Richard Flanagan
Senior Vice President
Fort Hill Company

My career has focused on helping people improve their lives and relationships by adopting new and more effective behaviors.

One thing we know for sure about making learning stick and achieving behavior change is that strong, well-developed goals with clear timelines are essential.

Strong goals provide the roadmaps for the kind of changes we seek from learning and development initiatives. In my work with business leaders in learning and development programs, I have seen the value of spending more time and effort on the goal-setting process.

I often ask participants to “stand and deliver” at the end of a program – to practice an elevator speech they will share with their colleagues when they return to work to explain what they learned and gain support for their goals.

You can feel the energy in the room when people share well thought-out goals that they are really committed to delivering.

That should be the goal of every program.

Richard Flanagan is Senior Vice President of Fort Hill Company, Wilmington, Delaware,

Before joining Fort Hill, Dr. Flanagan founded Epotec, Inc., a privately-owned Internet software and content company that developed interactive behavioral health tools and services.

A licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Flanagan’s career has focused on developing ways to help people change behaviors and improve their lives and relationships.

A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Flanagan received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Delaware. He was a post-doctoral fellow in family systems theory and therapy at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas and at the Georgetown Family Center in Washington, D.C.

He can be reached at: flanagan@forthillcompany.com

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Recent Learning Alerts

 
Goals: A Fresh Look

Richard Flanagan

Management by objectives has been around for a long time. So, it is tempting to assume that everyone is proficient at writing goals. But, the evidence suggests otherwise. We have reviewed thousands of participants’ goals from dozens of training and development initiatives. A surprisingly high percentage are vague, low impact, or unrelated to the program’s objectives.

This should be a concern for all of us in learning and development. When participants are allowed to leave programs with weak or trivial goals, the probability of transfer is reduced and the program’s effectiveness undermined. To produce meaningful behavior change and a return on investment, learning needs to be transferred and applied to the learner’s job. Strong, well-developed application goals with clear timelines and accountability for results are essential.

So what makes a good learning goal and how can the goal-setting process be improved?

Improving learning transfer requires treating developmental objectives with the same seriousness as traditional business objectives. Good goals optimize the personal and business results a participant will achieve by identifying what will be accomplished by when. Good goals link application of new knowledge and skills to participants’ on-going job responsibilities and business objectives – linkage that is facilitated by aligning program content with company strategy and by having instructors emphasize application throughout, in order to reduce the learning-doing gap.

Participants should be encouraged to start thinking about goals early – ideally even before they arrive – and they need to be given adequate time during the program to write strong and meaningful goals. Too often, goal setting is crammed into the last few minutes before the closing remarks.

Participants should leave the program charged up and prepared to take action on their goals. Learners must clearly understand the WIIFM (What’s in it for me?), so that they will be emotionally invested in accomplishing their goals. They need to recognize the personal benefit that will accrue. And, they need to know that their manager will support them but also hold them accountable for following-through on their learning transfer goals; they cannot just put them in a notebook and forget about them.

Ideas for action:

1. Do not leave goal setting to the end of the program. Stop after each major topic or segment and have people write down how they could use what they just learned to accomplish something of importance.
   
   
2. Allow at least one hour at the end of the program for refining and finalizing goals. Do not allow instructors to spend so much time on content that preparation for follow-through is shortchanged.
   
   
3. Provide a suggested goal construct to help participants frame their goals, and incorporate time frame, benefits, outcomes and indicators of success. For example: “In the next three months, I will [fill in what will be achieved] … so that [state the benefit]. Indications of my success will include … [specify observable changes or measurable results].”
   
   
4. Have participants work in pairs to help each other make improvements and test for importance and commitment.
   
   
5. Raise the stakes and seriousness of application goals by sending copies of their goals (on paper or electronically) to their managers. Manager involvement is key to making learning deliver results.

By providing greater time and guidance for goal setting, we can improve the all too typical “Coach better” or “Communicate more with my team” to more robust and results-oriented goals like:

“In the next 10 weeks I will practice using coaching, rather than blaming language, until it becomes a habit, so that I become a more effective feedback provider and my reports feel empowered rather than deflated. Measures of my success will be positive feedback from my reports and their taking greater initiative.”

Good goals are the starting point for great results.

Excerpted from:
The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning, to be published by Pfeiffer in early 2006.

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