Be careful to not set CONFLICTING GOALS

To start with, a conflicting goal is one that CONFLICTS with another goal you have set. Basically, they compete with one another. The closer you move towards one, the farther you get from the other! NOT GOOD!

In order to best explain how a conflicting goal works in real life, I need to tell a short story. My wife took a part-time job at a major discount drug store. She wants to keep active and make a few bucks on the side.

So this particular store wants to sell you a “subscription based product” when you check out. You get charged like $10 a month but you get back more than that in coupons. The store gets some regular guaranteed income (when sold by the thousands nationwide) and the customer gets a bunch of discount coupons. Win Win in a sense!

The store really leans hard on the associates to sell these things. They have weekly meetings, daily goals are set and even some high-level contact with District Managers to go over the numbers. It’s a BIG DEAL. Managers get threatened with termination if they don’t sell enough of these things each month.

This is an ONGOING PROCESS with no end in sight. But now they add a TWIST. They now also want to steer customers to use the “self-checkout lanes”. They want to do more business with LESS. Sounds great right? It is EXCEPT that the self-checkout machines CAN’T SELL THESE SUBSCRIPTIONS. Only an associate can! The bosses want more subscriptions AND more use of the self-checkout lanes!

What are we left with? A CONFLICTING GOAL! Now if a multi-billion dollar company can make a mistake having conflicting goals, the average cleaning business start-up, or even experienced pro can do the same. So the moral of todays post is BEWARE of making these simple mistakes. Think it through, be real careful when you want to achieve something. Goals needs to all be pushing in one direction to be effective!