This fall I met up with three friends from Young Women Social Entrepreneurs for a mini weekend retreat. For me, my best planning is visual and creative — like in this collage I made by looking through magazines like the Harvard Business Review:

Whether you’re planning for your personal life or an organization, you’re most likely to reach your goals if you get detailed about them and have a vision for where you’re going.

What are mine? On a professional level my vision is to be an amazing team leader with strong and accurate social intelligence guiding my work. I’d like my work to result in breakthrough thinking, be a source of constant learning, and help me and those I work with reach potential. All this should be interspersed with physical balance, cozy time over hot chocolate, sharing around campfires, adventures in nature, and making things that feel satisfying. One goal is to earn enough to buy property with my husband, hand build a small and beautiful house, and take time to make many of the things in it from pottery to weaving.

What about you? Let people know your vision and keep it present. If you collage it you can have it on your wall and photograph it to have it handy on your computer.

It’s important for organizations and companies to care about individual team member goals, even if it’s for their self own interest. Organizational goals are more likely to be accomplished if team members have aligned those goals with their own personal success goals and their own career vision.

Imagine it’s one year from now. What would you have liked to accomplish personally, professionally, and across your organization? What is your ideal future?

If you’re thinking about embarking on a website redesign, or building a new app, or launching a new campaign, we can help you first step back and think big picture about your overall goals. You’ll be thankful too!

In a goal setting example on a Hubspot webinar I watched today, they recommended drafting up goals in a format something like this, which I found useful in combining personal, professional, and organizational goals:

The goal for [org/company name] is to get $ ____ in individual donations in 2014 / increase sales to $__ in sales in 2014. Increasing our revenue will allow us to ____, send our children to college, prepare for retirement, and give raises to our employees so we can retain our best people. 

Our longer term goal is to achieve $__ in annual donations / revenue in the next 5 years and scale our organization / business from __ to __ employees with 50% of our donations / revenue in recurring gifts / retainers, so that we have steady cashflow.
 

Once you have the full set of goals in mind, the actions and vehicles to get you there have a clearer road map to follow. The Fission team uses 7Geese.com to set and monitor each of our goals, and you might like it too! This tool facilitates recognizing and thanking people for their contributions. I loved getting recognition from Fission’s partner Roz for my work on our sales plan, for example (see image). An attitude of gratitude helps organizational culture.

And lastly, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, which is this week, I’d like to say THANK YOU to the women of YWSE and my team mates at Fission for many amazing goal setting sessions!

Can we help you? Write me for a free conversation about your goals at adriana@fissionstrategy.com.








Adriana Dakin (@apdakin) is VP of Strategy & Research at Fission. She is a board member of YWSE and has a masters in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. You can read her bio here, and see her series of posts on techie parents at Fission sharing child raising tips on the Fission blog.