3 Principles for Crafting Institutional Goals

Crafting and executing institutional goals is an essential function and responsibility of executive leadership. Credit union decision-makers must weigh countless factors to ensure goals are in line with their members’ experience, performance and growth expectations. Put simply, the complexity and intricacy required to create goals that align with members’ constantly-evolving needs is a daunting task to say the least. However, by relying on foundational, guiding principles, credit union leaders can traverse the challenges of goal creation and position their institution for a bright and successful future.

Unmistakable

Humans are imperfect. We bring an endless array of cognitive interpretations, unconscious biases and subjective opinions to each decision we make. Undoubtedly, these inherent human traits can provide your credit union with problem-solving capabilities on a wide chasm of situational issues. Nonetheless, institutional goals that are formulated without strategically accounting for humanity’s biological idiosyncrasies are doomed to fail from the get-go.

As the credit union’s leadership, you have to be cognizant of how your goals will be perceived and construed by your employees as well as where and when subjectivity could occur. At every juncture of the goal creation process, you must ask yourself, “Is this goal objectively clear and unmistakable?” Another effective technique is to provide concrete examples of what achieving your institution’s goals would look like. This will illustrate to your employees a clear path of actions in furtherance of accomplishing your credit union’s goals.

Achievable

When constructing goals, credit unions have to be highly tactical in setting their teams up for achievable success. Leaders should seek to strike a balance between promoting reasonable growth and pushing your team to better its performance. Establishing SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely) will help lead your team in right direction. Many financial institutions make the fatalistic mistake of setting unattainable goals in the pursuit of reaching performance levels never seen before. This reckless strategy has demonstrated time and time again a plethora of unpleasant unintended consequences. For example, Ron Carucci reported in the Harvard Business Review that setting unrealistic goals has proven to promote unethical behavior by employees cutting corners in the way they reach a goal, or even lying when reporting how much of the goal they actually achieved. Clearly, it is important employees have the right resources, support and time to achieve institutional goals, otherwise potential damage could occur to both the employee’s professional development as well as reputation of your credit union.

Measurable

It is essential that your credit union’s goals have the aptitude of being consistently measured. 19^th Century physicist William Thomson puts it best: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” These metrics will help your credit union improve on a variety of fronts. First, the objective data will instruct if your goals were ultimately achieved or not as well as which strategies were effective and which failed to make muster. Kenneth Cukier, Data Editor of The Economist, correctly states in his TED Talk on big data that “Data doesn’t just let us see more of the same thing we were looking at. More data allows us to see new. It allows us to see better. It allows us to see different.” Second, metrics can help to give your credit union objective feedback on your employee’s performance as well as indicate where human capital could be better allocated. These additional metrics can give you the opportunity to further assess your employees and their skill sets compared to your institutional needs. Lastly, 2019 data can provide your leadership team with a solid footing from which to build goals for 2020.

By setting unmistakable, achievable and measurable goals, credit union leaders can position their institution, employees and members for a truly prosperous future.

Robin Kolvek is CEO at EPL, Inc. She can be reached at robin.kolvek@epl.net or 205-408-5300.