What’s stopping you from making this year your best yet, professionally?
While we all have full calendars and inboxes, your career advancement depends on you setting aside time to figure out your goals. If you don’t define and plan for your goals, how can you expect to achieve them?
During our January New Supervisors Community of Practice session, “2025 Is Your Year: How to Goal Set for Success,” Dr. Gerome Q. Banks, PSHRA-SCP, EdD, MBA, Organization Design & Development Manager, US Office of Personnel Management and Owner-operator of Banks & Banks Consulting Company, spoke on how to ensure your 2025 goals are not only set, but met.
Below are a few key takeaways from that session, as well as the full recording with even more tips. Also, don’t forget to register for our next New Supervisors CoP on Feb. 24 at 4 p.m. ET, “Active Listening: What It Is & How to Do It.”
- Developing Goals Should Happen in 3 Phases: First, you should take inventory and gain an understanding of your current environment, then set a vision, and lastly, determine the path needed to achieve it.
- Know Your Motivation: Are you making goals that align with your mission and that have intrinsic motivation, or are you making them with external drivers (such as a reward or punishment that’s been brought forth)? Banks said that making goals where you believe in the value of the outcome and are seen as a steppingstone for growth are immensely more effective than ones with external drivers, which are more likely to thwart progress and be harmful.
- Model The Behavior You Want to See: Banks explained that by showing a good example of what goal setting should be to your employees, colleagues and boss, it not only keeps you accountable on your own goals but builds both trust and engagement.
- Document Your Progress: Keeping track of your goals doesn’t have to be fancy. Banks advised simply using the tools you have at your disposal, noting that he created a matrix in Excel to chart his progress. He also added that he kept a notebook with him with the same information, so his goals were always accessible and top of mind.
