Agreeing individual objectives
Featured in the Setting Objectives and Seeing Them Through training manual
By Beverley Williams
Category: Performance Management
Credit price: 4 download credits (Single user)
Objectives that are Agreed are far more likely to be SMART and far more likely to succeed than those that are imposed. Getting people involved right from the start gains commitment, which leads to all parties involved working wholeheartedly towards common targets. For the majority of people, the agreement of objectives will need to take place within parameters that have been defined at corporate level. This restriction does not detract from the benefits of agreeing objectives at the appropriate level and is easily accepted. For example, people who work as customer service assistants in banks would not expect to be involved in setting objectives relating to interest rates but would certainly have valuable ideas regarding queuing times when corporate objectives are seeking to improve customer service. For most people, objectives will be Agreed during a one-to-one interview. It is perfectly appropriate to agree broad objectives during an initial session and then to ‘SMARTen up’ the objectives at a later session when each party has checked facts, carried out some research, and so on.
You begin by emphasising the importance of agreeing rather than imposing objectives before asking participants to work in groups to think about all the reasons why agreement is so important. Write the participants’ responses on the flipchart. Then, you introduce and explain the stages of the objective-setting interview before encouraging participants to think about potential problems. Emphasise that it is quite appropriate and may produce better results if the objective-setting process takes place over more than one session. Finally, you run one or more observed role-plays and feedback sessions. You close the training activity by covering the key learning points.
Who is it for: This training resource is intended for use by trainers to help participants to examine the benefits of gaining commitment to the objectives and focuses on how objectives are agreed during a one-to-one interview.
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 4 |
| Max Group Size: | 10 |
| Typical Duration: | 02:55:00 |
| No of Pages: | 25 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Purpose: This training resource is intended for use by trainers with participants who are involved in the objective-setting process and who are familiar with SMART. While this is of particular importance to line managers, all other members of staff will be able to contribute more fully to the objective-setting process if they have worked through this training activity. Ideally, participants should already have covered, ‘Objectives: What they are and why they exist’ and ‘Introducing the SMART objective’.
Download the training activity, Agreeing individual objectives as featured in the Fenman training manual; Setting Objectives and Seeing Them Through