Sample of a Professional S.M.A.R.T. Overall Goal: I want to run my own consulting business. Goal: Within one month, I will land my first client after organizing a sensible plan for sending out pitches. Specific: Using my network, I will seek out companies in need of my consulting services.; Measurable: I will pitch my first three clients within two weeks, aiming to pitch. Personal Productivity Help Your Team Deliver Results With This Goal-Setting Approach Create a process where goals are frequently discussed, ambitious, specific, and transparent. Measurable goals should include a deadline so that there is an understanding of when and how things need to progress. Without a target date, the goal may suffer from poor time management and never come to fruition. The time frame will also create a sense of urgency. It functions as a healthy tension that will springboard you and your team to.

“The minute you get away from fundamentals, whether it’s proper technique, work ethic, or mental preparation, the bottom can fall out of your game, your school work, your job, whatever you’re doing.” – Michael Jordan

The greatest professional athletes in history focused on the fundamentals of their sport to achieve at the highest level. That includes the likes of Michael Jordan in basketball or Tom Brady in football.

The same can be said for achieving business success. If you’re ready to break through to your next level of success in your business this year, you have to get laser-focused on what may seem elementary but is essential.

And one of the most fundamental exercises any financial advisor can leverage is goal-setting. It’s simple, yet powerful. Goal-setting can empower you and help spark your energy and passion.

In this article, you’ll learn a proven process for setting goals that inspire you to take action and achieve greater results faster. But more than that, you’ll learn how to set goals for the right reasons. Goals are more than just something to reach for — they help you grow your business to where you want to take it in the future.

Why Should You Set Goals?

Sometimes, busy financial advisors will say, “I’d love to set some goals, but I just don’t have time.” I challenge this way of thinking with a quote from the great college basketball coach John Wooden: “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

Now is your time!

Another benefit to setting goals is that you’ll see more opportunities more often that can lead to achieving the outcomes you most desire.

You have millions of different bits of information coming at you constantly in every moment of your life. But most of this information is only picked up by your subconscious and not fully lifted to your conscious awareness.

Let your brain know what’s important and what isn’t. As soon as you consciously make yourself aware of the goals you want to achieve, your brain will allow information related to those goals to pass through to your conscious awareness.

Where Do I Start?

When you’re setting goals, follow the direction of Stephen R. Covey from his best-selling book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” In it, he says, “Start with the end in mind.”

Why is this important? It’s easier to put markers along a path if you know the destination.

If you start your goal-setting today by writing out a 20-year vision, does that mean you’re committed to it for the next 20 years? Absolutely not. Things will change, and so will your plan. But you’ll find that starting with the vision will make the process of goal-setting easier.

Let’s look at it another way. When you’re trying to put together a complex puzzle with hundreds of pieces, is it easier to guess what the puzzle should look like as you piece it together or to look at the picture on the box as a model and begin putting pieces in place based on that picture?

Envisioning Your Goal

If you need help creating your vision for the future, consider your answers to some of these questions:

• What does your team look like? How many advisors?
• What are your total assets under management?
• How many clients do you have?
• How often do you meet with your clients?
• How are you growing your business?
• Where and how are you spending your time?
• Are you working on the business or in the business?
• How many weeks of vacation will you have?
• How much time will you spend with your family?
• What experiences will you create for yourself, your family, your team and your clients?
• What will your health and physical fitness be like?
• What will your personal and professional relationships be like?
• Will you be volunteering with an organization?
• What other causes will you support in your free time?

There’s no right answer to these questions — this is your vision. Be creative and think big. Human potential is virtually limitless; set your goals from this state of mind.

The Goal State of Mind

Set your goals in a high-energy, passionate state of being. Don’t set goals if you’re tired, upset or disappointed.

Tips For Goal Setting

If you’re not in the right state of mind, take steps to get there. Get active. Lift weights or go for a jog. Even running for five minutes will get your blood flowing and increase your energy levels. Watch a motivational clip on YouTube or listen to a song that always fires you up. Do what you need to do to get yourself excited for the future.

Once you’re in this high-energy state and you’ve painted a clear picture of your vision for the future, it’s time to write out your goals.

Setting Your Goals

Now that you understand the importance of having goals and how to think toward the future, you’re ready to set goals.

I recommend organizing your goals into one-, three-, five-, and 10-year goals. Start with the longer-term goals and work backward.

Consider the structure of your team and organization. How many advisors will be on your team in 10 years? Five years? How many non-advisor stakeholders? How many clients will you serve? What kinds of clients? In 10 years, will you have an account minimum of $5 million while the Associate Wealth Advisors on your team have lower minimums? Will you have any additional offices? How many days out of the office will you allow yourself to take? How will you spend your time?

Don’t worry about how you will achieve the long-term goals yet. But as you think about your one-year goals, begin choosing the specific action steps that will help you reach them.

You can have goals in multiple areas of your life. Consider also setting them in the areas like your health, relationships, spirituality and personal economic success.

What to Keep in Mind

As you set your goals, why not go big? Even if you don’t know what’s possible or realistic, don’t play it safe when it comes to your future.

Goals are important because they give you direction and something to work toward. The power of having goals is not in achieving them but in who you become in the process of working toward them.

