Actions and goals

A Guide to Setting Targets

It’s common to see actions, goals or performance targets written in such a way that it is impossible to tell if they have been met or not, or to what degree.

Here’s an example of a poorly written goal: ‘Improve member engagement’. There’s no way of measuring success in this statement. Improve from what to what? Improve what aspect of engagement? What is the current baseline? and so on.

You can address this by defining what success would look like and including that in your action, goal or performance target.

For example, if you are looking to increase membership, what numbers do you aspire to and is there a type of membership you’d like to concentrate on?

Your action or target could then read: ‘Increase female membership from X (current number) to Y (+10%) by the end of the 2024 calendar year’.

This is an example of a SMART goal. 

What is a SMART goal?

SMART stands for

S–pecific

M–easureable

A–chievable

R–elevant

T–ime-based

Looking at the example above, the action is specific (female members), measurable (the difference between X and Y), achievable (10% is not so big a difference as to be impossible), relevant (you want to improve gender balance at your club) and time-based (defined as by the end of the calendar year).

Not only can you now pinpoint exactly what success looks like, you can measure and report on how well you did with this action – e.g. you may have increased by 5% so the target was 50% met, or you may have achieved a 15% increase, meaning that the target was exceeded by 50%.

Stretch goals

When setting actions, goals or performance targets, consider setting multiple levels. 

For example, a reasonable sponsorship goal might be a 25% increase over a period of time. 

A stretch goal would be intentionally set way higher, as a way to inspire growth and motivate the team. In the example it might be to double sponsorship revenue in the same period of time. 

When setting stretch goals, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Setting too much of a stretch can be disheartening for those tasked with achieving it. There’s no point in setting a goal that is plainly impossible even under the best of circumstances.
• Consider how your goals are publicised. Your team might be working to the stretch goal but the public goal might be much more conservative. That way, expectations are managed and members won’t think you’ve failed if you don’t hit your stretch target.
• Setting a second challenging but not unrealistic stretch goal will generally result in the conservative goal being exceeded, even if you don’t achieve the stretch version.

Accountability

All goals, actions or targets should be assigned to someone who is responsible for driving their success. That doesn’t mean they have to do all the work themselves, but it does mean that they will lead efforts to reach the goal.

If no one is accountable, then it is human nature to let other, perhaps more attractive or pressing, goals take precedence – or to do nothing.

Setting people against goals also can highlight an imbalance in tasks when one person ends up with all the difficult jobs and others with none. Overloading one person, no matter how capable, does not set either them, or the goal, up for success.

Traffic light reporting

Now that you have a clear set of actions, goals or performance targets, consider how you are going to report them. A traffic light system is an easy way for the management committee to see what is going well, what needs a bit of attention and what is in need of more resources or a rethink.

In the traffic light reporting model, green would represent a goal that was met or exceeded (complete), orange would represent a goal that was only partly achieved (or it might be started but not yet complete) and red might represent a goal that was not met at all (or not yet started).

In these cases, the color of the traffic light serves to highlight areas of concern that need further investigation and in all cases need to be backed up by some contextual notes.

Here’s an example of a traffic light report:

Summary

Always strive to be clear when setting a goal or performance target. Test each goal against the SMART framework, make sure someone ‘owns’ it and consider setting a stretch version to inject a bit of fizz into the process. 

You might not meet each goal but using traffic light notes means that at least you’ll have a better chance of understanding the factors affecting performance.