Goal Setting
Goals are used to help encourage behaviors that drive outcomes towards which individuals, teams, and organizations strive to increase organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Goals help to do the following: direct attention to what is most important, regulate effort to help motivate to produce and act, increase persistence which in turn produces more effort and a don’t give up attitude, helps to foster strategies and action programs in order to find ways to achieve those goals. These four factors are called mediators, and all provide additional support in the goal reaching process. The main premise of this model is to serve as a motivator by allowing people to compare historical performance with the present period. Goals can help improve performance because they help to set clear expectations about what is needed to achieve the desired outcome.
MBO or Management by Objectives is a management system that uses goal difficulty and goal clarity in order to motivate employees to perform a task or sets of tasks. The difficulty level involves the task being challenging enough to increase the baseline effort levels but at the same time should not be impossible to accomplish. Clarity is the extent to which the employee is fully aware of what the task is and everything that is involved in reaching it. The ability of a person to carry out a task, their commitment to meeting the challenge, the quantity and quality of feedback that the employee gets, and the complexity of the actual task will ultimately determine how well the employee will perform. These factors are called moderators and along with the presence of mediators and challenging goals are the catalysts of high performance.
Personally, I prefer to use the MBO system to motivate my sales reps to achieve their objectives. Setting challenging but reachable quotas and giving them the flexibility to operate as they need to in order to reach their objective is essential in our corporate culture. Anything more regimented tends to lead to micromanagement and ends up stifling motivation and effort more then anything else.
MBO or Management by Objectives is a management system that uses goal difficulty and goal clarity in order to motivate employees to perform a task or sets of tasks. The difficulty level involves the task being challenging enough to increase the baseline effort levels but at the same time should not be impossible to accomplish. Clarity is the extent to which the employee is fully aware of what the task is and everything that is involved in reaching it. The ability of a person to carry out a task, their commitment to meeting the challenge, the quantity and quality of feedback that the employee gets, and the complexity of the actual task will ultimately determine how well the employee will perform. These factors are called moderators and along with the presence of mediators and challenging goals are the catalysts of high performance.
Personally, I prefer to use the MBO system to motivate my sales reps to achieve their objectives. Setting challenging but reachable quotas and giving them the flexibility to operate as they need to in order to reach their objective is essential in our corporate culture. Anything more regimented tends to lead to micromanagement and ends up stifling motivation and effort more then anything else.
