January is the time of year when companies are eager and perhaps overly zealous about setting goals. While intentions and motivation are ripe during this season often goals go from ripe to rot by the time Spring rolls around. So how can you make goal setting a part of your company culture rather than an annual platitude? Discover how Palette Hotels Developments, a Texas-based Hospitality Management company operating over 40 hotels are taking a powerful approach at professional goal setting and crushing them. Here are some inside tips on how to make goal-setting a part of your company’s lifestyle and reap the rewards nearly immediately
Drives Strategic Thinking
Every forward-thinking company wants its team members to think on their toes and be empowered to make critical decisions. Making good decisions is nearly always an exercise of thorough critical thinking habits that boil down to solid planning and clean execution. Goal setting encourages critical thinking because it establishes a clear process of looking down the mouth of a decision beforehand and then proactively planning the best course of action. Take for example that your company is falling short on budget. If your Operations team sets a goal in advance to meet the budget, you’re calculating preemptively how to maneuver expenses and maximize revenue so that your goal is achieved. True, sometimes goals will be missed but the guarantee of coming much closer to meeting your goals is irrefutable than never endeavoring to meet them in the first place. Think about how profoundly simple that is.
Establishes Purpose Each Day
The process of setting goals for all helps connect qualitative efforts, the daily grind with quantitative results, the bounty of those efforts. It’s like solving a linear equation, once you plug in the variables it begins to make perfect sense and it even becomes fun. Goal setting, simply put, connects effort and result in a person’s mind. It declutters the hyper mind. It’s easy and often that employees fall into the hamster wheel work trap. This daily zombie-like sensation can hinder motivation and executive thinking capacities. When you set goals, you must STOP and think deeply and see the bigger picture, the strategy. After that’s established then you can scaffold in the tactical steps to realize the goal.
Establishes Desire and Need
The first thing you must ask when setting any goal is how much desire do I have to achieve this goal and why am I setting it in the first place? If those questions cannot be answered with certainty then you must go back to the drawing board. For any goals, big or small to be realized you must establish a clear and unwavering desire to see them through. Establish a clear picture and even a written description of what the outcome will look like and feel like. No one has time for a soliloquy but taking some time to write down powerful words and sentences about what crushing that goal will do for you and visualizing it is a recipe for successful goal setting.
Improves Time Management
The most valuable yet non-renewable commodity for all humans is time. How do we make the most of it? Setting monthly goals helps us home in on priorities. At Palette Hotels Developments- Hotel Management Company, we educate our leaders on the 80/20 Time Management Principle coined by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. We ask our leaders to list out all their tasks and then highlight the “vital few” that drive their largest and most lucrative gains. We do this every month when establishing our monthly goals. After several months the practice of recognizing those vital tasks becomes easier and results follow. Before you go to bed at night make it a practice to list your tasks for the next day so that your sub-conscientious mind has time to work on your behalf toward completing these vital tasks. In the morning, highlight your vital tasks, these are the ones that drive the biggest yields and tackle those first.
Fosters Transparency
At Palette Hotels Developments we utilize shared sheets to input, analyze and evaluate our goals over our 40 properties. This is an iterative process that starts with our General Managers and is reviewed by our Regional Managers and then goes to the inbox of our Chief Operating Officer. We do this every month. The goals are accessible for stakeholders to glean a deeper understanding of what teams are working towards. This fosters accountability as our entire Operations team is in the know of what actions are being taken and the progress and results are shared collectively.
Creates a collaborative framework for Performance Management
In the hospitality industry, we are privileged to support Owners, Employees, and our Guests. At times that balance is hard to strike, therefore, at Palette Hotels Developments, we explicitly create a goal with the best interest of each of our key stakeholders in mind. Our aim is to deliver optimal performance to all three parties. Therefore, we establish one clear goal in each category. We call these goals EGO (employees, guests, owners). A feature of using the shared sheet and the EGO format is that our Operations Team can collaborate and discover new methods and best practices from one another. If they see that a particular property is exceeding goals it’s effortless for them to tap into each other’s strategies, especially since we review all our goals as a group. This is also a key to collaboration and transparency. We evaluate our goals both individually and then as a group which provides us the time to hear and discover pitfalls or areas of opportunity. This process makes us keener and sharper operators because we have a pulse on the property level as well as the support level.
Celebrates Successes Continuously
The best part of the month for us at Palette Hotels Developments is when we can applaud and give those well-deserved accolades to our team members that crush their goals. It’s just an all-around feel-good moment listening to our General Managers and Directors stand up and recognize the hard-earned results of our properties and teams. The enduring part about this process is that we do it every month. At Palette Hotels Developments, we believe it is most effective to continually herald the successes of hitting our milestones. This is key to motivation. Displaying our goals in a semi-public forum helps us see and continuously discuss the actions that move towards alignment both vertically and horizontally. The adage, many hands make a job light is a truism especially when your company’s people are all moving in the same direction.
Drives Healthy Competition
We all need a push sometimes to get the ball moving in the right direction and for most of us when your boss pushes you to implement a new practice, we don’t have much choice other than to oblige. In the case of goal setting, your boss is probably onto something positive that could germinate into other areas of your life. Once you see how creating focus and action around goals has a positive result in your work life you may feel an impetus to bring the practice home into your personal life. Maybe you have a goal to save more money each month. By getting your kids or partner on board and writing out the benefits (maybe it’s a family vacation) your intentions on reaching that goal will galvanize that collective energy to achieve success.
Pools Energy and Talent into a progress-oriented state of mind.
Nobody enjoys feeling stuck in the mud. We have so much to do, and deadlines are always looming. By setting goals on a consistent basis, we get the opportunity to hit pause and really think deeply about what we want to achieve. The success comes when we make goal setting and incremental practice that we consistently commit to as a group. It will create a tidal positive emotional contagion in your workplace that fuels a progress-oriented mentality. This practice, when done consistently and succinctly drives motivation and morale because teams recognize that they are working together towards something, rather than aimlessly.
Set goals that bring people and teams together and delve into your employee’s individual and collective strengths. This practice of goal setting will help your company tenfold. You will construct the cultural bedrock to set and achieve betterment and progress. Remember it’s not the destination we are most proud of it’s the journey to get there.
Written by Asha Bhakta-Roziere, Founder of Thrive Leadership & Development
