Founders' OfficeLumiere
Want to tell if a goal will be met? Look at how it’s set!
As VP at Lumiere Education and a coach at Ashoka University Women in STEM (AUWS), I work with some really sharp young people. Ambition is never the problem. Turning it into a goal is.
For 4 years, I’ve run a goal-setting workshop for every incoming batch of AUWS mentees. It’s the most important thing we do, after recruiting great Ashoka alumni as mentors.
At Lumiere (a team already obsessed about OKRs), for everyone I coach, we spend the first week setting their goals for the next 6 months.
Why? Because “I want to learn more about different fields of mathematics” and “I want to be a better manager” aren’t goals. They are wishes.
What exactly needs to be achieved? How will you measure it? By when? If you can’t answer those, you’ll never know if you got there. And if the deadline is too far off, it stops meaning anything. This is why world leaders love making broad promises for 2047.
A real goal is SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound.
So instead we set goals like:
“I’ll speak to at least 10 PhD students with different specialties about their areas of research by the end of this semester”
“I’ll do a monthly 1:1 feedback session with each of my reports for this quarter”
And we smash them!
We’re hiring for the Founders’ Office at Lumiere. Fair warning: in week one, I will ask you for your 6-month goals, and ‘learn a lot’ won’t cut it. Application link in the comments.
tal saysjoin the founders' office at lumiere to drive strategic execution and goal-setting alongside leadership
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