Some thoughts on Goals

The development of this post is starting to be funny, almost to the point where I’m scared to think about it.

This post has taken three months and one day to get to this point. And the funny part is the topic and trigger of this post is and was the development of annual professional goals at work.

Three months and one day, and 9 drafts, later, and this post is starting to scare me.

It could be an indication of how busy I’ve been. Or at least how little time I’ve been making for things that aren’t immediately family or work related. I started the first draft of this post on March 8 during a lunch trip to Bean There Cafe, and here I am, almost two months later, still working on it, on multiple trips to Bean There later.

Here I am now , and I’m still not sure this is going to be the last draft. Nor do I know that looking at the results of the last several drafts is going to be helpful, or if it just isn’t better to stare at an empty screen and become surprised that it slowly fills with [hopefully] useful thoughts.

Goals are something that I tend to have a somewhat complicated relationship.

Every year there is an exercise at work, at various levels of absurdity and relevance, to set goals for a the coming year. Always some kind of attempt to make staff partially responsible for lackluster improvements in compensation.

On the personal side, there are also things that I want to get done in an attempt to make my life better, or at lesat less boring. And I’m not talking about Natalie’s “Honey DO” list.

I’ve been less than perfect in completing personal goals. Even in the case where a goal “perfectly aligned” with both personal and professional needs/wants/desires/stuff, it’s amazing how quickly something becomes completely irrelevant during the events that occur between breakfast and diner.

As I’ve gotten furhter away from heads-down system administration (the whole care and feeding, keep the servers up and running, and nobody gets hurt day job) it has been easier to come up with goals that are stay relavent longer than one day, one week or one quarter. In the past, goal setting conversations have ranged from an all hands conference call where everyone was given the exact same set of goals. Just too bad that none of them had any relevance with what it was I was doing day-to-day. And every checkpoint along the way usually started with “good job you’re doing there.” And “Don’t worry about the group goals, they don’t apply to you.” and usually ended with “I only have five minutes cause we’re way behind schedule on these meetings, KTHXBAI.” [Maybe without the LOLcat] The original draft of this post was angry.
I had just finished talking to a recently former coworker (divestiture). And he had just had the initial goals conversation with someone how now may or may not actually be the manager responsible for him. He had just gotten some negative feedback that seem more focused on his internal clients inability to follow processes and account for effort than it had to do with his ability to do his job and deliver on time. But the leader was remote, and the client’s only feedback was about delays in delivery. The delays were caused by the client’s failures, not the coworker’s. The original draft made use of words like suffering, struggling and questions of relevance.
Charged conversations that occur over the second cappuccino of a trip to Bean There might not be the best triggers for blog posts. And in three months, I don’t know if his situation has gotten any better. My own situation is different, from his at least. I’m still remote from everyone else I work with, but the account seems to appreciate what I can do to help them. The team member I work with has the same kind of deep understanding of their existing systems that I have brought to previous accounts. It’s refreshing not to have to make up or discover everything as I go along. I have goals that I actually think I can accomplish, describe the kind of work that I am actually doing, and might possibly add value to both the client and my own group. And add to all that, I can add participation on two group initiatives related to things I’m actually interested in and excited about. After three months, most of the energy of the original post is gone. But the Anger that triggered it isn’t my own. It is frustrating to hear what is happening to systems I spent close to 13 years managing, some even designing from scratch myself. Even more so hearing about problem with friends and former coworkers (after that long, I still know a lot of people there, I just don’t work with them).

I can’t really say how many year’s goals were eventually proven to be well out of the range of what was actually possible in the reality of not enough time and not enough funding. But the goals get written every year. And at the end of each year there is a meeting where I sit down with a manager and try to align what was actually done that year with the goals that were approved and what actually happened.
Let’s just say that some years, the goals the get approved are not just crap, but impossible to accomplish given corporate reality crap. For me, this year doesn’t seem to be a crap year. I wish more people weren’t that unlucky.

Now that I’ve gotten this post out of the way, as poorly written as I fear it is, I can move on to other topics, hopefully.