI to EBITA and NSAT?
It’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to write the perfect goal, but it doesn’t have to be that hard.
Let’s try and simplify the elements of a great goal in the same way these authors did:
Set aspirational goals. Not too many. Have measurable results. Focus on action.
Let’s break down those steps.
1. Set aspirational goals
Start with a goal you’d like to achieve in your organization or team; do your best to make it clear, concise, and aspirational so that others can easily articulate it and share your vision. Picture it as a slogan that would fit on a t-shirt.
A good example might be, “Build a world class company culture filled with rockstar employees.”
If you already have goals written, don't feel like you have to throw them out and start over. There are small tweaks you can make to move from your starting point to something more inspirational for your team. In other words, instead of just listing the goal itself, make sure it encapsulates WHY you want to achieve it, and WHO the result will benefit.
It’s the same as starting an exercise program. Before you buy that $5,000 aerodynamic triathlon bike and shoes with carbon fiber soles, start with what you have, even if it’s a dusty 10-speed in the garage.
These goals are generally known as your Objectives within Viva Goals, though you might choose to call them “big rocks” or something similar.
Pro tip: If you’re completely starting from scratch, check out our article that outlines the most common business goal categories, Profit, Product or Service, People, Promotion, and Progress (the 5Ps).
2. Not too many
For someone looking to improve their diet, trying to change a dozen unhealthy eating habits is (ahem) a recipe for disaster. In the words of Michael Pollan, simply eating “not too much” could have a great impact.
Similarly, one of the pitfalls in setting and achieving goals isn’t actually not doing enough, but rather, trying to do too much.
The key word here is focus. It’s been said, “If everything is important, then nothing is.” For that reason, setting just 3-5 goals per team is the optimal amount.
Limiting the number of goals set each quarter actually improves performance, allowing you to focus on the most important things to get done, and being able to lower the priority of everything else.
3. Have measurable results
With your aspirational goal set, think about how you will know if you’ve achieved it. What you’re looking for is 3-5 measurable results … numbers and metrics that will let everyone know if you’re on track to meet that goal.
If author Peter Attia’s goal was to “live to be 100,” then his measurable results might be exercising 4-5 times per week, eating a balanced diet of 2,000 calories, getting 7-8 hours of sleep per night, and meditating for 15 minutes, 5 times per week. These are all activities that can be specifically measured.
These metrics are generally known as your Key Results within Viva Goals, though you might choose to call them “metrics” or something similar.
Pro tip: Viva Goals allows you to set your key result type to match your goals, such as “increase from,” “stay above,” and “find a baseline.”
4. Focus on action
With your goals set and tracking metrics in place, the last thing to do is take action to make it happen. So if your health goal was exercising 5 times a week and eating 2,000 calories, your tactical plan each day might alternate between weightlifting, running, and biking, and your meal plan might spell out your lunch of salmon, brown rice, and broccoli.
Similarly, Viva Goals offers a category called Initiatives. These are the actions that you do in order to achieve the metrics you’ve set. So if your marketing goal is broader reach for your brand, and your metric is reaching 50,000 page views per month, then your action might be a new social media campaign and posting 1-2 times per day on various platforms.
Again, you can track these Initiatives within Viva Goals, where they are sometimes called Projects.
What’s next?
Now that you’ve reached the end of this post, I hope you’re not disappointed to discover that you didn’t magically obtain ripped abs and eternal life. What I hope you took away however, is that sometimes starting with just the core elements, sets you on the path to achieving your goals, no matter what they are.
As you build upon these lessons, you’ll start to establish a goal setting rhythm of business -- a continuous flow of collaboration, goal creation, check-ins, and closing -- that will make your aspirational goals lead to the actions you desire.