GOAL VS TASK - WHICH IS MORE CRITICAL?

For two years, Google has conducted a study with more than 180 teams/companies/organizations to eventually come to a conclusion that those who have clear and specific goals or objectives and good plans for each of its member will work more effectively.

13 in each 100 failed startups broke down because of “lack of focusing” (source: Forbes).

According to a research by Thomas C. Corley (author of Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals), 80% of people who plan carefully for their work and life is rich person, meanwhile, the rest 20% is the poor.

These numbers have pointed out the reason why some persons, teams or organizations are doing better than the others. It is good plans, detailed and realistic goals which help them in achieving their ambitions. This rule must be known by many of us, but as a matter of fact, there are still some people confused when working with tasks, goal, objective, etc.

1. Goal vs. task list?

The confusion between goal and task list (a.k.a to-do-list) happens even with some high position staff. When talking to a friend of mine who is working as a startup investor about the OKR (Objectives and Key results - you can read more about it here) method, at first, she thought that the two concepts were the same and could not distinguish a goal from a task list. A ‘wow’ appeared after I’ve drawn out the differences between these two. If you and your team are still unclear, let me clarify them out for you by the below inforgraphic:

2. Never underestimate the critical role of goal in your business

Yes. Let’s imagine what might happen when shooting an arrow without any target, that’s how you run your business without any defined and specific goal. Well, that arrow is gonna hit no-where, it’s like your day just spinning around while you do quite a lot of things but no result comes.

And how about the last time you gave your peers/employees a list full of task for their daily, weekly or monthly work, what was its outcome, do:

• Your employees meet/miss their deadline?

• Their performances hit your expectation?

If you’re unable to answer these question, it must because you have no particular target to shoot. When mention particular, I mean you need a quantitative/quantitative result and a time-bound which are able to track.

The three main consequences that might happen when no goal is set within your team, organization are:

A. Your business may head in the wrong direction

The first and most critical outcome is you and your team might move in the wrong direction which is not your original vision and mission.

The chance of new, short-term tasks and activities bumping up along with your current process is big when you have no goal-setting beforewards. And this leads to the fact that you cannot control the progress, your concentration may be disturbed and your key result will not be achieved anymore.

B. Cloudiness appears inside your system

The transparency is needed if you want your team/business/organization to engage with each other. The lack of transparency is the main factor splitting your team apart. In particular, the higher level your team’s position is, the more damage this does to you. Ambiguous to-do lists which are not aligned with each other could lead your teammates, your colleagues to work missing or work duplicate if your targets have not been written out.

C. The work of you/your team/your organization cannot be track

One aspect that makes goal or objective important is that it is measurable and you can easily track it. And tracking progress is critical to manager executives, department head, team lead, etc. If one cannot follow up their or their team’s activities, he/she is definitely unable to solve problems once issue rising up. They cannot figure out the vulnerability inside the system. They have to keep asking themselves: Does the issue come from the internal or some other objective reasons? How can we fix it and enhance our team? but they can never reach to the answers.

HR issue also arises along with your poor feedbacks on your employees when there is no performance tracking. In an article that we have published earlier - 5 Best ways to Boost your Employee Productivity - rewards and recognitions are your employees’ weakness. How could you show your appreciation to your staff if you don’t have a goal to check where they are and how they are at the moment. There are two cases could happen when you can properly comment on staff’s work:

• They feel bad when his or her works are underestimated and the productivities drop.

• They assume that they have worked enough, and will not ignore the current task if you overestimated them.

3. How to set and work with goals effectively?

To help you and your team define a suitable goal, we give you three main element that a goal should be:

• It must be measurable, in another work, it is easy to track (the goal is quantitative or qualitative, and is set within a timeframe).

• The goal must be realistic (ambition is good but don’t set your target to high, this could make you tired when cannot commit it, this will affect the other goals).

• Each goal needs 4-5 key results and from these key results, you can draw out your own task list.

For example: Your goal is Find out leads for marketing strategy, nevertheless, how many leads do you need? Does it need to be quality? What is its deadline? Thanks to those questions, we can figure out a more detailed goal/objective: Find out 100 quality lead before 2017, September, 30th, and there it goes, you are now able to list out all the key results you and your team need to complete (click here to access our objectives and key results setting guideline).

Setting the goal is step one, the next step is that you need to track your goal carefully. This tracking thing will assist you, your employees/peers in committing with this goal. You will easily see where is your progress now, it is now on track or at risk, if it is at risk then where the problem is, and why it happens.

Normally, companies will use spreadsheet to track their objectives and key results after setting themselves some appropriate goals. Other big companies/cooperation such as Alphabet (the father company of Google), Intel, etc. designed their own tools to solve this problem. Some others, however, are using applications dedicated to objectives and goals management, our product - Goalify is one of them.

Goalify hopes that this article will support you on writing your own goals/objectives which will enhance your performance as well as your system’s workflow.
Writer: Huyen Pham, Editor: Justin Bui Tran