Why Everyone Should Mark Themselves Out of 10 Every Working Day

Setting yourself targets is a vital part of ensuring continual growth and development in any walk of life or personal endeavour.

And the same can be said for all businesses or organisations - any manager or leader should be constantly monitoring performance in any way they can.

From a personal perspective I have always set myself targets throughout my career and regularly reviewed those targets. When it comes to progression I have said in the past that regular reviews are a good idea to ensure constant acceleration and forward momentum.

When it comes to running a business you have to be constantly keeping an eye on the operation and your managers. Once or twice a year simply isn't enough.

I have always said that everybody's performance should be measurable; it should be easy to see what value they add to the organisation. All managers and team leaders should see their performance and results reviewed on a weekly basis. That way, if the performance does drop then action can be taken to remedy the situation as soon as possible.

I have long been in the habit of setting my key people targets. For example I would expect my finance director to improve savings year on year and also look at ways of improving margins. Remember that targets must be realistic and achievable because there is nothing more demoralising than being set up for a failure.

But you always lead by example and if you are setting your staff targets, then there is no reason that as a chief executive you should be excluded from the monitoring process.

Each week you should take a close look at the performance of the company in terms of revenues, costs and profit margins.I regularly take time out to look at my personal performance and question whether there are things that I could have improved on or done differently.

Of course market conditions and changing circumstances can affect the bottom line but you also need to be critical of your own performance and the effect it has had on the company. If the business is not performing as well as it should be, then you need to ask yourself some tough questions.

Any good manager has to have the ability to able to step back from the day to day running of a business to look at their own performance – after all no one else inside the company is going to do it for you.

Keep up to date with all the latest news, jobs and videos at Hamilton Bradshaw.