Middle Way Management and Setting Goals

In my last post, I discussed how Aristotle and Buddha have offered us complementary ways of being based upon virtue ethics and a recognition of suffering and its alleviation. In this post, I consider goal setting within the context of Middle Way Management™.

The Middle Way Management Context
What do I mean by "the context of Middle Way Management"? I mean the practice context in which you find yourself as an active Middle Way Manager™. Middle Way Management includes two major aspects of Buddhism that I have modified to dovetail with organizational management goals and objectives. The first is similar to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism:

1. Suffering exists within organizations at the individual, team, and organizational levels,
2. Organizational suffering is the direct result of managerial practices,
3. There is a way out of organizational suffering, and
4. The way out of organizational suffering is through the practice of Middle Way Management.

Along with the Four Noble Truths, Buddhists find their way out of suffering by treading the Eightfold Path. This path is comprised of three sections: Morality, mindfulness, and wisdom. While the Eightfold Path includes wonderful ways to reach a state of ultimate awareness that includes right thought, right speech, and right action, I have chosen to replace them with the Cognitive Domains™ as a means of practicing the Middle Way Management approach. It is mere coincidence that I have identified eight Cognitive Domains. I can clearly see a time when I will add more or refine the current list as new knowledge and insights reveal themselves to me.

Setting Your Goals
Most goal-setting exercises emphasize three types of goals: Short-term, intermediate, and long-term. It is vitally important that Middle Way Managers set realistic goals of all types. This speaks to vision (a moral imperative of the Middle Way Manager) and motivation. A team cannot move forward without vision and vision cannot be formulated without active goal-setting. Likewise, goals act as motivational milestones at the individual, team, and organizational levels. How such goals are set is an opportunity for the Middle Way Manager to practice inclusive leadership that is such a vital part of Middle Way Management.

Contextualizing Your Goals
As a Middle Way Manager works with his/her team during goal-setting exercises, it is important that all participants remain mindful of the primary goal of Middle Way Management: The relief of organizational suffering. For instance, a work team might embark on the exercise of setting sales goals for the year. The aggressiveness of the sales numbers will be determined by two questions: 1) Are the numbers (i.e., goals) realistic - if they are not, they will create a significant amount of suffering at all organizational levels as they are not met and 2) Are the target numbers designed to truly reduce suffering within the organization - an instance where they might not is one in which support workers cannot support the numbers of widgets sold.

In the end, the reduction of organizational suffering is the primary focus of the Middle Way Manager's goal-setting activities. This includes the adoption of a realistic view of organizational capabilities, as well as consideration of team capacities, support team availability and capacities, and overall organizational goals and objectives (to name but a few). The Middle Way Manager does not set goals and, hence, vision in a vacuum. The Middle Way Manager always emphasizes the relief of organizational suffering tempered by accountability inside and outside his/her work team.

In my next post, I will consider the importance of vision to the Middle Way Manager. As I've said here and elsewhere, vision is a moral imperative of the Middle Way Manager, one that must be executed with care, precision, and joy.

Go now, and manage with compassion!

Onward! Darin

Copyright © 2009/2010, Darin R. Molnar, PhD. All rights reserved.