Goals, Objectives and Measures of Effectiveness (August 2008)

Having a clear picture of where the client is headed and what is the expected outcome is of primary importance in the mentoring relationship.

The MPRI expectation for mentoring is to ensure that the client/customer is imbued with specific functional skills or organizational capability that will enable the client to achieve a level of success that was not previously attainable without our involvement. In short, thoroughly teach our client’s the functional skills to become better today than yesterday and even better tomorrow than today!

To help our clients and customer’s reach a higher level of performance it is a good idea to assess where the client is and then to help establish goals and objectives that lead to optimum success. Once those goals or objectives are established it is important to develop specific measures that will recognize the development of their effectiveness; i.e., measures of effectiveness.

Goals are the things that the client wants to achieve, objectives are the intermediate steps to achieve the goal and measures of effectiveness identify if the goal has been achieved, or not!

Using the organizational imperatives can be an ideal method of identifying specific goals to be achieved. For example, if the goal is to develop and write a comprehensive training manual, it is best to determine what current training documents and doctrine exist and how that information can be improved upon, rather than recreating work that has already been done. The objectives would be based on subjects to be covered and the time determined to research, write, review and publish the document.

When developing measures of effectiveness, each needs to answer a specific question, such as; “what will change, by how much, by when.” The following acronym… “SMART” …has been designed as a means of determining if your measures of effectiveness are established to support and measure progress:

S pecific – do we know precisely what has to happen to be successful?

M easureable – how will we know if we’ve achieved effectiveness?

A ttainable – is the measure realistic or do-able?

R esults – oriented – will it really move us toward our ultimate goal?

T ime-limited – when do we want to have this accomplished?


Helping the client define obtainable goals is the first step to measuring effectiveness. Add specific objectives to be accomplished over a given period of time and you help to develop an effective, measureable plan of action. These become the essential elements of effectiveness that can be measured over time and promote a legacy of accomplishment for the client.