In what ways do goals and objectives help managers control various processes within an organization? How do specific and measurable goals affect employee and promote organizational performance? Provide an example from your own experience of when a specific goal or objective provided beneficial control over a process. Explain what the beneficial control was and how did it positively impact organizational performance.
“Goals and objectives provide the foundation for measurement” (Carpenter, M., Bauer, T., & Erdogan, B., 2010). If we cannot measure, we cannot be sure whether the organization is on the right track or not, if the work that is done is not a waste of time and is a small step towards the overall success. Managers set goals and objectives that are tied to strategy, mission, and vision; they help to measure the results, see possibilities for improvements, and optimize the workflow.
Having specific and measurable goals makes it easier to see where we go; when the employees know how the specific objectives lead us to the result needed by the organization, it lets them feel like a part of a whole, gives the understanding of how important they are and why they are here and, as a result, leads to good job performance. When every employee knows and understands the objective he becomes a part of a machine (organization) that works consistently as a team.
As I mentioned before, one year ago I used to work as a teacher. The thing was, that the school provided me with the textbooks but I was not the only teacher working with the same class: first, using the same textbook another teacher taught all the new vocabulary and grammar, and only then I came to practice what they learned earlier. Very soon I felt that I needed to teach them something new, too – it was obvious that students felt bored practicing the same things again and again. I prepared a set of lesson plans; each of them was somehow connected with the previous ones. I wrote down goals and objectives for each lesson, explained – only for myself – how it would help to practice the previous knowledge adding something new, made a list of examples of how to explain different things or practice them (even sample dialogues), made a separate list of new words and grammar that kids would know at the end of the year and prepared a number of presentations for each of the classes. This helped me a lot. First of all, I always knew how to spend each minute of the class because I already had a plan. Secondly, I could measure how well they learn things from me because I could always come back and see what we already learned. Finally, I could easily control our lessons and align efforts because I specifically knew what we wanted to achieve and how to do it.
I think that having specific goals and objectives is very important in all spheres of our lives because it reminds us why we are here and what we want to achieve at the end.
References
Carpenter, M., Bauer, T., & Erdogan, B. (2010). Management Principles, v. 1.1. Retrieved from https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/management-principles-v1.1/