Roles, Goals, and Tasks

Setting and tracking goals are a key factor in a person’s efficiency and effectiveness both at work and in their personal life.  Whether documented or implied, we all have goals; things we hope to achieve over time.  Although you may not have written them down, you probably have work goals about progressing in your career either by effectively completing your tasks or improving your skills.  At home you may want to get better at cooking, you may be working on finishing a home improvement project, or maybe you are saving up for a vacation to Disney Land.  Goals are what drive our motivation, and the better we are at documenting, tracking, and visualizing our goals, the more motivated and productive we will be.

When we talk about goals, there are three factors to consider: roles, goals, and tasks.  Goals align with the roles you are fulfilling, and tasks are the things you do to achieve your goals. For example, if you have kids, then being a parent is one of your roles. In that role, you may have the goal of teaching your child to ride a bike or helping them improve their grades in school.  You may not have written this down, but if you aspire to achieve something, it’s still a goal. As you can see, your roles define your goals, and your goals support your roles. (Not sure about you, but I’m feeling a little like Dr. Seuss right about now.) Roles and goals are interdependent…But wait! There’s more.

To accomplish your goals, you require tasks. Those tasks must clearly support your goals…and once again, your goals will shape specific tasks. For example, I’m a weightlifter (my role), and I want to increase my strength to bench press 50 pounds more than I can now (my goal). To achieve this goal, I will establish tasks to do over the next six months. I will lift weights four days a week (task #1), get at least eight hours of sleep every night (task #2), and improve my diet by eating no more than 2,000 calories per day (task #3). If I routinely accomplish my three tasks for the next six months, then there is a high likelihood that I will be able to bench press 50 more pounds in six months (my goal) as a weightlifter (role).

When writing a goal, it is helpful to break it down into sections.  First, define what you plan to achieve, then define the outcome, then clarify when the goal will be completed.  This creates a goal statement of “achieve…an outcome…when”. Some examples are provided in Table 1. In addition to writing a goal in this structure, a well-written goal will also be SMART: specific, motivating, attainable, relevant, and trackable.  You may have heard about SMART goals in the past, however, this definition of SMART is likely a bit different than what you may have seen.

A specific goal is written clearly with details that are objective and measurable.  A goal is motivating if you are inspired and interested in achieving the goal.  Not all goals are motivating on the surface, but the better we understand the purpose and impact of a goal, the more motivating it can be.  A goal is attainable when it can be reasonably achieved within the constraints and timeframe allotted.  If the goal is relevant to the needs of the individual, the team, the organization, or the client, then it is considered relevant. Finally, a goal is trackable if progress can be measured over time and an end-date is defined.  But we don’t live in an ideal world, and the truth is, not all goals are created equal.  Goals don’t always meet every criterion of SMART; and that’s ok! The SMART framework is a helpful tool to assess and improve how our goals are written.

There are also different types of goals with different outcomes, different levels of control, and different types of measures. There are three types of goals: outcome, performance, and process.

Let’s start by defining an outcome goal. The name itself is intuitive; the objective of an outcome goal is measured by achieving a result or end state. For example, winning a race, getting a promotion, or receiving a certification are all outcome goals.  Let’s consider the goal of achieving a promotion.  This goal is easy to measure; I either receive the promotion or I do not.  However, many external variables may affect this promotion. For instance, I have no control over when the position will come available nor how many other people will apply for the position. As with all outcome goals, we have low control over accomplishing them because outcome goals are typically dependent on other factors.

The second type of goal is a performance goal. A performance goal seeks to improve an attribute or skill. Improving my skill at using Excel, increasing my knowledge of Navy network systems, and improving the quality of production deliverables are all examples of performance goals. Performance goals encourage us to always seek to improve and never be satisfied with the status quo, but they are also more difficult to measure because they typically require an indirect measurement. Let’s consider the goal of improving the quality of production deliverables.  There is no single measure of quality to definitively say we provided quality or didn’t provide quality.  But we can identify indirect measures, such as the number of defects found after production, the amount of time spent on reworking issues, the mean time between failures, or others.  Some measures may be more subjective and based on opinion like a customer survey.  Some measures may also be easier to measure than other measures. Furthermore, a person typically has more control over performance goals compared to outcome goals because there are typically fewer external factors that impact the measure.    

The last type of goal is a process goal. A process goal is measured through the completion of a process or procedure. These types of goals provide the highest level of control and are tasks that help us achieve a performance or outcome goal. Let’s use the previous example of improving the quality of production deliverables by identifying three process goals that will contribute to successfully achieving the performance goal. One task goal might be to work with a more experienced person for 3 hours each week to learn quality techniques from them.  Another task goal could be to spend 15 minutes at the end of each day to clean and organize my workspace.  A third task goal could be to complete a personal quality check halfway through the development of every production deliverable. Completing process goals are the measurable tasks we do to achieve our performance and outcome goals.

References

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717.

Doran, G. T. (1981). There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives. Management Review, 70(11), 35-36.

Austin, J. T., & Vancouver, J. B. (1996). Goal constructs in psychology: Structure, process, and content. Psychological Bulletin, 120(3), 338-375.

Pulakos, E. D., & O'Leary, R. S. (2011). Why is performance management broken? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 4(2), 146-164.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.

Latham, G. P., & Locke, E. A. (1991). Self-regulation through goal setting. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 212-247.