Setting Goals and Standards

The Rationale
Organizations are concerned with achieving corporate goals through management by objectives (MBO). Employees are concerned with making a meaningful contribution, having a say in decisions affecting their work, being committed to more than a job and a paycheck¼ in short, improving the quality of work life (QWL). The process that addresses both set of concerns is one that involves the joint setting of goals and standards. In most organizations, this is done at the upper levels of management. But all too often employees and their supervisors have not been integrated into the process. This module teaches goal setting as a tool of organizational and personal revitalization to obtain commitment and growth at all levels.

Learning Objectives for the Workshop
Participants who attend this workshop will be able to:

• State advantages and pitfalls in involving employees in goal setting
  
• Identify their own attitudes on 10 aspects of goal setting
  
• Relate the need for challenge and security to goal setting
  
• Define and illustrate by examples: objectives, goals, standards, quotas
  
• Distinguish among wishes, activities, and goals
  
• Assess the strength of each of 10 barriers that cause resistance
  
• Edit MBO statements to meet 10 criteria of effective goal setting
  
• Define the 2 roles of management: entrepreneur and steward

Performance Criteria in the Workplace
Participants who attend this workshop will be able to:

• Recognize poorly defined goals and rework them when possible
  
• Involve their work group in the setting of goals affecting their work
  
• Develop standards to give meaning (visibility, reward) to routine jobs
  
• Analyze 2 aspects for their job: entrepreneurial and stewardship
  
• Deal effectively with resistance to goal setting from employees
  
• Identify the activities and resources needed to achieve a goal
  
• Negotiate the value of different goals and thus establish priorities
  
• Prepare MBO documents and develop other employees to do so also