As a corporate leader, your work life largely revolves around achieving business goals. The challenge with business goals is as they are set at the beginning of the year and with the lapse of time they become more daunting and unachievable.The situation gets more complicated as the team part of the goals also feels the goals are unachievable and surrender even before they begin working on them.

Follow these 5 steps to set and achieve your business goals.

Assess Where You Are – As you start the exercise of setting goals make an honest assessment of where you are and where you want to go, think about external and internal factors that will affect your goal achievement.

Write down the list – Write down the goals you want to achieve quickly, say in 10 minutes. Whatever you want to achieve in this business year. Don’t edit write them down as per your vision and dreams.

Set Goals – Now relook at this list and start prioritizing these goals from the perspective of need and impact. Select those goals which are most important to achieve and will have the maximum impact. Also make sure these goals are measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. Set goals which require a stretch but are not an unachievable dream.

As you are setting goals, keep in mind the following:

• What do you want & with Whom?
• When do you want it?
• How will you know you have achieved it?
• What support do you need & from whom? What do you want them to do?

Post this exercise you should be able to zero down on specific goals you want to achieve. Don’t worry if the goals are only two or three.

Companies often make mistakes by setting too many goals which although are good for goal setting exercise on paper but have no real value as they can’t be achieved.

Recall a Great Goal You Achieved in Near Past – Think about a goal you achieved of which you are really proud.

• What resources you had?
• What were the key elements that were vital in achieving the goal including, team, strategy and company support?
• What learning’s you got?
• Can the resources and learning’s help you achieve the current goal?
• How will you celebrate if you achieve your current goal?

Set Action Points – Set monthly and weekly action points for each goal. This activity helps you to be on track and make you realize if you get diverted. A good way of implementing this step is to make use of sticky notes or postcards and stick them where you can see them the most.