Garrett Mintz: How AI can help managers set better objectives, goals

Goal setting is a critical element to any successful team. If businesses fail to create an environment for team members and leaders to set goals, they are firefighting.

Firefighting is the concept of having employees tactically react to emergencies that come up in the business as opposed to strategically creating long-term solutions for those challenges. Firefighting is exhausting, mentally draining and leads to burnout. It is also highly inefficient.

In most work environments, firefighting is inevitable, but it shouldn’t be your team’s primary focus. Employees should be either following a proven process to solve that challenge, or they should be experimenting and tweaking potential solutions to create a proven process.

One of the best ways to combat a culture of firefighting is with goal setting. Most business owners and executives might read this and think to themselves, “Let’s start having our employees set goals,” or, “We have an HR system that allows us to set goals, and we encourage our employees to set them.”

These comments miss an important fact: Most employees suck at setting goals. And to be fair, that’s not their fault! Good goal setting takes practice, and many people have let that skill atrophy if they ever learned it at all.

They have never been taught proper goal-setting techniques like setting goals that are specific, measurable, relevant, attainable and time-bound. And even if they have learned about SMART goals, they probably haven’t practiced this skill enough to turn it into a habit.

And even if a couple of people on the team are good at setting goals, you still need company support to ensure that goal setting stays a high priority.

This is even more critical at the managerial level.

Managers not setting goals or setting poor goals affects the entire team. This ripple effect can create a culture of firefighting because if businesses aren’t strategically thinking about how to build processes to handle the challenges that come up, they will be reactive to whatever challenges they encounter.

Isolation is another challenge managers face when setting goals.

Even if managers know how to set goals effectively and consistently set them, they still need to understand their company’s objectives to set great goals. If they are isolated, they will set goals based on unclear or out-of-date objectives that were determined internally from the past.

I should briefly clarify the difference between goals and objectives. Objectives are large, significant changes in the business that are strived for over a long time. Goals are steps in the process to achieving that objective.

Because the world (and thus the company) is constantly changing and evolving, if our managers don’t have any concept as to what innovations are coming within their departments, they run the risk of their goals getting stale and outdated.

Companies can leverage AI to help their managers not only set effective goals but set goals and objectives that are like those of managers with similar teams in similar industries.

How?

AIM Insights has an AI integration that can identify the industry, title and department of a manager and provide suggested objectives and goals for that manager based on what other leaders in similar roles are doing. AIM Insights also helps managers from across the company see what goals other team members and managers are setting so they can better understand what other departments and managers are focused on.

Why is this important?

If companies have managers struggling to identify the most important thing they should be focused on (this typically occurs after prolonged periods of firefighting), having suggestions generated by AI can help managers quickly realign and get ideas. When used in conjunction with an executive coach and knowing the goals of other managers in other departments at the company (who are also using an executive coach), managers can combine cutting-edge technology with an experienced professional to get the best of both worlds.

When managers and teams have extended periods of firefighting, doing any work that is strategic can be really hard to pick back up. Employees can become so jaded by strategic work like goal setting that they sometimes end up weighing the cost of time spent goal setting as a sacrifice to their ability to put out a certain number of fires. This zero-sum thinking is devastating for a company’s long-term health.

If employees develop this mindset around goal setting, it creates a toxic environment and a culture that is incentivized to put out fires without considering ways to preemptively stop the fires from ever starting.

There is a story about the early days of Amazon. Jeff Bezos was on the floor with some of his employees packing boxes and shipping them out. Bezos suggested to his employees that they should get knee pads. But an employee chimed in with a better idea: Get packing tables.

When employees and managers don’t take the time to regularly set goals, they are blinded by what they can do to ease their immediate pain (knee pads help alleviate pain from an uncomfortable position) instead of focusing on an innovative solution that can eradicate the challenge altogether with a side benefit of increased productivity (getting packing tables).

AI suggestions for goal and objective setting can be a great way to quickly get employees thinking about what they can focus on to handle their challenges.

AI can be a great starting point for assisting in goal setting, but it is the human receiving the AI suggestions that needs to approve those goals and subsequently act on achieving them.•

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Mintz is founder of Ambition in Motion, a firm that helps companies increase employee engagement and collaboration by implementing corporate mentor programs.