Career conversations begin with you. S1E2

The Career Suite is all about helping you drive your future forward. CEO Helen D. Smead emphasizes the importance of setting specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART) goals. These goals should be aligned with the organization's business plan and should be discussed during the onboarding process. It's important to have a roadmap that defines, measures, and recognizes success. If your organization doesn't have a performance management system that includes SMART goals, reach out to your HR business partner. Goal setting is crucial for personal, professional, and educational dreams. Start with bite-sized pieces and document your progress. Helen challenges everyone to set one specific goal, break it down, measure progress, and email it to her. Welcome to the Career Suite, where we focus on driving your future forward. I'm Helen D. Smead, CEO, wife, mother, and philanthropist. So join me for career conversations inside the suite. You'll be glad you did. Ready to drive your future forward? Then you're in the right place. Let's step inside the Career Suite, where career conversations begin with you. Wherever you are in your professional journey, internship, business venture, or reorg, it's essential to create a roadmap. A roadmap designed to achieve a goal, personal, professional, educational, or a unique blend of all of the above. Today, we're focused on goals that are specific, measurable, and broken down into bite-sized pieces. Goals that you can self-manage, because ultimately, you are responsible for your destiny. If you are the primary decision-maker for an organization, then you are uniquely positioned to build goals into your business plan. Everyone within your organization, regardless of title, compensation, or tenure, and yes, this does include volunteers, are all expected to contribute to the organization's success, typically focused on problem-solving, profitability, and growth. Today's question in the suite, what is your roadmap for goal-setting? Let's start with an acronym, SMART, an abbreviation of several words, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. In addition to setting SMART goals, you want formal and informal leaders to connect the dots between their performance and the company's business plan. You want them to be aligned and congruent. SMART goals are just as important in relationships as they are in business. Okay, take a moment, think about your onboarding process. If you're laughing at me, it's probably because you haven't designed or participated in a successful onboarding process. The onboarding process is your first opportunity to discuss and agree on three SMART goals. One that aligns with the organization, one that aligns with the department, such as finance, IT, marketing, or HR, and one that fuels the new hire's professional development. If there isn't a roadmap that defines, measures, and recognizes success, then it's time to reconnect with leadership and ask a very straightforward question. What goals do we want our team to achieve within the next six months and how will we measure success? If you are the CEO or decision maker and your organization doesn't have a performance management system that includes setting SMART goals, it's time to reconnect with your HR business partner. An HR business partner, whether full-time, fractional, or on contract, is necessary to help co-create a successful roadmap. We all need to inspect what we expect. This includes parents and partners. Regardless of title or compensation, it starts with creating a roadmap of SMART goals congruent with your business plan. Those of you in the suite today who are CEOs of your own career, your SMART goals are just as crucial for your personal, professional, and educational dreams. The best way to drive your future forward, to transition dreams from believing to achieving, is with goal setting. If this is all new to you, begin with bite-sized pieces. While driving a red Corvette from zero to 60 in under three seconds is amazing, slow and steady typically works better when we create a new human-centered activity. Okay, time for a brief story. My father died when I was 14. The next day, I went to school and set out to learn everything I could so I would own a home. I didn't know the first thing about how to do it, but I knew I had to do it. I've owned four homes and sold one without a real estate agent. I didn't have the perfect roadmap, but I had a goal. I broke it down into bite-sized pieces knowing that every decision I made needed to drive me one step closer to home ownership. Measuring a goal during its development can change as you gain real insight on how to achieve it. It's a process, one that takes more than three seconds. You want to document your progress, the outcomes, and any new information you've garnered. That's growth, the purpose behind the goal, whether in the C-suite, early on in your career, or in a partnership. Here's my challenge for everyone in the suite today. Set one specific goal for yourself. Break it down into bite-sized pieces and create the framework to measure your progress. Then document it and email it to me, ceo at thecareersuite.com. I'm Helen G. Sneed. Join me again in the career suite, and I promise to save you a seat.