Setting Professional Goals

Remember, company goals are just as important as your own. Always display respect for your employer’s goals, even if you privately disagree with their choices. You will find it much easier to structure and achieve your personal goals if they integrate with those of your employer—there is a natural match.

Unless they directly conflict with corporate objectives, discuss your goals with supervisors and manag-ers. For example, if you want to set career goals to improve your performance by 20 percent and become a candidate for team leader in the coming year, tell management. You probably will not receive any guarantees of promotion, but you may learn about opportunities for new team leaders that management foresees. Con-versely, if your primary career goal is to find a new, more promising job elsewhere, rethink this suggestion and disregard it.

Learn all you can about your employer’s goals and strategies. Understanding the focus, intent and back-ground of your company’s goals helps you set your objectives, using this valuable management advice and information. For instance, a corporate goal of dominating the market and strengthening the brand globally, may not help you use career tools to attain a C-level position, but may give you ideas that match your em-ployer’s thinking, while also accelerating your job progression.

Think, think, think. Spend as much quiet, quality time as you need with yourself to design goals that target what you want. Before management, co-worker or family agreement on your goals, you must agree on your objectives with the "face in the mirror." Too many em-ployees view their jobs as “trading hours for money,” without thinking about what they really want. Learn what you really want from your career. You can only do this by spending quiet time alone to organize your thoughts and professional “cravings.”

Re-visit, measure and modify your goals regularly. As always, setting no goals, stuffing them in a drawer or lacking a willingness to modify your objectives is much worse than setting a hundred bad goals. Even poor goals have elements of value, allowing you to modify, improve, change, and enhance them. For example, you may receive additional management advice or information that leads you to scale back or ramp up your original goals. Instead of starting over, creating new goals, you can simply modify your original road map to make detours that still get you to your destination.

Employee goals are valuable career tools that will help you improve your job situation—sometimes, dramati-cally. Using honest management advice, quality alone time and keeping your "eyes on the prize" to improve your performance and position always works.

Borrowed from Kelly Services "did you know" newsletter