Are you looking to grow individually or possibly grow your organization? I find that one of the keys to growing an organization is knowing how to set the right expectations. You see, many times, we set our expectations based on past history and past history alone. And the bottom line is, we don’t even know if our past history was good. We’ll take a sales figure of say, 300 and decide we should grow that by 10 percent this year. The new goal is 330. Well, was 300 a good number from last year or was it below industry average? And is 10 percent even an acceptable figure to think about?
We need to not only look at our past experience when we set our expectations but we need to look at other organizations both inside of our industry and outside of our industry to see what their experiences are. Then we’ll find out that 300 may have been a great number or may have been a weak number and the expectation should be 450, 475 or 500 based on what is truly possible.
Setting expectations too low will lead to low results. Setting expectations too high, well, that can lead to poor results as well. Expectations that are too high can lead to being demoralized and also making bad decisions because we’ll take unnecessary risk trying to reach those unrealistically high expectations. It’s critical that we learn to set the right expectations and when we establish the right expectations, our companies, our organizations will grow at a much faster pace.
