Goals and this Week’s Elephant Bite

How Do You Eat An Elephant ?

One Bite At A Time

As a Leader, you probably do a lot of Goal Setting with your teams. And sometimes goals can feel like an elephant around our necks … can’t they. Especially if your organization has bought into the BHAG school of goal setting. Those are Big Hairy Audacious Goals.

Remember goals are our targets AND simply setting goals is not enough to reach them.
Using goals as a tool to focus our actions is the key. AND, since the only bite you can take of that Elephant that is your Big Hairy Audacious Goal is the next one … the most important question to ask your Team is this …  “What is this week’s bite”

Once a goal is set, the critical next step is to help your Team figure out what step they must take THIS WEEK to achieve their
goal.

One proven way to find This Week’s Bite is
“Backwards Planning” here’s how it works==============

An Example Goal:

“Double our sales in the next twelve months”
Backwards Planning starts by imagining you have reached the goal
and working “backwards” to the present.

The leadership questions might sound like this …

• Imagine it is a year from now and we have reached our goal…
  we have doubled your sales … what are we doing differently
  than we do now?
• When you look back in time to today, what was the first step
  we took?
• What new habits did we have to develop - things we did
  differently every week?
• With all this in mind, what is our task for this week … the
  task that will keep us on track to our goal?

Each week ask the question, “What is this week’s task to reach our goal?”

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When we can chunk down our goals into a single bite for this week
even the biggest goal becomes doable.

After all, How Do You Eat An Elephant …. One Bite At A Time.
Take that one bite each week, no matter what, and pretty soon you
will reach that Big Hairy Audacious Elephant.

Tagged as: Coaching, goal setting, goals, questions, Teams