The Secret to Better Goals - Keep Asking Why
By Frederick Marx , Keylingo's CEO.
Recently we had a corporate goal-setting session with our operations team. As an intro to the exercise and sort of an icebreaker, we asked each team member to write down one personal goal they have for 2023. For background, we recently introduced a goal-setting methodology called “OKR”. This framework breaks goals down into Objectives and Key Results (OKR). It is a tool, like many others, designed to result in more effective goal setting and the achievement of what you set out to accomplish. The point of the icebreaker exercise was that our team would apply the #OKR method to their one personal goal. Finally, as the facilitator of this exercise, I asked the group to be willing to be vulnerable and write down a goal that would stretch and/or take them out of their comfort zone.
To add to the discomfort, I then asked for a volunteer that would be willing to share their goal with the team. The idea here would be to discuss the goal within the context of whether or not it met the standard of the OKR framework. What happened next was not expected and made an important impact on me and I believe the team as well.
The goal went something like this.
“My goal is to travel to another country to have intercultural experience, improve my English skills and self confidence.”
We first acknowledged our teammate for the willingness to share and I then asked the group to critique the goal. Does it meet the OKR standard or does it need work? We all agreed it needed work.
As the facilitator, I asked everyone, “What is the Objective?” Many said it was to travel to another country. Is it? Probing further, the key to improving this goal and getting down to the essence of what our teammate wanted to accomplish required a simple question. Why?
Why do you want to travel to another country? Because I want to have an intercultural experience. Why do you want to have an intercultural experience? Because interacting with people from another culture will help me understand them and their language. Why do you want to better understand people from another culture and learn their language? Because I love culture and language and I spend my working hours interacting with people from this other culture and language. If I travel to another country I will be immersed in the culture and language and that will improve my ability to interact. Finally, the real why was revealed. If I do these things my self-confidence will improve.
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What we discovered was that the real objective was not to travel to another country. On the contrary, the real objective was buried at the end of the goal - to improve self-confidence. That’s what our co-worker really wanted.
Armed with this information we helped our co-worker set a goal for the upcoming year. The improved goal looked something like this.
Objective: Improve self-confidence
Key results:
What we all learned from our goal-setting exercise is to keep asking why and that as a result, we may learn that our real objective is buried within what we thought was our goal, to begin with.
If goals are done right they should require us to dig deep and take us out of our comfort zones. Continuing to ask why can take us there regardless of whether we are setting personal or professional goals. Doing this right will lead to real growth. Even if we fall short of the goal we will learn more in the process, continue to ask why, and set even better goals the next time around.