The Manager’s Playbook: Can Chat GPT help you write better SMART Objectives in less time?
In today’s fast-paced business world, managers and employees often find themselves juggling multiple responsibilities, leaving little time (or motivation!) to craft well-defined goals or objectives - essential for effective individual and organisational performance.
However, with the rise of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, an interesting question arises regarding how these could be harnessed to not only save time in the goal setting process, but potentially improve the overall quality of organisational objective setting.
What Are SMART Objectives?
Before diving into how ChatGPT can assist, lets just recap what SMART objectives are:
Specific: The goal should be clear and precise, leaving no room for ambiguity
Measurable: There should be a concrete way to assess progress and determine when the goal has been met
Achievable: The objective should be realistic, given the resources and constraints at hand
Relevant: It must align with broader business goals, ensuring that it contributes to the organisation’s success
Time-bound: The objective should have a defined timeline, creating a sense of urgency and focus
The science behind SMART objectives.
Setting objectives and goals is a powerful way of motivating and engaging people, as well as playing an important part in facilitating the performance and effectiveness of an organisation. Our understanding of how setting goals motivates is based on extensive research carried out since the 1960s by prominent psychologists, such as Locke and Latham, and more recently by Klein et al (1999). Their findings identify that there are a number of key principles which underpin how goal setting works, these are that:
Difficult goals lead to higher performance than easier ones, so long as they have been accepted by the person trying to achieve them
Specific goals lead to higher achievement than general ‘do your best’ goals
Knowledge of results (i.e. feedback) is essential if the full performance benefits of setting difficult and specific goals are to be achieved
The benefits of goal setting is influenced by a person’s goal commitment
The challenge of writing SMART objectives.
So, if SMART objectives are so powerful in aiding performance, what’s the problem?
The challenge, is that whilst a good portion of managers and employees know that writing SMART objectives are good for them (a bit like eating your vegetables!), putting them together can sometimes feel onerous or time-consuming. Managers may struggle to articulate goals that are both specific and realistic, while employees may find it difficult to align their objectives with broader company goals. Moreover, the process often requires a balance between strategic thinking and attention to detail, which can be challenging when time is limited.
So what can AI do?
With the advent and increasing popularity of generative AI tools, such as Chat GPT, over the last couple of years interesting questions/opportunities arise regarding how they can be used to support business processes; including the setting of objectives.
Whilst I have my own musings and thoughts on the topic, I thought it would be interesting to pose answer this question to Chat GPT and see what it had to say. In response it outlined the following ways in which AI can help with setting SMART objectives:
1. Generate specific objectives. One of the hardest parts of writing SMART objectives is getting the specifics right. ChatGPT can help by generating tailored suggestions based on input provided by the user. For instance, if a manager inputs a general goal such as “Improve customer service,” ChatGPT can refine this into a more specific objective: “Reduce average customer service response time by 20% within the next three months.”
2. Ensure measurability. ChatGPT can assist in creating measurable objectives by automatically suggesting quantifiable metrics. For example, it can prompt you to add measurable outcomes such as “increase sales by 10%,” “reduce error rates by 15%,” or “train 50 employees on the new software by the end of Q4.” This ensures that the objectives are not only clear but also trackable.
3. Assess achievability. The AI model can analyse the feasibility of an objective by considering factors like resources, time, and constraints. For example, if a goal seems too ambitious, ChatGPT might suggest a more realistic target, ensuring that the objective remains challenging yet achievable.
4. Align objectives with relevance. ChatGPT can help in ensuring that individual objectives are relevant to the organisation’s overarching goals. By providing context or suggesting alignment with company-wide initiatives, the AI can guide users to create objectives that are not only personally meaningful but also strategically important.
5. Set clear timelines. Finally, ChatGPT can assist in making objectives time-bound by recommending specific deadlines. For instance, if a user sets a goal to “launch a new product,” ChatGPT might suggest adding a timeline: “Launch the new product by the end of Q2 2024.” This ensures that the objective has a clear endpoint, which is crucial for maintaining momentum.
Sounds good but what are the limitations?
Before sprinting off to log into your Chat GPT account and speed-generate a dazzling and impressive array of SMART objectives, let’s take a moment to just check what challenges and limitations of using AI might be here.
Contextual Understanding. Chat GPT may not fully understand the specific context of your organisation and may miss some of the nuances that makes your team and industry unique. This potentially leads to objectives that feel a bit too generic or like they were plucked from some corporate playbook.
