Welcome to a new year! Whether your organization has tasked you with coming up with your goals for the year, or you’re on a personal journey to define them for yourself, the steps below will help you determine where to start, how to make sure your goals are meaningful, and how to capture and track them.
This isn’t a prescribed set of rules—it’s a list of things to consider, to help you understand what’s important to you as an admin and as a driver of success in your organization, so you can set goals that matter to you.
The tips below are a helpful starting point in the goal-setting process; take what you need and do what works best for you!
Oftentimes, when it comes to looking at the year ahead of us in order to plan goals, we start with an empty sheet of paper. And if that works for you, great! But if you find yourself staring at that blank piece of paper (like I usually do!), wondering what you want to achieve, aim for, and accomplish next year, I’ve found it incredibly helpful to go backward. Meaning, look back at previous accomplishments before looking forward.
Take 30 minutes (or longer) and look back on all your past projects, deliverables, accomplishments, and high-fives you’ve gotten from your organization. Take stock of what those things are, what they mean to you, and how you keep building on them for this year.
Think about the tough projects you worked on, the new things you implemented, and the skills you stretched. Think about the times you felt proud and frustrated. It’s very likely that in all of that, you will find areas that you really want to explore, either because you feel really great doing them, or because you want to feel really great doing them.
And in case you’re looking in 100 different places to find all this information, consider building yourself a brag book. This episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast is a phenomenal starting point for creating a system for you to capture your successes! And if you don’t have a brag book yet, that’s okay! Start one this year, so that you’re already ahead for goal setting next year; “future you” will be very grateful you did. ?
January is the most common time to start new habits, and it’s really easy to start them and let them slowly fade over time. Goals and habits are inextricably linked; rarely can you meet a goal without implementing good habits. Consider your goals for the year, and think about the ways you can create habits around those goals. One valuable resource for helping you create good habits is the Essential Habits Trailhead module.
Whether you’ve completed Essential Habits already or it’s going to be a shiny new badge for you, it’s a fantastic Trailhead module to ground you in creating habits around core responsibilities, any time you need it! What are Essential Habits, and why are they so important? Let’s dive in!
The four core responsibilities of Salesforce Admins are User Management, Data Management, Security, and Actionable Analytics. Essential Habits walks you through the steps of forming good habits across those four core responsibilities.
You can meet, and build upon, each of the four core responsibilities by creating good, consistent habits. Whether you’re new to the admin ecosystem or a multi-star Ranger, you’ve likely noticed that a lot of the advice for admins comes in the form of “tricks” or “hacks.”
While those can be helpful for finding a faster way to do something you’re stuck on, it may not apply to every situation and it may not be repeatable. A habit, on the other hand, is something you use not only repeatedly but consistently so it becomes second nature. If you’re looking to really amp up your goals this year, consider giving yourself the goal of creating good habits, using the Essential Habits Trailhead module as your starting point.
By revisiting the content in the Trailhead module throughout the year, you can easily spot areas that may need more focus or habits you’re building well. If you need some inspiration on getting started with a method to track your habits, we’ve created this template for reference.
The skills kit was launched in April of last year. In the last several months, we have loved seeing the way it has come to life in the community! The skills kit highlights the business skills that are relevant to driving success both for you professionally and for your organization. The business skills that all admins use aren’t unique to admins, but the ways in which admins bring those skills to life are unique. There’s also a community-led blog series that focuses on these skills!
All 14 skills are mapped to quantifiable examples of the ways admins can use their expertise, transferrable skills, and experiences to be successful in their roles and bring success to their organizations. If you’re looking for a concrete place to start your goal journey for the year, consider the ways in which the 14 skills can be incorporated into your day and your habits.
Building on the recommendation above to revisit Essential Habits, one idea is to connect the habits directly to the skills kit to put even more structure around your goals. Let’s take one skill from the skills kit (communication) and bring it to life in a goal-setting exercise across two core responsibilities!
Let’s say one goal this year is improving communication. What does that look like? How do you measure it? And how do you know when you’ve been successful? Let’s think about how we might connect that to two of your core responsibilities: Actionable Analytics and User Management.
Maybe you’ve built a great practice of providing reporting to executives within your organization, and that reporting helps put a spotlight on new revenue opportunities. If you’ve made it a habit and you’re providing that reporting every week, you likely don’t think much about it after the report has been formatted and sent.
But what if you quantified how much incremental revenue was brought in because of you surfacing those analytics? How would you communicate that to your organization? At the end of the year, you might be able to say you met your communication goal by surfacing and reporting on analytics that drove an X% increase in revenue.
Simply put: Once you’ve built the habit, make sure you’re communicating how often you engage with it, and what those results are.
Let’s do that same exercise for the core responsibility of User Management. Not only are you solving business challenges, but you’re leading your organization on using Salesforce to create success, and you want your colleagues to embrace the platform too. One of the ways in which User Management can become a habit is by scheduling time to observe how users are engaging with the platform, no matter how or where you work.
For this exercise, let’s assume you’re doing a lot of your training/user observation in those random moments when a colleague drops by your desk for a casual chat, and you end up showing them some light automation tips.
We lovingly refer to that as SABWA, or Salesforce Administration by Walking Around (or SABZA, for virtual/Zoom call admins!). Not every training session is a formal one, but the value you’re providing is just the same as if it were. You’re finding opportunities to improve user experiences, and learning directly from your users in real time. That’s why we suggest approaching your role in terms of forming the necessary habits: repeatable, automatic actions to help you succeed no matter the situation.
What’s the next step? You’ve built a great habit, and you want to measure it in some way that highlights the skills you’re using in your role. Using the skills kit provides a helpful example of how we might put solid metrics behind this habit through the lens of communication. In this case, start tracking those interactions where you’re consistently observing and training your users (formal or by SABWA), and add those metrics to your brag book. Once you start tracking those interactions, you’re able to quantify and communicate your impact.
Using the two examples above, you can see how mapping habits and skills can be a great start on identifying your goals for the year, and how you can track and measure them. In this case, you’re setting your goal to improve communication by using your core responsibilities and putting habits into action.
The best way to set goals is the way that works for you! The above info is meant to be a starting point for organizing your thoughts and putting them on paper, not a rigid rulebook to follow.
We all have different methods of staying organized, on track, and productive. The objective is to be consistent, have a clear focus, and know you can always shift your goals as needed. And if you’re ever looking to connect on your goals with other #AwesomeAdmins, the Admin Trailblazer Community is a great place to be!
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