At this time of year, many of us are busy setting goals for the next twelve months – both personal and professional. Many of the goals being set by our community of learners at the myHRfuture Academy focus on upskilling to become an experience led, business focused and data driven HR professionals. We’ve been looking at the most popular HR skills and HR resources from 2021 and shifting 2022 HR predictions into practice over on the myHRfuture blog to help shape these goals.

And this year, for the very first time, we’re going one step further to support you on your learning journey. Throughout January, we are offering a free 30-minute coaching session with one of our learning experts, when you sign up to the myHRfuture Academy. This will be a one-on-one session for you to think through your learning and career aspirations for 2022 and formulate specific, challenging goals.

To celebrate the launch of this offer, we thought we’d explore goal setting in a little more detail… 

Why do we set goals?

Goals are an important and effective way to spark motivation. They serve to energise the goal setter into action, either through intrinsic motivation (e.g., the feeling of satisfaction you get when you achieve a goal and subsequent increased confidence or self-esteem) or through extrinsic motivation (e.g., an end of year bonus is dependent on achieving your goals).

Goal setting therefore leads to increased performance and outcomes as effort increases in line with enhanced motivation. At least, that’s the theory!

What is goal setting theory?

From the late 1960s, the development of Goal Setting Theory (GST) is attributed to two American psychologists, Dr Edwin Locke and Dr Gary Latham. What really made their research stand out early on was one study, in which Locke found that for 90% of the time, specific and challenging goals led to higher performance than easy or "do your best," goals.

There are four key components for effective goals. Goals should be:

1. Clear and specific

2. Difficult/ challenging

3. Accepted/ agreed (although this isn’t as well-proven as the other three components)

4. And finally, feedback should be provided

Perhaps the most well-known interpretation of Goal Setting Theory is Doran’s ‘SMART’ model. Goals should be:

1. Specific

2. Measurement

3. Achievable / Agree-upon

4. Realistic

5. Time-based

For a more in-depth look at the theory of Goal Setting, here are two great articles:

• Locke's Goal-Setting Theory

• What is Locke’s Goal Setting Theory of Motivation?

What is the difference between performance and learning goals?

Performance-oriented goals centre around a tangible outcome, for example ‘get a promotion in 2022’. Performance goals can also be outcome-avoidant, for example ‘do not miss a deadline in front of my boss.

Learning goals, on the other hand, focus more on continuous development and improvement, with cycles of feedback and self-reflection in an ongoing manner.  There is plenty of research which supports the idea that focusing on the process over the “end goal” actually has a greater impact on performance.

As we are interested in the application of goal setting to learning and development (i.e., becoming a data driven, experience led and business focused HR professional), we can interpret these findings as follows: it’s more important to be on a learning journey and focus on continuous improvement. Ultimately, learning is for life. 

Who is involved in goal setting?

Goal setting can be both innately personal and fundamentally professional. Often goals related to learning could be associated with a promotion or finding a new job and so there is a clear personal element even though what is being learnt is inherently professional.

There are many actors involved in setting goals effectively:

• Employee. Ultimately it is the individual who will carry out the work necessary to achieve the goal. They should also be involved in the goal setting process as far as possible and agree the goal being set. Once a goal is achieved, increased confidence feeds into the next goal and so on.

• Line Manager. A line manager supports the employee to achieve the goal in whatever way possible. Once again, agreement on the goal is therefore important.

• HR. HR has an important role to play in providing the right systems and processes for discussing, agreeing, monitoring and evaluating goals.

• Organisation. Finally, the organisation’s overarching aims and objectives have to be taken into account when setting individual goals – do individual goals align with the organisation’s ultimate purpose?  It’s also important to consider the organisational culture and context and how it supports the setting and achievement of goals.

How the myHRfuture Academy can help you set your 2022 goals

At the myHRfuture Academy, we are offering a free one-on-one coaching session with one of our learning experts to help you set effective goals for 2022. Alongside this, the myHRfuture Academy platform supports HR professionals, like you, to become more digital, data-driven and experience led and get certified in the skills you need for the future, to stay relevant, get hired and get ahead. Sign up today and put decades worth of goal setting theory into practice, increase your motivation and your performance and Press PLAY on your Career.