Objectives

A clear, precise forecast of what you want to achieve at some point in the future.

Objectives are important because they act as an essential backcloth to behaviour itself. Behaviour in a vacuum may be very interesting, but that’s about all. Decisions about the effectiveness and appropriateness of different behaviours can be made only within the context of particular situations and specific objectives.

Despite this, resistance to the objective-setting message is high. Typical blockages to objective-setting include the following:

• People are often not clear about what an objective actually is. They get confused about the differences between activities and objectives, about short-term and long-term objectives, and about semantics.
  
  
• People often prefer the excitement of ‘playing things by ear’ or having a very vague, open-ended objective to the discipline of pin-pointing a precise objective.
  
  
• People often prefer to rationalise after the event and convince themselves that things went well and ‘according to plan’, rather than compare what was actually achieved against the objective.
  
  
• People often feel that pinpointing a precise objective wastes time that could be used more productively getting on with the job in hand.
  
  
• People have often had bad experiences with objective-setting. For example, they may have been encouraged to stick their necks out and set an objective, and then been clobbered for not achieving it. Alternatively, they may have found objective setting a dull ritual that didn’t make any difference to anything.
  
  
• People often feel safer if they play things close to their chests and don’t reveal their hand too early. Since they wouldn’t want to declare their real objective, even if they had one, they see little point in having one at all.
  
  
• People find that, by and large, they get by without bothering about objectives. They think they’ve been successful if they have kept busy – never mind if they were busy doing all the wrong things!

An objective is a clear, precise forecast of what you want to achieve some time in the future. The objective could forecast achievement in the immediate future (like 30 minutes, one hour, two hours etc) in the short term (like today, this week, this month), in the longer term (like this quarter, this half year, this year) or in the distant future (like two years, three years, four years, five years, a decade, a lifetime).

Irrespective of these differences in time, a respectable objective has certain known qualities as follows:

• Any objective has two parts to it:
  
  
  • A forecast of the end result
  • Indicators of success.
  
  
• Any objective should be in step with the circumstances of the situation as you know or understand them.
  
  
• Any objective should be realistic or, in other words, possible to achieve successfully within the forecast time span.
  
  
• Any objective should be challenging or, in other words, pitched at a level of achievement where you are going to have to strive to pull it off (and have deserved feelings of satisfaction if you succeed).

It is important to have clear, precise objectives when interacting. Here are some of the benefits:

• The objective helps you to be clear about what you have to do in a bid to get it to come true.
  
  
• The objective makes it easy to compare the actual outcome with your prediction. This means you can be quite certain about total success or relative success and failure and, therefore, be in a better position to learn from experience.
  
  
• The objective helps you to organise your behaviour. It means that you can spot irrelevancies and be better at controlling your behaviour so that it contributes to the achievement of your objective.
  
  
• The objective helps you to communicate to others what you want to achieve. Doing this helps them to decide whether they can subscribe to it or not.

Objective-setting is a skill that, like any other, develops with practice. Here is a step-by-step routine to follow when setting an objective for an interaction:

1. Clarify the overall aim (ie the longer-term result).
   
   
2. In the light of the overall aim, set an immediate result by answering the question, ‘What result do I want to achieve by the end of this interaction?’
   
   
3. Work out indicators of success by answering the question, ‘How shall I know that the result has been successfully achieved?’

Here is an example of an objective set this way.

OVERALL AIM

The customer has bought goods to the value of x by the year end.

RESULT

By the end of the meeting I shall have established rapport with the customer.

INDICATORS OF SUCCESS

The customer has asked at least six questions about me/my work. The customer has ‘opened up’ to me about a significant current problem.

The customer has relaxed sufficiently to volunteer at least a couple of personal details (about outside interests, family, etc).

We have booked a date, time and place for our next meeting.

The customer has specifically asked me to provide some additional data for our next meeting.

All achieved within an hour (longer than the customer originally scheduled, ie he was ‘happy’ to overrun).

Finally, here is a check-list to help you determine whether an objective is satisfactory:

1. Has the objective got a result together with some indicators of success?
   
   
2. Does the objective pinpoint a result, as opposed to merely describing an activity? (An activity is something you do. A result is what is achieved doing it.)
   
   
3. Is the objective achievable by the end of the interaction?
   
   
4. Are the indicators of success obviously linked with the result? (Sometimes people drift off and dream up indicators that don’t adequately tie in with the result.)
   
   
5. Are the indicators of success precise enough to enable the achievement to be assessed with considerable certainty?
   
   
6. Do the indicators of success cover:
   
   quantity
   quality
   reactions (behaviour)
   TIME?