Lack of Strategic Insight. AI doesn’t inherently possess strategic insight so might struggle to ensure that the objectives it generates align with the long-term goals of an organisation; or it generates objectives that are conventional rather than innovative or visionary. Without additional input or direction, Chat GPT could fail to capture the big picture, leaving you to connect the dots between today’s tasks and tomorrow’s ambitions.
Accuracy and Relevance. The quality of objectives it generates will depend heavily on the clarity of the input provided. ChatGPT is like a sponge—it gives you back what you put in. Feed it vague info, and you’ll get vague objectives. Precision in, precision out. Furthermore, without careful guidance Chat GPT might generate objectives based on incorrect assumptions or outdated information. ChatGPT isn’t infallible.
Human input and oversight required. Even with the seemingly endless AI assistance a tool like Chat GPT can provide, human oversight is essential to ensure objectives are relevant, aligned with business goals and grasp the subtleties required to balance ambition with realism.
Ethical and privacy concerns. When using a took like Chat GPT there can be concerns about sharing sensitive business data with AI, so get the nod from your higher ups before inputting any potentially confidential information. Also, AI could reflect biases from its training data, leading to unintended favouritism in the objectives, so sense check for fairness and inclusivity. Finally, make sure you’re following the GDPR playbook to avoid any nasty surprises.
Top tips for using Chat GPT to set SMART objectives.
Despite the potential limitations outlined above, everything considered Chat GPT still has the potential to be a useful tool in your arsenal when it comes to setting SMART objectives. With that in mind, here’s 7 top tips on how to get it to work for you:
Provide clear and detailed input. Be specific and start with clear and detailed descriptions of what you want to achieve. The more specific your input, the more tailored and accurate the generated objectives will be. Including context and relevant background information, such as company goals or team priorities, will further improve the quality and relevance of the output and help ChatGPT align the objectives it generates with your companys’ broader business strategies.
Focus on measurability. Ask ChatGPT to suggest measurable outcomes, such as percentages or numerical targets, to ensure the objectives are trackable - and then double-check the proposed metrics are realistic and aligned with your team’s capabilities. If not, provide feedback and ask it to regenerate until you get a set of measurable outcomes you can work with.
Iterate and refine. Use ChatGPT to generate several versions of the objective, then refine and combine the best elements. After generating an objective, review it with your team or manager to ensure it’s realistic and relevant, then use ChatGPT to make any necessary adjustments.
Request timeframes. Ask ChatGPT to include specific deadlines or timelines to ensure that the objectives are time-bound. You can even ask it to help break down long-term objectives into shorter milestones that can be reviewed regularly.
Maintain human oversight. Always review the objectives generated by ChatGPT to ensure they meet your needs and are free of any errors or biases.
Experiment with prompts. Experiment with different ways of phrasing your requests to see which prompts yield the best results. If the first output isn’t quite right, use follow-up prompts to refine the objective or add missing details. As part of your prompts you can also tailor the language and tone of the objectives to fit your organisation’s culture and communication style.
Share best practice. If you find using Chat GTP to generate your objectives useful, then share the love! Share with your team prompts or tips that have worked well in generating strong objectives - and encourage them to do the same.
Specify output format: Unless directed to otherwise, Chat GTP loves a bullet pointed list! If this isn’t the right format for you, let it know what is your preferred format for the output you are requesting. As well as bullet points and numbered lists, it can also be directed to present information as tables, paragraphs of text, flow chart, checklists, etc.
Final thoughts. Balancing AI and human insight.
Using ChatGPT to write SMART objectives has the potential to transform the way you writes SMART objectives. Like strapping a jetpack to your goal-setting process!
By leveraging an AI-powered tool such as Chat GPT, it can offer time efficiencies, enhanced clarity and improve consistency across teams. Furthermore, it has the capability to quickly generate precise and actionable goals, reducing cognitive load, support scalability, and ensure that objectives are aligned with best practice, and make the goal-setting process more effective and streamlined.
However, despite all the pros it’s essential to balance the use of AI with human judgment to navigate its limitations effectively. Even the best AI assistant is just that—an assistant. You’re still the one steering the ship.
Find out more…
If you would like to know more about how Psychology Works could help your organisation with objective setting, performance management or leadership development more broadly, just give us a shout! On 01273 569314 or hello@psychologyworks.global.
In the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed our musings on objective setting and AI, why not check out some of our other blogs and thought pieces. For real time updates and insights you can also find us on LinkedIn, our social media platform of choice: @PsychologyWorks and @mariagardner.
