Setting Your Development Goals: Start with Your Values

This guidebook is about changing the way you think about setting goals. It is about identifying goals that are important and meaningful to five key areas of your life: career, self, family, community, and spirit. The goals you create will be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timed. Setting meaningful goals will reward you with real progress toward success in all areas of your life.

This series of guidebooks draws on the practical knowledge that the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) has generated, since its inception in 1970, through its research and educational activity conducted in partnership with hundreds of thousands of managers and executives. Much of this knowledge is shared-in a way that is distinct from the typical university department, professional association, or consultancy. CCL is not simply a collection of individual experts, although the individual credentials of its staff are impressive; rather it is a community, with its members holding certain principles in common and working together to understand and generate practical responses to today's leadership and organizational challenges.
The purpose of the series is to provide managers with specific advice on how to complete a developmental task or solve a leadership challenge. In doing that, the series carries out CCL's mission to advance the understanding, practice, and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide.

Bill Sternbergh helped design CCL 's flagship Leadership Development Program (LDP). In his thirty years with the Center, he has worked internationally with scores of organizations and thousands of executives. He was appointed a CCL Senior Fellow in Leadership Education in 1992, holds an AB in psychology from Guilford College, and has completed graduate work in psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of West Florida.

Sloan R. Weitzel is product manager for e-products and services at CCL. Before assuming responsibility for developing CCL leadership development tools for use on the Internet, he was a senior program associate at CCL. In that role he worked with more than two thousand executives as a certified feedback coach. He holds an MBA from Duke University.