Drives For Results Goals

This is one of the reasons I don’t believe in setting realistic or safe goals. By setting higher goals, you’re setting higher standards for yourself. You’ll be forced to become the kind of person who can achieve those bigger and better goals. And, as you become that greater version of yourself, you’ll be able to serve more value to more people.

I believe that the people who set the biggest, seemingly far-fetched goals in life are the ones who positively serve the greatest value to the greatest number of people in this world.

With years of experience as a financial advisor, J.J. Peller now helps advisors grow their firms in his role as a business coach at Carson Coaching.

The definition of “OKRs” is “Objectives and Key Results.” It is a collaborative goal-setting tool used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. OKRs are how you track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement around measurable goals.

Whether talking about office operations, software engineering, nonprofits or more, OKRs work the same for setting goals throughout many company levels. They can also work for personal goals and can even be used by individuals to get things done at places where senior leadership doesn’t use them.

An Objective is simply what is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action-oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution.

Key Results benchmark and monitor how we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt. At the end of the designated period, typically a quarter, we do a regular check and grade the key results as fulfilled or not.

Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved.

Who created OKRs?

OKRs were created by Andy Grove at Intel and taught to John Doerr by him. Since then, many companies have adopted them, including Allbirds, Apartment Therapy, Netflix, and inspiring nonprofits like Code for America.

Early on in “Measure What Matters”, Doerr writes about “MBOs,” or “Management by Objectives.” MBOs were the brainchild of Peter Drucker and provided Andy Grove a basis for his eventual theory of OKRs. In fact, Grove’s name for them originally was “iMBOs,” for Intel Management by Objectives. However, despite the original reverential name, Grove created some key differences between the two which he passed along to Doerr.

Grove rarely mentioned objectives without tying them to “key results,” a term he seems to have coined himself. Other key differences between MBOs and OKRs are that the latter are quarterly, not annual, and they are divorced from compensation.

Doerr was the one who crafted the name “OKRs,” which he assembled from Grove’s lexicon.

The most famous story about OKRs is that of Doerr introducing the philosophy to Google’s founders in 1999. Gathered around a ping-pong table which doubled as a boardroom table, Doerr presented a PowerPoint to the young founding team, which included Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Marissa Mayer, Susan Wojcicki, and Salar Kamangar.

Doerr’s Objective and Key Results for the PowerPoint presentation were this:

Google then set its company strategy with this management framework and the rest is history.

OKR examples

But what are some other high-level examples?

The city of Syracuse, New York recently set this objective: to “achieve fiscal sustainability.” Fiscal sustainability is a great goal for any government, local or otherwise, but it has to be measurable. That’s why Syracuse is using Objectives and Key Results.

When written out, along with their Key Results, Syracuse’s OKR looks like this:

As discussed earlier, OKRs can work for all industries and even personal goals.

Personal goal OKR

Doerr was asked about his personal OKR in an interview on Recode Decode. He answered, “You know, my daughters have both left home, but I had read and I believe that having family dinners together was a good thing. So, I set an OKR, shared it with my team to be home for dinner by 6:00 p.m. 20 nights a month and be present, turning off the phone. I put a switch on the router. We shut down the internet to the whole house.”

“It’s not only the quantity but the quality,” he added.

This personal goal would be written out like this:

And while it is a “personal” OKR, Doerr was transparent from the onset. Not only did he share it with his colleagues and family, but he also shared it in an interview.

Industry OKRs

For other examples of industry-specific company OKRs, click here.

Are there different kinds of OKRs?

OKRs can be two things, committed or aspirational.

Committed ones are like their name suggests—commitments. When graded at the end of a cycle, a committed OKR is expected to have a passing grade.

Aspirational ones, on-the-other-hand, are sometimes called stretch goals or “moonshots.” The pathway to an aspirational OKR is expected to be forged since no one else has gotten there before. They also may be long-term and live beyond an OKR cycle or even be transferred between team members to stretch employee engagement.

To learn more about the committed and aspirational versions of Objectives and Key Results, click here.

What OKR tools are available?

If you’re looking for some OKR tools to help you set ambitious goals, look at these OKR-tracking tools for personal goals and smaller teams and these tools for larger enterprises.

How do you grade OKRs?

The Andy Grove method of grading OKRs is a simple “yes” or “no” approach. However, there are ways to grade them, too—namely “the Google method.”

To learn more, click here.

Are OKRs tied to compensation?

Unlike other performance management frameworks, like balanced scorecard (BSC), OKRs are divorced from compensation like salary and bonuses.

To learn why, click here.

Where can I get more information?

This system is deceptively simple, but when used properly, good OKRs will equip your organization with superpowers to create things like high output management in all your business goals. Learn more by reading “Measure What Matters” or exploring more FAQs, Resources, and Stories right here on WhatMatters.com.

Or, if you’re looking for an OKR coach, check this out.

If you’re interested in starting our OKRs 101 course, click here.

Ryan Panchadsaram (@rypan) is the co-founder of WhatMatters.com and is the technical advisor to John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins.

Sam Prince (samprince.com) is a journalist, storyteller, and the digital strategist of WhatMatters.com.