As a business owner or team leader, it’s natural to set the standards high. It’s an inherent characteristic of leaders to want the best for their organizations, teams, and customers, after all. However, aiming too high can sometimes be detrimental to your organization’s growth and success. Rather than setting unattainable standards or goals for yourself and your team, it’s important to properly develop your business processes and set realistic business goals to create sustainable growth.
One of the best ways to ensure your business succeeds and to set your employees up for success is to have a solid business plan, stay organized, and encourage collaboration. However, that’s not always easy, which is why it’s vital to practice realistic goal setting and use tools that will aid you on your road to being a successful entrepreneur.
MindManager® is a visualization software that that can be easily utilized as a valuable tool to set and track your business goals. Using any one of their mapping templates, you can brainstorm, organize, store, and share vital organizational information to keep you and your employees on track to succeed.
Why it’s important to set realistic business goals
Goal setting is a vital part of running a profitable business. Setting proper goals can give you focus, motivation, and drive. However, you don’t want to just set any goals. Instead, clear, well-defined, and realistic business goals are the best way to take control of your company’s direction and improve your chances of reaching your targets.
When creating goals for yourself, your organization, and employees, you must ensure that they are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time bound
These five objectives are commonly referred to as SMART goals, as they are an acronym for the steps used by entrepreneurs to consistently reach their objectives. By keeping these five factors in mind, you can focus your efforts in the right direction and increase your chances of successfully accomplishing your goals.
Example of a SMART goal
When setting SMART goals for your organization, taking the time to map out your plan of action can set you apart from your competitors. Unsure of how to set SMART goals? Use these examples to help you create your own version:
General goal: I would like to grow my cookie business.
Specific goal: I will find new stores who are willing to sell my product.
Measurable goal: I will measure my progress by ensuring I acquire one new customer monthly.
Achievable goal: I will bring in one new client a month, as this is the greatest number of clients that I can acquire without sacrificing the quality of my cookies.
Relevant goal: Adding new stores to my list of clients will ensure that my company gets visibility, increasing my income and success.
Timely goal: I will have one new client by the first day of next month.
Overall SMART goal: I will have my cookies sold in one new store a month. This will enable me to slowly and thoughtfully grow my client base and increase my revenue without reducing the quality of my products.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with intentions, ideas, and objectives. However, mapping out your course of action and setting realistic business goals can ensure your business prospers. Fortunately, there are business tools available to help you make ideas and dreams come true.
How MindManager can help you reach your goals
If you have trouble setting SMART goals for yourself, it may be valuable for you to utilize software that can help you capture, communicate, and track progress, such as MindManager. MindManager is a mind mapping software that can help you transform intentions into clear-cut, personalized mind maps and flowcharts for your team and business.
The ways in which MindManager can set your organization up for success are endless. With dozens of different charts, maps, and board templates to choose from, you can plan, organize, brainstorm, process, and problem-solve efficiently and effectively. In addition, goal setting for workers and for your business is made simple with intuitive mapping software. The other ways MindManager can benefit you, your business, and your employees includes:
Staying more organized
With MindManager, it’s easy to keep your goals in one central location that you can refer back to at any point. Organizing company data and information becomes seamless when you use one of their map templates, such as the Onion diagram, Tree diagram, Knowledge map, or Organizational chart.
These visual diagrams allow enable you to analyze probable outcomes of specific business situations, scenarios, and processes. MindManager’s maps also allow enable information and knowledge to be organized in a way that is easily accessible to your teams. Whether you’re aiming to show how work flows through your organization or are analyzing the dependencies and relationships between various parts of a process in your organization, organizational maps can help streamline the process, ultimately showing the path forward towards your goals.
Project management
Project management is the use of specific tools, skills, information, techniques, and knowledge within a team in order to achieve a goal within certain time constraints. Unfortunately, the project management process isn’t always easy. It’s often complex, even when your team is small.
Using MindManager’s mind mapping templates, users can collaboratively visualize tasks, activities, and events across a specific timeframe. Gantt charts, Kanban boards, Timeline charts, and Pert charts all make it possible to visualize workflow and ensure short- and long-term goals are being accomplished. In addition, mind maps take the pressure off project managers by making deadlines and processes clear-cut and straight forward for all employees.
Collaboration
Collaboration is one of the keys to a successful business. However, collaboration isn’t possible without the proper applications to help employees do so. MindManager’s maps were designed with team collaboration in mind. When you and your employees come together to set realistic business goals in a collaborative manner, anything is possible.
MindManager helps to enable collaborative goal setting because it is easily implemented into commonly used apps, such as Microsoft Teams. Here, you can easily access maps and templates directly in your chats without ever leaving the Teams app. Employees can add links, attachments, and valuable information directly to mind maps and collaborate to help you reach your goals.
Problem solving
To run a successful business, you’ll inevitably have to overcome obstacles and challenges. Problem-solving is an important part of pushing your organization forward. Unfortunately, problem-solving isn’t always so straightforward. Often, the road to a solution is rocky and confusing.
For this reason, it’s incredibly important to find tools that help you visualize your problem and assess the multitude of ways to solve it. With mind maps, you can examine relationships between sets of data, show the potential causes of a specific event or issue, and visualize your decision-making process. It’s possible that your organization is not reaching its goals because of unrealistic expectations nor or missing steps or information. Using visualization tools to solve problems allows enables you to figure out exactly where you went wrong and how to adjust your process to reach your goals.
Knowledge management
Knowledge management can be defined as creating, sharing, using, and managing resources and information within an organization. It creates value for an organization by ensuring that key information is available to the right people at the right time. Without proper management, your employees and your business will suffer, and your goals will seem even more difficult to achieve.
To ensure your employees are productive, the organizational knowledge of your business is consistently captured, and that your company information is well-documented and accessible, the proper tools are needed. MindManager provides users with a variety of map templates that can be used to ensure company information is always cohesive and within reach. Realistic business goals become reality when project managers implement mind maps into their business processes.
Ready to give MindManager a try?
MindManager includes a wide array of pre-built project planning and management templates. These customizable templates can help organize and keep track of project workflows and aid communication with team members and project stakeholders.
MindManager enables teams to add links to visual diagrams that live on web pages, local files, SharePoint documents, emails, and within other project resources. By aggregating all the important project data in a centralized document, you can easily seamlessly share information for better knowledge management and overall company success.
See how MindManager can help your organization set realistic goals and sign up for a free trial!
