It’s easy, right? (If your answer is yes, then let’s have lunch so you can teach me how!) If you’re like me, you might think, “I will be successful…once I accomplish this, after I have that, when I have a family, etc.” The list goes on and on, though it may be slightly different for us all. Have you ever met a major goal and still not felt satisfied? If so, what’s the problem? Having such goals is obviously wonderful and it must feel amazing to set out to do something you said you were going to do, but I know that sometimes when I’ve met the goal, I don’t feel different. I expected to feel different.
Part of the problem may be that the goals we set for ourselves are too often a solution to meet a need. Maybe you want to feel important, so getting to a certain level in your career is what you’re seeking, or you want to feel alive, so traveling around the world is what you aspire to. Perhaps you crave stability, so you desire to have a family and a home. Distinguishing the solution from the goal is important so we can do our best to fulfill the need and implement the best solution. Maybe you can fulfill the goal of feeling alive just by shaking up your daily routine instead of depleting your savings to lug your family through airports around the world!
This concept is just as true at work as it is in your personal life. Identifying a solution as the goal is entirely too easy. If we do this, we might consider our projects successful because we’ve met the goal: for example, implemented a specific system. However, once implemented, we find that our customers are still frustrated and unhappy or nothing has changed. Maybe the goals were not properly identified, which, as you can imagine, could significantly impact the entire project. Take, for instance, one of the goals for the new Yawkey building – reduce patient wait time. The data showed that the changes implemented did result in less wait time in many patient processes, and in general, overall patient satisfaction was at a record high following the opening of Yawkey. However, one surprising discovery was that, though wait time did decrease for blood draw for the patients, they were actually less satisfied with lab services. Turns out that what was really important to patients was a comfortable waiting area.
So, when you’re working on a project, think critically about the goals of the project and make sure they are indeed what you’re trying to achieve, not how. With any luck, your customers will feel differently after you’ve helped them achieve their goal!