The Balance Between Setting Business Goals and Personal Development Goals
Charlotte Rheingold
Instructional Designer, AmTrust Financial Services, Inc.
When thinking about career development, striking a balance between your company’s objectives and your own professional growth can be challenging. However, prioritizing both can help you achieve happiness and success at work. I found myself in this exact situation about a year ago. I had just joined a new company and was tasked with outlining my business goals while also trying to determine my overall career path. Since then, I’ve reworked my business and personal goals, and here are a few things that helped me.
Creating Business Goals
When crafting business goals, start by understanding the “why” of the company – what is the main purpose? What are the top objectives? Why is this what we’re all striving to achieve? Then, think about how your team or department goals contribute to the overall company vision. (If you are ever unsure about what these goals are, ask your leader!)
Once the larger goals are clear, then think about your role and why it matters to the business. Even if your impact isn’t immediately obvious, every individual contributes to the company’s broader objectives. Begin with the big picture, and then zoom in to your specific role and what you do daily. This approach can help connect the dots to how your regular work duties actively contribute to the overall success of the business.
Utilize SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) criteria to track progress effectively. When it comes to making your goals measurable, think about metrics that are important to your team. Do you have sales numbers, service level agreements, customer portfolios, satisfaction surveys, etc.? Is there a metric that you are looking to increase (e.g. number of claims handled per month) or decrease (e.g. employee turnover)? Think about which goals can be achieved through your regular work and how you can measure them through key metrics.
For my project-based role as an Instructional Designer on a Learning & Development team, this meant thinking about how each of my training projects related to larger department and company strategic goals. My team has our goals posted in a centralized location, and anytime I start a new project, I ask myself how it aligns with them. If it doesn’t support these goals, I recognize that I either need to realign the project objectives or it’s likely not something I should prioritize.
To share a personal example, last year one of our main team goals was to increase the value of the new employee experience to build a strong culture of inclusivity to retain top talent and drive business performance. I contributed to this goal by working on various new hire training programs. It can be easy to send a new employee some documents and consider their onboarding complete, but I pushed beyond that to create a well-rounded, welcoming, and structured experience for our new hires. I wanted to make sure they felt that they belong here, were set up for success in their role, and would be supported throughout their tenure.
Creating Personal Development Goals
While business goals are important, your personal growth also matters. Development goals can be anything you want them to be: skill development, a promotion, creating an entire new role, becoming a leader of an employee network – the sky is the limit! They can be directly related to your current role or focused on growing into something totally different. This is both exciting and challenging because you have to decide for yourself what you want. Take time to reflect on the skills, knowledge, experiences, and type of work-life balance you want to acquire.
I started my reflection by identifying my values, and I was surprised by how deep and introspective an experience it was. Defining my values helped me better recognize and make the most of situations where I can embody these values in my work. By further thinking about what these opportunities looked like, I was then able to determine what skills I need to execute on them. This helped me develop a roadmap of the skills I want to learn, which I can apply to both personal development and business goals.
One goal that I have been consistently working on is developing self-promotion and networking skills, which supports my long-term aspiration of becoming a Learning and Development (L&D) team leader. I want to promote our training programs and highlighting the value of continued learning to the business. Additionally, having a strong network is beneficial to tune into business needs and create impactful training. One thing I am doing to build these skills is serving as the co-chair of one of our internal employee networks for young professionals. This is helping me to develop my voice, executive presence, and build key relationships across the company. Plus, it gives me a platform to share all the great work our L&D team does and help others benefit from these programs.
Even with a well-defined plan for my personal development, I am open to changes along the way. I know that my professional priorities will evolve and when I achieve one goal, I will replace it with a new one. If I find that one of my goals no longer works as intended, I’ll reevaluate it. This is why having clearly defined values helps inform the adjustments to my plan over time.
Finding a Balance
Your business and personal development goals don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, the more they can complement each other, the better. If you notice a large gap between the two, maybe that’s a sign that you need to consider a role where they can be more aligned, which is absolutely okay. We all start somewhere.
We all come to work to do a job that supports the success of the company. But we should also prioritize work that supports our own personal success.
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