This is 7th & final article in a series about using SMART as a checklist to help get better outcomes for you and your team.

I wanted to sum up how you can use SMART to help you with almost everything you’re doing at work, and how that short little checklist can help you achieve really powerful outcomes. Importantly, even though you have likely heard SMART followed by GOALS most of the time, I strongly encourage you to stop thinking of SMART as just for goals. Start thinking of SMART work.

This is the 6th in a series of articles about using SMART as a checklist to help get better outcomes for you and your team.

The percussive end to SMART is T. For me (and in most of the references I’ve found), T always stands for Time-bound.

Time-bound is the classmate voted mostly likely to compromise—at least in the beginning as you’re getting the work organized and clarified. Time-bound is strongly influenced by Achievable and vice versa.

This is the 5th in a series of articles about using SMART as a checklist to help get better outcomes for you and your team.

If I HAD to pick a letter to vote off the SMART island, it would be R. In most sources, R stands for relevant… And don’t get me wrong, I think it is important to make sure that work is relevant to the company’s bottom line, the job that someone is doing (or wants to do), and to the person. I think of Relevant a gatekeeper.

This is the 4th in a series of articles about using SMART as a checklist to help get better outcomes for you and your team.

After you’ve figured out how you’re going to measure the specific work that you’ve defined, Achievable comes along to help you assess whether what you’ve defined is realistic, and in this capacity, Achievable can sometimes seem like a bit of a party pooper.

This is the 3rd in a series of articles about using SMART as a checklist to help get better outcomes for you and your team.

While all the letters are important – in my experience, it’s the M that gives the SMART checklist real muscle, and it’s that muscle that gives you higher quality and more complete outcomes. Setting and meeting measurements is really how you get things done.

This is the 2nd in a series of articles about using the SMART checklist.

When we’re writing goals or building out tasks for a job role, I think most folks know that they need to be specific. But it can be tricky to land on the right level of specificity—not enough, and the task or goal is vague or unclear, too specific runs the risk of micromanaging and not allowing for creativity and autonomy.

This is the intro to a series of articles about using the SMART checklist to help you accomplish more with not just goals, but project, strategic planning, and everyday tasks as well.

Conflict has gotten a really bad rap lately, and I think too many people think that we should work to avoid conflict. I’d like to challenge that thinking… at least in certain contexts. I want to make a case for the intransitive verb form of conflict ~
“to be different, opposed, or contradictory: to fail to be in agreement or accord.”

To do their best work, to be innovative and productive, people need to feel safe. They need to know that they can tell the truth, take risks, and make a mistake without fear of punishment. The truth is that mistakes are going to happen no matter what you do, but when you cultivate an environment of safety, where your team admits when things go wrong and takes the time to learn from that, you’ll likely see productivity increase and mistakes decrease. Here are some ideas to help build a culture of safety.

Candid conversations are not necessarily only ones about negative behavior. What I really mean is a conversation based on honesty and transparency, and I believe that conversations like these build trust, free up creativity, and build resilience.

I think they are critical, but I don’t think they are easy. They require bravery and vulnerability and enough confidence in ourselves to be ok with not knowing all the answers.

Like most people, I’m doing lots of video conferencing these days. I’ve seen lots of technical tips about how to make the software work better and how to protect from interlopers. I’ve seen some best practices, like placing your camera at eye level and making sure that you have clothes on!

But the thing that bothers me the most in group discussions is people talking over the top of each other. This article offers some ideas for managing that.