Have you ever felt like you are sleepwalking, and you have
no idea where you want to go? What do you want? Maybe you have a rough idea of
what you want but you don’t know how to get what you want. That’s where the concept
of goal setting comes into picture.
Setting a goal means taking a first step towards planning your
future. To put in the words of Pablo Picasso
“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a
plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously
act. There is no other route to success.”
Goals are “the object or aim of an action, for example, to
attain a specific standard of proficiency, usually within a specified time
limit.” Latham & Locke (2002) They are the level of competence that we wish
to achieve and create a useful lens through which we assess our current
performance.
There exists abundance of research on goal setting especially in
the organizational context. Primarily,
this search began with the objective of determining how the level of intended accomplishment
(the goal) is related to the actual level of achievement (the performance) in
an organizational setting.
Research has shown that goal setting increases employee
motivation and organizational commitment. Moreover, goals affect the intensity
of our actions and our emotions – the more difficult and valued a goal is, the
more intense our efforts will be in order to attain it, and the more success we
experience achievement (Latham & Locke, 2006).
Organizations are complex systems which consists all the
stakeholders located at different parts. These locations could be geographical,
hierarchical etc. All these parts are intertwined with each other. The efforts of
all these parts together create an organizational output- Products, services
etc. which then results into a financial performance of an organization in terms
of profit.
Anand Group, which is an Indian conglomerate, uses
the large system intervention for its annual goal setting. As I spoke to a manager
working in this organization, he said that “the organization advocates creating
internal buy in from all the stakeholders for setting the business strategy.” This
organization has moved away from the top down approach and has adopted a more
collaborative bottom up approach of large-scale integrated process (LSIP) which makes them realize the power of collective intelligence.
LSIP is an OD intervention methodology for organizing sustainable change which has an active involvement of stakeholders throughout
the whole system. It is a unique methodology for simultaneously involving large
groups to have an impactful conversation leading to transformational change. LSI
embraces the “whole system thinking” which is a revolutionary technology for
harnessing perspectives of cross sections of multiple stakeholders – Sr.
Management team, customers, suppliers, employees etc. For Anand Group it is a 2
day event where the stakeholders from all the manufacturing plants located in
different parts of the country come together. In this event the expectations
from all the stakeholders as well as inputs on current business scenario are
shared. The idea thus here is not only to share and create buy in but they also
aim to work together on the organizational goals and come with tangible road-maps, metrics, projects which would guide them to work effectively to achieve
their goals.
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