doug smith training

What is your primary goal as a leader? I consider my primary goal to be "helping people to achieve their goals." The most challenging thing to that is that I don't succeed unless others do. The longer I work, the more I am convinced that is true no matter what your primary goal is. To the extent that we help others, enrich others, empower others -- that's the degree of success we achieve. What if your success depends on your ability to bring success to others? Will it change the way you do business? Will it change the way you look at others? Will it recalibrate success? Sure. We have goals for ourselves. What I'm wondering, though, is how much more do we get when others do well as well? I'm thinking that the answer is: a bunch more. What do you think? -- Doug Smith

How do you measure success? Having been a manager, supervisor, and project leader for many years I've had to evaluate team member success in many different ways. We usually focus on performance that is connected some how to customer happiness. Sometimes, that's not as important in our metrics as profitability. It's easy to lost track of why we're doing what we're doing if we don't measure the right things. I learned as a supervisor that if you're not careful about what you measure and how you reward performance that people will achieve the metrics you want even if they have to game the system to do it. They can miss the whole point of the exercise and instead worry about getting the reward. We shouldn't do that to people and we shouldn't let them do that to us. We should use measures that tell us how we are doing about our financial performance, yes of course, AND also how we're doing at meeting our mission. Are we serving our purpose? Are

What do you get when you've achieved a goal? First, you get the result of that goal. That's usually cause for celebrating and energy you can convert into new efforts. You get to set another goal. A tougher, more ambitious, maybe even more noble goal. Growth is the direction that goals lead us in. Success raises the bar. It's a challenge, and it's a blessing. We get to do bigger and better things. We learn constantly from both our struggles and our successes, and we use that learning to move on to the next big goal. You've got another next big goal. Why not get started right away? -- Doug Smith Front Range Leadership:  Training Supervisors for Success doug smith training:  how to achieve your goals