Setting Great Goals

Great goals enable your district to focus on the “why” of a performance outcome, not just the “how” of the activity. Great goals allow for measurement and management that is necessary to enable school districts to become learning organizations that can adjust flexibly over time. Also, great goals help organizations become more agile in nature, allowing shorter time cycles for evaluating progress and more rapid redeployment of resources. Great goals also raise the overall accountability of an organization by increasing transparency. Today, many school district goals and associated management protocols fall short of what is needed for effective district improvement.

As you rethink your district’s goals, consider the most urgent challenges in your district that could be resolved in a given time period. Setting specific outcomes expectations and their timing will help bring change to your district now. Often, the activity to reach a given performance outcome is what gets listed as a goal or objective, but the activity should not be the goal in and of itself. Activities are the actions or the steps that will achieve the outcomes prescribed by your performance goal. For example, many activity-oriented goals begin using language like “Establish a plan for…” or “Submit a report on” or even “Assemble a team to…” These are activities, not true performance outcomes. People often set “activities” and assume that the results will take care of themselves. Activity-oriented management misses the connection to “why” the activity is being pursued: Is it to directly affect student achievement? Reduce costs? Improve operational efficiency? These are the performance outcomes to which myriad district goals should tie.

With activity-oriented goals and management, it is often possible that the district will successfully complete all the activities, but fail at the larger performance goal.

DMC supports the use of “SMART” goals. “SMART” goals are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Aggressive yet Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound (see Figure 1). They capture what, why, and when. Establishing metrics that clearly define what performance is expected and how it will be measured is a key element of any smart goal. For example, instead of broad goal statement like, “We will reduce the dropout rate in our district,” an appropriate performance goal might read “We will reduce the dropout rate by 25 percent in six schools over a 12-month period.” By being specific about the results you want to achieve, your successes and failures will be very clear and allow for ongoing adjustment and learning.

Progress toward performance goals can and should be managed and measured. The prioritization, work planning and execution that accompany great goals are critical parts of the management process to enable progress and successful change in your district. Responsibility and accountability need to be clear, with team members clearly aligned with specific performance goals. Timing and tradeoffs quickly become an important part of the planning process – with limited resources, which performance goals are truly the highest priorities? Given competing resources, where should we allocate our time and effort? However, without the structure of great goals, these conversations are far less manageable.

In one example, leaders in one DMC member district were able to recraft goals and workplans using the SMART approach. Rather than the more nebulous objective to “Improve school safety”, one leader worked to “Decrease lunchtime incidents by 20% at 5 high schools in the next twelve weeks.” This SMART goal enabled efficient workplans to be developed, data to be collected, progress to measured, and resources to be efficiently allocated. Regardless of whether the objective is reached in the end, the process allows for fuller understanding of where progress is made and why, thereby growing the leadership capacity of the organization.

DMC recommends that districts invest in professional development to train their teams to carry out results-oriented goals more quickly. Make your district work efficiently by implementing the changes that work. For more information on results-first planning, see "Delivering Results, Developing Leaders" in the DMC Resource Library.