Setting goals and mission statements. Why do we do it?

My annual review actually included a criticism about my goal-setting, even though I hadn’t actually set any goals about goals, writes Colm O’Regan

DO you have a mission statement? Depending on your vintage, the phrase mission statement might have a different connotation.

Maybe it was a sermon delivered by a Redemptorist warning of the dangers of fornication, leading everyone in the parish to go home and look up the word, then see what it was like.

Now though, a mission statement appears in the “about us” section of a website. It says things like “we are a dynamic organisation”.

It says the organisation is passionate. Passionate about “changing the way the world looks at staplers” or “driving value for our blue-chip clients in the manure space”.

People also have mission statements. I found mine recently and I now read it with my palm clamped to my face.

Apparently I was a dynamic and goal-oriented individual. I don’t know why I had to include individual.

Maybe because I’d achieved so much, they might think I was a collective.

Along with dynamic, “goal-oriented” has to be one of the more over-used LinkedIn and curriculum vitae favourites.

It’s so ubiquitous that candidates might as well describe themselves as mammals or vertebrates.

I think I wrote it to reassure readers that I wasn’t drifting through life on a raft made of dreams, carried by a current of circumstance.

The most goal-oriented time of year is annual review time. Annual reviews begin a year earlier, with goal-setting.

Performance reviews used to be more straightforward.

You worked for someone.

If you got on with them, sent them an email when you did something well, and owned up to mistakes after you’d fixed them, you usually got your just desserts.

You got some constructive criticism which hurt like hell, some praise with soothed you, you found someone similarly treated and had pints with them and a good long moan.

Then they wanted to bring in transparency and, to make sure there was no disgruntlement on review day, you had to set your own goals in advance, agree them with the goalkeeper (I made that title up) and then you were measured against them.

I hated setting goals. It was like being sent off into the forest to cut the rod to beat yourself with.

I’d spend ages trying to figure out what was SMART — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.

Tidy my desk was not an acceptable goal apparently.

I procrastinated about setting the goals so much my annual review actually included a criticism about my goal-setting, even though I hadn’t actually set any goals about goals.

As I neared the end of my official work life and “freedom”, I looked forward to no more goals.

But old habits die hard. I found myself in January 2011, the first new year of self-employment, opening up a spreadsheet called Goals2011.xls.

It turns out I still needed them.

Not necessarily that the goals themselves were the right ones, just the structure of them.

I needed something concrete to make sense of the windswept beach that life had become.

Looking back over those goals, out of the 50 I’d written, I’ve done 40, but a lot of the harder ones were not done.

It was a start, but I’d taken a few low-hanging fruit so I could report progress to myself.

Tidy my desk was a quick win for Team O’Regan.

Will I do new goals for 2017? I’ll make it my mission.