Approaches for Goal Setting
Setting goals is necessary not only important in business, but life as well. Coming off with objective and futuristic assumptions are required in planning courses of actions, career choice, relations choices, and many other important aspects of social life. Every step of our life is carefully planned and carried out either by us, or our parents. In a corporate environment, goal setting and planning is the daily bread and butter of the managerial staff.
Suppose you have been elected president of your school treasury. If you want to integrate the activities of the treasury into the day to day activities of your school, what are the steps do you need to take? The first step is to plant the entire process on paper. Setting clear goals and devising precise and relevant alternative strategies is the key to planning such an operation.
The main functions of goals are to provide a benchmark to measured accomplishments against; and to provide a sense of direction to the company which helps the managers make better plans. Every action undertaken inside an organization is goal-oriented. In order to achieve the specified goals,managers tend to choose different styles of approaches in setting goals for their organizations. The common approaches to goal setting can be broadly divided into two types:
Traditional goal setting: this is the way a totalitarian organization works. In this method, the decisions and goals are set by the highest level of management in an organization and passed down to the lower levels, where they become sub-goals for each particular area within the organization. For example, in a manufacturing business, the vice president of production is informed by the top management about expected costs of production; whereas the vice president of marketing department gets asked for the projected sales report. The goals pertain to the specific objectives of a particular area, and are used as a standard to measure performance. The flow of goals is downwards and it is further divided into individual goals based on their responsibility and field of expertise.
In the formative years of industrial complexes after industrial revolution, most corporations are family-controlled or peer-controlled, with lower level employments hired from outside sources. Since they were not part of the initial vision of the organization, the manager kept them out of the loop and only passed down the relevant instructions needed to be followed. This method, although still widely popular among sentimentalists and authoritarian managers, the changing times and workers’ rights movements have brought forth the fact that despite its effectiveness, traditional goal setting has various disadvantages:
- Dividing a goal into sub-goals for each department and further compartmentalization of the objectives can be a cumbersome process. It also reduces transparency among the various departments and leads to inefficient and uncommunicative work space environment.
- Most decisions that are made by top management in this way are ambiguous- leaving it to be subject to individual biases and interpretations. This can defeat the purpose of setting the goal. The manager who makes the decisions at the executive levels is often unaware of the situation in his subordinate levels. Megalomania and egotism are rampant in the traditional method, which can cause mass confusions and disastrous consequences.
- The downward flow and constant modifications in various levels of management causes loss of clarity and inability to understand a particular goal and properly carry out the steps to achieve it. When a goal is passed down the corporate ladder, it is modified and amended by each consecutive level, which ultimately results in a different final goal than originally set. This prevents proper understanding of the goals and their fulfillment.
One of the features of traditional goal setting is the formation of a means-end chain, which an interconnected network of goals which requires reaching all goals in one level in order to reach the goals in the next 