The purpose of setting goals, professional or personal, for yourself can be summed up in this cliché:
"If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there."
Goal-setting is usually one of the first subjects taught in business or managerial master’s-degree programs.
"Objectives are critical to accomplishing anything," says Ralph Rich, a professor in the Master of Business Administration program at Lakeland College in Sheboygan. Rich teaches one of the first courses in the program, Business Research Methodology. "A lot of people come into an MBA program and say ‘I’d like to improve myself.’ As they go through the program, they can determine goals in a more effective way. Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know.
"One of the things I do with students is what they’re going to do with their degree. It’s an important part of their short-term expectations — what am I going to do with this? What do you expect to happen from it? How are you going to market yourself within your organization or another organization or even in your family? We really need to use these tools in your personal life as well."
"If you lack goals or objectives whatsoever, you don’t have the opportunity to improve yourself or grow in the marketplace," says Brian Danzinger, an instructor in the Master of Science in Management and Organizational Behavior program at Silver Lake College in Manitowoc. "Individuals who don’t take the opportunities to improve themselves will fall behind individuals who do. Goals provide benchmarks, and without benchmarks, you have no ways of assessing your own personal development."
Professional goals are not necessarily about the next job, or getting a certain job by a certain deadline.
"Traditional career pathways are dead," says Hank Lindborg, a professor in the Master of Science in Organizational Leadership and Quality program at Marian University in Fond du Lac. "The career ladder as a metaphor is gone. It’s more like a game of Chutes and Ladders, or a zigzag path, or a labyrinth. It’s hard to go into a career and expect that you don’t have to plan. You have to take the initiative to plan; you have to decide what you can bring to the table."
"It’s difficult to grasp what position is going to be the apex of your career — I really rarely see a student say, ‘I want to be a fill-in-the-blank,’" says Danzinger, who suggests setting goals in terms of acquiring "a skill set by a certain age." Such skills often include "developing their soft skills — leadership skills, communication skills, interaction skills," along with, in many cases, "fulfilling a gap that maybe wasn’t fulfilled in their undergrad or other certification programs they’ve had."
Lindborg describes goal-setting not as creating a list of what someone wants to do or be, but, as corporations do, engaging in scenario planning, creating a series of "if–then" statements "if things don’t work out as you expect.
"This I think is not simply accidental. People who escape from disasters — this was true on 9/11 and in plane crashes — people who thought about an escape route beforehand are much more likely to survive. This is true of careers too."
Danzinger describes goal-setting as followed by answering the question, "How are you going to do that? And that comes down to the goals and objectives of your own career path."
Some master’s students go into programs with the goal of reaching a certain position where they’re working. But, Lindborg says, "Very often expectations of advancement in an organization are thwarted; internal candidates are not always the ones who get selected."
One goal of an MBA program is to develop, as Rich puts it, "not just literacy or competency or proficiency — it’s mastery."
Rich teaches being able to answer three questions — what, so what, and now what? "Knowledge is not meaningful; action is, and informed action is the most important," he says.
Rich quotes from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which includes a story about a widower unable to resume his life after his wife died. Frankl, a psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor, asked the widower what would have happened had the man died before his wife.
"He now had a ‘why,’" says Rich. "The issue is that education provides the ‘why,’ and when we figure out the ‘why,’ we can always figure out the ‘how.’"
Rich believes the process of setting goals includes three facets — developing a skill set, recognizing opportunities, and evaluating opportunities.
Lindborg suggests a self-inventory, "what you really want to do, what your skills are, and not just within a specific job — what you like to do — and what you can bring to any work situation."
One difficulty with setting goals is that one’s circumstances change, and in fact entire industries change.
"People need to understand opportunities when they arrive and be able to respond to them," says Rich. "We need to have criteria put together for what we want to do — setting a goal is really setting criteria. The goal of ‘I want to be independently wealthy by the time I’m 50’ will result in other goals being set."
The life of a master’s degree recipient doesn’t change instantly upon receiving the master’s degree hood at commencement. Sometimes, though, it changes before receiving the degree.
"Many of the students in the Marian program undergo some kind of career transformation while they’re in the program," says Lindborg. "Very often people are planning their education while they’re planning their career path."
"I tell our new MBAs, ‘The world isn’t really going to change," says Rich. "But people will look at you to do things in a different way. You’ve got to be able to develop solutions, to take advantage of the opportunities that reveal themselves, and then you have to be able to work with a lot of people, evaluate information from a lot of different sources, come up with a consensus. But most importantly, you have to be a leader.
"We try to teach people that you have to take responsibility — it’ll change you if you let it."
Next: Organizational and leadership theory, in Marketplace Sept. 2.
