Impress your supervisor by being super prepared for your goal setting discussion

With some nice drinks in our hands, we welcome the new year and commit to new year resolutions. We set our personal goals and pretty soon, we’ll have discussions at work about business related goals.

This episode will help you to not only be ready for the discussions with your supervisor, but also give you tools to reach the goals with better probability than the usual vague new years resolutions.

We’ll start the episode with discussing some reasons for setting goals, which include:

• Giving direction
• Providing measure for prioritization
• Helping to determines first step to get into action planning
• Ensuring alignment with your supervisor
• Avoiding drift in random directions
• Helping you to get back on track

As business achievement represents only a part of your life, it’s important to also have all your other personal goals in mind beyond the business goals. What are your goals in terms of:

• Spouse and family
• Spiritually
• Health
• Intellectual development
• Community support
• Friends
• Hobbies

In terms of the business goals, we break the process down into:

• Where are you now?
• What are your strengths?
• How satisfied are you now?
• Workload
• Passion for the projects
• Team environment
• Supervisor
• Development progress – trajectory
• How does your project list look like?
  • Stable or flexible
  • All set already for your year?
• For each project, how is your
  • Passion level
  • Skill level

• Where do you want to be in 5 years?
• How does it feel like?
• Picture how a day looks like in 5 years?
• Break this down into what needs to happen next year in order to achieve this 5 year goal
  • What skills (leadership, technical) do you need?
  • What knowledge (business, disease, processes, …) do you need?

• Now look at your current work list and see, how it supports these development goals.
  • What are your degrees of freedom?
    • Any other projects, you can take on to get experience on the job?
    • Any trainings?
    • Can you tweak the projects to help them reach your goals?
    • Is there something you should better delegate to achieve your goals?
    • Anything, that you should stop as it is not aligned?
• Now get into an action plan:
  • What habits will help you reach your goals? Here are two great recommendations to read:
    • The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
    • Atomic Habits by James Clear
  • Create a
    • 3 months plan,
    • 1 week plan,
    • and finally what can you do today?

There’s much more about goalsetting and we can’t cover all the topics in detail, but you’ll have a very good understanding after listening to this episode.