A dear friend of mine sent me a book recently simply titled Success: The Glenn Bland Method…How To Set Goals and Make Plans That Actually Work!

The book was written in the 1970s and quite frankly carried and implied genre that I don’t spend much time reading (but should probably spend more time).

On page 42, I was stopped when Glenn Bland wrote this about goal setting, “only 3 percent of all people have goals and plans and write them down.  Ten percent more have goals and plans, but keep them in their heads.  The rest - 87 percent - drift through life without definite goals or plans.”

Then Bland follows that shock statistic with this, “the 3 percent who have goals and plans that are written down accomplish from fifty to one hundred times more during their lives than the 10 percent who have goals and plans and merely keep them in their heads.”

Fifty to 100 times more during their lives than the 10 percent.

Brian Moran wrote a great book some years ago, The 12 Week Year.  It is a must-read, and a must-implement.

Here is the jist…

Renew and update your goals every 12 weeks instead of every 12 months.  Only choose 3 goals…only 3.  Any more than 3 and you are at risk of not accomplishing anything.  Too many goals is similar to having no goals at all.

Within each goal, write out as many tactics you will need to accomplish the specific goal.

That’s it…pretty straightforward.

Moran gives us a simple framework to follow and one that has worked well, albeit adapted to a variety of contexts, in it’s most basic form.

Many of our clients have seen success and have positioned themselves as one of the 3 percenters, and thus accomplishing more value-added things in their lifetimes than they could have imagined to this point both at work, and more importantly, at home.

That’s a big takeaway…don’t just make goals for work, prioritize goals for your personal life as well and follow up on them with the same rigor.

How have they set goals and achieved them?

Three things.

First, set 3 goals.

Each goal can be intentionally broad and should be a direct solution to a challenge you see right now, or the next mountain that you wish to climb.

Do not overthink your goals, and at this stage, they do not need to be S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

Just create a title for a goal like, “better culture and employee engagement”.

Second, take 1 of those goals you created and then create as many steps as needed that it will take for you to look up in 12 weeks and say, “because we accomplished each one of these steps, we can confidently know that we have a better culture and employee engagement.”

For instance, you may have some of these items as tactics,

• Take 30 mins to write out a description of our existing culture and engagement
• Set meetings with each direct report to ask them their feedback on our existing culture, and what their vision is for our culture
• Write out a vision for our culture
• Create a list of important culture and engagement elements
• Share the list with the team during a team meeting
• Add a line item in our team meeting to review the list weekly

If you do not map out the details of your goals, then you will rarely achieve them.

Finally, the missing element to most goal setting is repetition.  Having one place, usually the weekly team meeting, where the entire team can hold themselves accountable to the goals and tactics.

Goal-setting workshops are notorious for writing things down, and then never circling back to implement, review, or hold account to those goals.

Do this exercise with your team four times per year and watch your culture become a collection of 3 percenters!

Remember, if you don’t write it down, you don’t own it. 

If you don’t write it don’t you can’t understand it.

If you don’t write it down…it doesn’t exist.