management skills

SMART Objective Setting for Managers by Irial O'Farrell

Every year, millions of managers sit down with their staff, to set objectives for the coming year. Every year, the vast majority of those millions of managers dread the prospective of having to sit down with their staff, to set objectives. If this sounds like you, then meet your new best friend – SMART Objective Setting for Managers.

This book unpacks the 4 main challenges that most managers grapple with, when setting objectives:
– Defining the desired outcomes of performance
– Diagnosing team members’ individual starting points
– Defining tangible objectives for “soft” behavioural performance issues (e.g., poor communication or influencing others)
– Understanding what goes wrong during the communication of agreeing objectives

As you read through the book, your understanding of SMART, developing performance and communication builds up, culminating in Chapter 8. This chapter explores how to identify soft performance issues and how to diagnose what the real underlying issue is and provides a framework to design an objective that will deliver real performance improvement.

Reviews on Amazon rave about how easy-to-read and concise the book is while providing a whole new way to look at objective setting.

SMART Objective Setting for Managers by Irial O'Farrell

If you manage teams, what frustrates you the most? If you’re like most managers I’ve met, chances are it’s the way “Johnny communicates his ideas” or the way “Chrissy keeps asking you to talk to the other team, rather than just doing it herself” or how “Jamie keeps asking the same questions over and over!”. Developing these “soft” performance issues are very challenging. It can feel uncomfortable to raise the topic and many managers fear the conversation will go wrong. The 4 main struggles managers have with objective setting are:

1. Defining the desired outcomes of performance
2. Diagnosing team members’ individual starting points
3. Defining tangible objectives for “soft” behavioural performance issues
4. Understanding what can go wrong in the communication process, when agreeing objectives

SMART Objective Setting for Managers unpacks each of these challenges, culminating in a chapter dedicated to understanding how to diagnose and design objectives that address the “softer” performance issues. Being endlessly practical when it comes to the “how”, the book also provides a roadmap for preparing for and conducting objective setting meetings.

Told through stories and examples, feedback from readers include “I thought I already knew how to do this but I’ve learnt so much from this book”, “very easy to read and understand the learning points”, and “managers and employees should read this book”.

So if reducing your frustration while increasing your team’s motivation and engagement sounds like a good outcome for you, buy this book today and start finding out how to design and agree SMART objectives that will make a difference.

SMART Objective Setting for Managers by Irial O'Farrell

SMART Objective Setting for Managers by Irial O'Farrell

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