Do You Have a Strategic Approach to Goal Achievement?

Every church is challenged with balancing day-to-day job responsibilities with achieving goals that help take the organization to the next level.

Churches grow and advance to the next level by achieving objectives that are determined by a strategic planning process.

These objectives are articulated through well written church goals that are filtered throughout the organization.  However, there needs to be a strategic approach to ensure goals are accomplished.

The first step, is to develop a performance management process that incorporates goal achievement into the employee performance appraisal cycle – which is then tied to pay incentives.

It is all about reinforcing good performance by rewarding employees for doing those things that help to meet objectives and implement strategy.

The next step is figuring out a way to break annual church goals down into sizable tasks that can be incorporated into daily employee responsibilities. Let’s look at this graphic as an example.

Now let’s look at an example annual goal for a church and break it down into each of these steps.

Global Church Goal: Transition all media – video, audio and print – to digital format by December 31, 20XX.

1. Example Human Resources Departmental Annual (SMART) Goal: Scan all human resource archive files (120 files) to confidential digital file format no later than December 31, 20XX.

2. Monthly Goal: Scan 10 human resource files and save in confidential digital format each month of 20XX.

3. Weekly Goal: Scan 2-3 human resource files and save in confidential digital format each week of the month.

4. Weekly To Do List: Scan 2-3 files to a digital format.

5. Daily Task List:

• Create list of files to scan.
• Pull 3 archived human resource files from archive storage.
• Scan file and save in confidential digital file.
• Open file to ensure all documents were scanned clearly and correctly.
• Ensure file is backed up on cloud server.
• Mark file off of list.
• Shred file.

Looking at this example, it is easy to imagine how the tedious task of scanning documents could quickly be put on the back burner and not get accomplished.

Or the goal is delayed so long that it needs to be done quickly at the end of the goal period.

Taking goals that are time consuming and breaking them into small actionable steps facilitates accomplishing goals one small step at a time and eliminates the stress of trying to accomplish many steps all at once.

Whether your organization is a church, non-profit or the dry cleaners down the street, achieving goals is important to meeting long-term objectives.

Taking the time to write goals and hold people accountable for achieving them, is how successful organizations move to the next level.

If you are interested in learning more about managing employee performance, check out our on-line Employee Performance Management class. This is an inexpensive way to train you or your managers and we offer a money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose.  Use coupon code smart20 to get 20% off.  Click here to learn more!  

Article originally posted June, 2012, updated August 2015.