Leadership SMART Goals - Tips and Examples

Goal setting is at the center of a team's leadership, and it's also the way leaders provide their team with challenges, attention, and encouragement. That is, as a leader, you are responsible for inspiring your staff and enhancing your team's performance. You would also need to develop your own managerial and leadership skills, which would be the SMART goals for yourselves.

It means that you have to set SMART goals for both your team and for yourself as a leader.

You are well on the way to becoming a better leader or boss when your goals are Smart. However, goal-setting requires a process or a structure to make it efficient and results-driven.

Read our blog on: Goal Setting For Employees: 5 Useful Tips

While setting growth objectives, we often have no difficulty turning the tangible targets into SMART goals. "Reduce client wait time on the phone by 3 minutes by the end of Q3 "... "Increase profits by 20 percent within six months" and so on.

We often come across famous statements like "be a better communicator" or "improve my leadership skills." Mostly, they are general and broad in scope but a crucial part of business success.

But we fail to establish SMART goals for objectives addressing "soft skills" or organizational competencies. Why?

Setting a SMART goal to develop communication, leadership, and other soft skills are complicated because it is harder to quantify and evaluate them.

Although having SMART goals for competency-based domains can be more complicated than more quantitative work, it's not impossible.

Key Areas Of Focus In Leadership Smart Goals

• Communication skills
• Self-leadership skills
• Coaching and mentoring others
• Evaluating circumstances and making choices
• Logical thinking and conflict resolution
• Capability to operate with a team

Examples Of Leadership SMART Goals

SMART Goal: Improve communication within the team

Specific: Develop communication aptitudes that lead to 25% fewer inquiries during group gatherings.

Measurable: Reduction of inquiries during meetings by 25%.

Achievable: Attend weekend workshops on communication skills.

Relevant: Developing communications skills would enhance the message's clarity, thus growing the team's understanding and saving time lost by answering questions.

Timely: Improvement in communication at meetings by 25 percent in three months.

SMART Goal: Encourage and inspire team members

Specific: Motivate and encourage team members to increase efficiency and rebuild team morale by 50 percent, as indicated by team members' feedback.

Measurable: Improve employee productivity and employee satisfaction by 50% as measured.

Achievable: Provide the team with resources and training to support their projects, cultivate team collaboration, and provide meaningful and positive input with team members through weekly check-ins.

Relevant: Motivating team members will boost productivity and morale, increase the number of completed tasks, and decrease the time that team members are distracted.

Timely: Achieve a 50 percent increase in the time it takes to complete tasks and show job satisfaction results to team members in 6 months.

Tips Before Setting Leadership SMART Goals

1. Understand what you want to accomplish. Know whether your goal is to empower your team or boost communication? Do you want your team to smile more or achieve more? Do you want them to ask lesser questions and become quicker to complete projects?

2. Focus on what do you need to work on to achieve your goal. Do you need to offer effective feedback, employee rewards and recognition, or just smile more? What do you need to focus on if you want to boost communication? When it comes to email exchanges, are you missing expectations? Or is your non-verbal communication the real issue? Do you need to enhance your communication in terms of consistency or tone?

Also read: The Ultimate Guide To Employee Rewards and Recognition

3. Build up some measurable metrics of success. As mentioned above, for soft skills, this is challenging because they're hard to quantify. How do you realize if you have motivated your team? The trick to measuring soft skills is to go back to the initial objectives. For instance, you might use feedback and questionnaires from your team to assess whether productivity is up. To track and calculate the outcomes, decide on the data you will collect.

Conclusion

Having a look at your goals through the lens of consistency, choice, and commitment (C3) helps you build concrete goals that are not only achievable and results-driven but are embedded in the workplace culture and aligned with personal and organizational success of your team.

So, what kind of goal-setting methods do you use in your organization? Let me know in the comments below.

This article is written by Susmita Sarma, a digital marketer at Vantage Circle. She was involved with media relations before shifting her interest in research and creative writing. Apart from being a classical music buff, she keeps a keen interest in anchoring and cooking. For any related queries, contact editor@vantagecircle.com