SMART Mentorship | Why SMART goals are so important to the success of mentorship
/
SMART Mentorship | Why SMART Goals are so important to the success of mentorship
PK Chef Russell Bird | The Promo Addict
What is a SMART goal?
Smart stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timebound. When you are making goals for a successful mentee/mentor relationship, it is important that you set goals and it is even more important that they are all the things in the SMART acronym. Without setting a baseline of goals that are these 5 things, it will be impossible to gauge the success of the relationship.
Be Specific: When you are setting a goal, breaking it down into specific parts makes it much more achievable. So instead of saying something like “I want to be healthier”, you could break that down into a specific workout goal like “I want to workout 30 minutes per day, 4 days per week”, or “I want to lose 40 lbs by my 40th birthday”. Being specific like that can allow your goal to be broken up into micro habits and provide accountability to your mentor on what you are doing to achieve them. So while I’d love to help you “land bigger customers”, I don’t know how big your current customers are, how big you can handle and more, so make sure your goals are specific so that we can build habits and actions around achieving them.
Make it Measurable: Measurable goals are awesome because if you goal is to “be healthier” then you don’t really know if you ever achieve it. If you goal is to lose 40lbs, then as long as you know your starting weight, it’s easy to gauge how you are doing against the goal if you have a good scale, in fact with the right scale, you can even have your weights sent directly to me using an app on your phone, talk about accountability! They say that things that are measured will improve, and I think when it comes to goals, this is very true.
Make it Achievable: I want to walk on Mars, but it’s not an achievable goal for my Canadian Promo company. I want to land Coca-Cola as an account nationally, but I probably don’t have the working capital to support their inventory, payment terms, fulfilment programs and design requirements. A much more achievable goal would be to grow overall revenues by 8% (double inflation) or increase our average order size by 10%. These are goals that can be broken down into a number of smaller strategies to achieve them, like hiring an additional outside sales rep, increasing google ads, Facebook or LinkedIn ads or doing a targeted direct mail campaign. All these steps can help me move towards achievable goals based on revenue growth. Taking it back to the weight loss goal, if I want to lose 40lbs by my 40th birthday, I have to look at my current BMI and determine if that’s a healthy amount of weight, calculate the time until my birthday and then figure out if I should consult a dietician, hire a personal trainer or buy a peloton, but all of these steps are great micro habits that a mentor can help push you towards if your goal is achievable.
Make it Relevant: Having a relevant goal is important to help move your life in the right direction and make it relatable to your mentor. I have a mentor right now that is a marketing expert, so I’m not necessarily going to get his help moving a goal forward to run a marathon or manage my weight. When I am dealing with my mentor, I want to set relevant goals to his life and experience. So, because he is a marketing expert, we set some relevant revenue growth goals and new google and SEO metric goals for improving our online presence. These are relevant to his experience and will help the company achieve its long-term vision and strategy.
Make it Timebound: Goals that are not associated to time can always be worked on tomorrow, and with that you may never achieve them. If you associate your goals to time, then it’s quite easy to track your progress to completing them to real life. I set a goal to lose 40 lbs. by my 40th birthday which is September 2022. I forced myself to sit down and analyze the goal and realize that this is far too long, with that much time there is no way I will maintain the motivation, so instead I shortened my goal to lose it by Christmas and then keep it off until my 40th birthday. This goal might change over time, but after looking at the time associated with my goal, I was able to find a flaw or a way for me to procrastinate and I eliminated it, this is something that a mentor can help with by looking at your goals from the outside to help you achieve them.
Coming up with SMART goals can be a real challenge, but if you put in the time, write them down and commit, it can truly change your life; especially if you have a mentor.