3 Dangers From Unclear Goals

3 dangers from unclear goalsThis is not your ordinary career site. I help the corporate worker who toils away in the company cubicle make career transitions. You want to do your job well, following all the rules -- .The career transitions where I can help you center on three critical career areas: How to land a job, succeed in a job, and build employment security.Top 10 Posts on CategoriesSMART Goals are foundational for all clear and unambiguous goals. If constructed correctly â€" and if they represent your work and not something driven by corporate that doesn’t care about your work.In other words, even though goals may look SMART, they are not. When your business goals are unclear, your chances of effective work â€" and a decent performance review â€" go down.Yes, there are dangers.Unclear goals never allow you to get to “done.” There is always a “done, but…” still remaining. When you never get to completion, your danger is management thinking you never produce results for the team or the business. Sure, your management changed your work direction a hundred times during the course of the year, but when it comes to performance reviews, management gets steely eyed and looks what got done. And your stuff didn’t.Business results are the gold coins of employment security. Without business results, you can’t show your ability to use your job skills to help management meet the company goals. In this age, business isn’t charitable about employing you; businesses will lay you off in a cold-blooded minute and have no qualms about doing so. Now, you can’t necessarily stop a layoff by producing results (except one), but those business results will stand out to the next hiring manager. Unless you never got results.Unclear goals cost you money. They cost you the amount of a raise you get (if you get one at all) and the amount of bonus you get (if you get one at all). When a manager sits down to write a performance review, the goals come first. When you r manager looks at your goal, you either met it or you didn’t. And if you met the goal, you either just met it or you exceeded it.But unclear goals means your goal attainment score is now up to the manager instead of from reportable results. You can whine about how the goals weren’t updated, were left or how the business went in a different direction. But you also carry the fault here: you didn’t work with your manager to update the goals. Because of that, you abdicate your ability to have good influence on your performance review rating.It’s just money.The thing is, it takes a lot of effort to get clear goals. It takes more effort to make sure that your goals stay current, that activities and results are documented, and your manager understands what you did. None of that guarantees a perfect rating, but at least you put your stuff in the right defensible position and helped you focus your work for the entire year.What do you think? Are your goals up to date going into summe r? Do you have results you can show on the progress you’ve made on your goals?This is not your ordinary career site. I help the corporate worker who toils away in the company cubicle make career transitions. You want to do your job well, following all the rules â€" .The career transitions where I can help you center on three critical career areas: How to land a job, succeed in a job, and build employment security. policiesThe content on this website is my opinion and will probably not reflect the views of my various employers.Apple, the Apple logo, iPad, Apple Watch and iPhone are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. I’m a big fan.Copyright 2020 LLC, all rights reserved.