Goal setting problems and solutions for L&D leaders

As we enter the awesome new year of 2025, learning as well as development professionals in SMEs and larger organisations must actively revisit the complications of goal setting. Are they SMART? ASMART? Some other sort of SMART? Or are they often what they are, bland and non-descript, but with plenty of reasonable reasons of why they are the goals!

Whether improving employee engagement, accelerating innovation, or driving running efficiency is your focus, effective goal-setting is recognised as the basis of sustained success. By dealing with key challenges upfront, your workforce can be empowered by learning, and development initiatives to achieve stretch goals that truly move the needle for the organisation.

I've been reflecting some of the common pitfalls that different enterprises encounter, teased out a couple of ‘big ones’ and thrown in some possible solutions to stimulate your thinking, so here goes…

Limited Resources: Large organisations usually possess greater financial as well as human resources than SMEs; however, the scale of their operations often makes it difficult to set and pursue ambitious goals. To overcome this, focus on the most important goals and explore external ‘resource’ funding sources.

Balancing short-term and long-term objectives: Larger enterprises must actively find the perfect balance between immediate needs as well as long-term planned goals. A balanced scorecard approach can be implemented, along with the proportionate allocation of resources, to help strike this balance.

Formal planning processes are often lacking: while more structured processes may be present in larger companies, a thorough goal-setting framework, such as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), should be developed, along with investments in calculated planning workshops for the leadership team.

Rapidly changing market conditions: In fast-paced, volatile markets, larger organisations often battle to set long-term goals effectively. To effectively address this challenge, you can actively incorporate regular market analysis along with scenario planning and also build agility into the goal-setting process.

Unclear Vision or Direction: The absence of a clear long-term vision among some large enterprise leaders complicates the process of setting goals. A visioning exercise with the leadership team is eased, along with the vision, and goals being communicated effectively to all employees, which can help overcome this.

Difficulty in measuring progress: Measuring progress can be difficult for many large organisations because they often lack effective tools or systems to track progress towards their goals. By implementing key performance indicators (KPIs) along with dashboards and leveraging digital tools and software, teams can streamline the monitoring and reporting of goals.

Resistance to change: Employees in large enterprises often find themselves accustomed to created practices and frequently resist more structured goal-setting approaches. Including employees in the goal-setting process is important. This approach encourages enthusiastic buy-in as well as necessary training and support to help tackle this challenge.

It's not an endless list, but tackling some of these many challenges as well as implementing a considerate strategy for goal setting, learning and development professionals in large enterprises will enable their organisations to achieve outstanding results in 2025 as well as beyond.