Business goals can be scary. They can stress you out because you are not successful until you have achieved them. They can impede your long-term growth, because once you’ve achieved your goals, you’re done. And they present an unfounded illusion that we have control over the future.
In fact, you would be better off if you didn’t set goals – but focused on doing the right kinds of things to grow your business, or for want of better terms your tactics or ‘system’, instead.
That, at least, is the theory put forward by Entrepreneur contributor James Clear, in a widely shared piece. It’s presented as a radical, exciting departure from conventional wisdom, but isn’t really. It’s a reflection of how too many businesses already regularly operate.
And it is also particularly a reflection of how too many businesses run their social media programmes. They blog, they tweet, they post on Facebook – but with no clear end in sight.
James Clear contends that if you are doing the right things every day, your business will grow regardless of whether you have set targets. I’d like to explain why this is bad advice, particularly in the context of social media.
The fact is that it’s very hard to know what systems to put in place – what your daily activities should be – unless you have a particular goal in mind. Let’s take some of
Mr Clear’s examples:
- If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week.
- If you’re a runner, your goal is to run a marathon. Your system is your training schedule for the month.
In reality, just writing regularly is unlikely to produce a book. You really need a timeframe: writing twice a week might take you 10 years to complete a volume, whereas in reality it needs to be ready in 18 months.
You need a clear mental picture of what your completed book will look like, so you can structure it correctly and produce the right kind of material.
Most importantly, if your writing is unfocused or ineffective, you will be unable to identify that you’ve taken a wrong turn, let alone correct course – because without a specific goal, you have no way of measuring whether you are succeeding.
Similarly, for running. You can train for a marathon each and every day – but if you do not actually have the goal of completing the marathon in mind, where is your motivation? If you are not working towards a particular date, where is your structure? And how do you determine whether you’re doing well or not, with no particular target to judge against?
Which brings us to social media. Time and again, companies embark on their social media programmes by setting up the exact kind of systems James Clear talks about – blogging each week, Tweeting each day, interacting on Facebook – but without spelling out the purpose and setting achievement targets.
The problem is, if you are not clear about what you want to achieve with your social media, how do you know what kind of blogs, Tweets and Facebook posts you should be producing?
If you don’t know where you want to go – how many Facebook ‘likes’ you need, how many hits on your blog, and most importantly, how many leads and sales you want to generate – how can you tell if your social media programme is working?
(For his own business, James Clear uses a ‘feedback loop’, where he checks how many visitors join his email newsletter every week, and then changes course if the numbers drop. In other words, he actually does have a benchmark and a weekly goal, even if it doesn’t call them that.)
Working without goals is setting yourself up for failure.
If you don’t spell the goal out, you’re saying that the end result doesn’t really matter. And that reduces the likelihood of you ever achieving it.
On two points I do agree with James Clear. Firstly, good systems are essential (and an equally neglected part of many companies’ social media programmes).
There’s no point having a really clear goal without a firm plan of how to get there.
Secondly, goals can be very pressurising and even stifling, particularly when you feel that you are not achieving them. But this is not the case for having no goals. It’s the case for setting realistic, achievable goals – and for understanding that they are just ambitions, targets, which can be adjusted and re-worked with experience.
Your goals are there to serve you – not the opposite.
Do you agree? Let us know in the comments!
Miriam Shaviv is the Director of Content at Brainstorm Digital
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