A famous management consultant of the 20th century, Peter Drucker believed that any action without planning fails. In his book The Practice of Management, Drucker introduced the Management by Objectives (MBO) strategy in which he explained that it is essential for employees to clearly see the goals they aspire to. Article from ScienceSoft.
This article analyzes the aptness of Drucker’s MBO strategy and SMART criteria by George T. Doran in the context of personal development planning, and will show how the MBO approach can be enhanced with the mobile technology.
Management by SMART Objectives
Introduced in 1954, by 1981 Management by Objectives was adopted by 27 percent of Fortune 1000 companies, and by 79 percent in 2008, as stated in Joseph Curtin’s research. This approach implies that goal-setting is the source of employee motivation, and in order to succeed, businesses have to cultivate clarity about personal and common missions.
George T. Doran in his article for Management Review referred to Drucker’s MBO and agreed that “the establishment of objectives and the development of their respective action plans are the most critical steps in a company’s management process.” He offered to characterize objectives “in a smart way,” where SMART is a mnemonic acronym for 5 indispensable qualities of each goal: Specific (clearly formulated), Measurable (with traceable progress), Assignable (involving specific people), Realistic (having all resources at hand), and Time-related (with a specific deadline).
With Drucker’s well-reasoned call for goal-oriented management and Doran’s focus on defining objectives, HR and staff managers seem to have finally gotten their hands on an effective strategy. Turned out, it wasn’t all that simple.
Why MBO-based personal development plans fail
Unfortunately, as mentioned in Sharon Gotteiner’s 2016 paper The OPTIMAL MBO, up until now many organizations have been following this approach incorrectly. As a result, the strategys unfairly blamed for the lack of effect, and sometimes referred to as outdated.
Gotteiner points out that while adopting the MBO principles, companies face many difficulties, including ineffective training, loose top management and insufficient incentives. For the MBO to show feasible results, all these challenges should be addressed directly.
At companies that are closest to understanding Drucker’s principles, the MBO strategy takes shape of personal development planning. According to Drucker, people are most motivated to pursue a goal when they set it for themselves, and personal development planning follows the idea by helping to formulate, control and regulate the process of moving towards a chosen mission. Still, personal development plans (PDPs) as they are implemented now, do not fulfill the potential of MBO. Both employees and managers often treat plans like standard and meaningless paperwork. Any kind of a paper-based form or an electronic sheet that just needs to be filled in ‘for the records’ simply can’t be taken seriously in today’s active, lively and mobile society.
Optimising personal development plans with a mobile app
Making a personal development plan go mobile may be the right call. Although a certain rearrangement of Doran’s SMART criteria deprives the term of its canny mnemonics, it helps to build a logical chain of how a PDP can work on mobile.
Each of the following steps not only describes what should be done to create and pursue meaningful goals, but is also matched with the suitable mobile functionality to bring the ideas of MBO to life.
Assessing existing skills – Realistic
To compose an effective development plan, an employee should first list and assess the skills they already have. However easy the task may sound, in actuality it slows down and kills the spirit of the employees who have been handed over just blank forms on paper or on the screen to fill in. Those who forget to mention all their talents or have 3 different wordings for one and the same skill, fail to lay the foundation for personal development and face inconveniences later. A PDP mobile app can guide employees through this challenging stage. By offering concise and specific questions, the app will help the workforce remember all their strong and weak points and make up comprehensive lists without forgetting any of their talents. The questions should certainly be tailored to certain departments and will touch upon skills (such as Microsoft Office software pack literacy) as well as personal traits.
All skills can be listed as competencies, with proficiency levels for each. Employees who prefer to double-check their own assumptions about themselves can be linked to internal or external resources, where they can complete a test, if applicable, and get the approximate results of their competency.
Setting Goals – Specific
After an employee’s lists and assesses skills and innate talents, it’s time for the actual development planning. The PDP app helps here too, first asking an employee to define the ‘big goal’: whether they want to focus on certain responsibilities and tasks of their position or vice versa, to expand their responsibilities and do more varied jobs. Based on the employee’s profile and the goals set, the app will offer a list of skills to improve or obtain. When finished, a plan will be available for the employee’s supervisor to review and approve. With line management involved, a mobile personal development plan can also turn into a human resources management (HRM) vacancy and promotion tool. Employees would log into the app to see a list of their company’s offers that relate to their profile. For instance, a sales manager will see an opportunity to transfer to a branch office as a senior and can learn what skills and competency levels they have to acquire to be offered a new position.
Set a Deadline – Time-related
Financial writer Gail Vaz-Oxlade says, “A goal without a deadline is just a dream.” Therefore, mobile PDPs should set a timeframe for achieving a certain goal. If the app is linked with an internal e-learning portal or a mobile learning app, it can calculate the amount of learning hours automatically. Otherwise, an employee will be asked to fill in an estimated amount of time they need to attain the skill. Deadline means that employees won’t be able to set their plan aside as soon as it’s created. The app can regularly show reminders to work on the progress and reflect the activity in the plan, thus being a perfect motivation system.
Track the progress – Measurable
When deadline is set in 3 months or more, an employee will most likely procrastinate without taking any real action until the very deadline. It’s a common behavioral pattern, and it certainly isn’t effective. Therefore, the road towards a goal should be divided into much smaller time periods with checkpoints. Knowing that they have to report about their progress weekly or biweekly, employees will feel obliged to actually work on their objectives. This approach, though indirectly, also applies to optimizing performance management and review as a regular practice.
Engaging those who can help – Assignable
Installed on corporate premises, a mobile PDP app backend will store the information about the workforce skills and make achievements public. This way, employees will see a list of colleagues they can consult with while working on a certain goal. For instance, in case an employee plans to go to a newly opened branch office in Mexico to supervise onboarding training in their corporate domain, they will definitely want to polish Spanish. And with other employees’ skill rankings, they can find a reliable advisor who is most proficient in the language.
A personal development plan on mobile devices brings in involvement, incitation and feasibility – all indispensable elements for correct implementation of the Management by Objectives strategy first suggested by Peter Drucker. Mobile plans are more interactive and flexible as they can be connected to a company’s learning modules, HRM vacancy / promotion systems as well as to other employees’ PDPs thus creating a collaborative network. With all the SMART criteria covered by the app, mobile PDPs will help businesses get the most of the MBO approach and experience its positive influence to the fullest.
