What Are SMART Goals?

Most teams have no shortage of ambition or intention to achieve goals and improve performance. The problem is they have difficulty converting broad intentions such as “grow revenue,” “improve customer satisfaction,” “ship faster,” and similar vague targets into specific, measurable goals that they can actually get done. Nebulous goals don’t just fail to inspire; they actively undermine team alignment because different people can interpret them differently. The SMART framework turns ambition into action. By forcing every goal to adhere to five specific criteria, it eliminates the guesswork about what achieving the goal looks like, and makes it possible to track whether the team is on its way to getting there. In this article, we’ll go over what SMART goals are, how to write them, and discuss the right tools to keep your team aligned from the moment a goal is set to the moment it is achieved. SMART goals refer to a goal-setting acronym and framework built on five criteria: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Each letter in the acronym is a filter against vague or ineffective goals. A goal that passes all five…