Today organizations have to be ambitious, but what does that mean and how can it be achieved without being unrealistic? The ambition of organizations is expressed in their objectives, it is not to have many objectives, but few but with high goals. The goal is the quantification of an objective, that is, if our objective is to increase sales, the goal is to know how much, 10%, 20%, 30% or more. To the extent that we generate a larger gap between the resources we have and the goal, we will prove to be more ambitious, that is, if we have 10 dollars in resources but we aspire as a goal to sell 1,000 dollars, we will be more ambitious than the one with 10 dollars in resources but he aims to sell 100 dollars.
Being ambitious is necessary, because it forces organizations to optimize the use of human effort, resources and time, as the goal is higher, we will seek to get more out of what we have, but if the goal is small, it will not be generates the motivation to do that.
But what is the limit for not setting an unrealistic goal? What is the limit for not going from being ambitious to unrealistic?
The limit is given by organizational capabilities. An organizational capacity is the best that an organization knows how to do, in people that is called ability. When an organization mixes the skills of people (the best that people know how to do) with the resources it has, it gains organizational capabilities, for example when it mixes the sales skills of its salespeople with the resources they require to sell, it develops its capacity. of sales, which will allow the organization to obtain sales.
This means that organizations have to formulate their objectives based on their organizational capabilities. For example, how a company can consider doubling its sales, if it does not have the sales capacity.
Now the question is how can we develop an organizational capacity? We have pointed out that a capacity is composed of resources and skills, resources by themselves do not do anything, it is the skills of the people who can convert the resources that an organization has into the results that are wanted, such as achieving increased sales, achieving lower costs, achieving maximum impact in an advertisement, therefore we have to focus on developing people's skills.
Now the question is, how can we develop people's skills?
The skills of people depend on motivation (that is, the desire they have to do something), knowledge (information they have about how to do things) and the work experience to be developed, therefore to develop the People skills should focus on motivation, knowledge and experience.
To keep people motivated, you have to find that they are located in things that they like to develop, strengthen the organizational culture and that the work environment is favorable, I mean salary, treatment, participation, recognition, etc. To develop knowledge you have to train and to develop experience you have to train.
Motivation is fundamental, especially that which is based on convictions, that is, on people's personal belief, people out of hunger (a need) are capable of killing, but because of an idea (conviction or belief) they are capable of dying. We have as an example the terrorist attack on the twin towers on September 11, 2001. When people are motivated they give their best, making their skills, knowledge and experience available and that is what we have to achieve. So let's work on motivating people, that is, their will, let's not generate reasons in an organization so that people don't want to work, on the contrary, let's give them a reason to want to work and give their best. It is said that there is no demotivation but negative motivation,In other words, people find reasons for not wanting to work such as low pay, poor treatment by bosses, lack of recognition of their work and other reasons.
As a conclusion, I must say that today organizations need to be ambitious to make better use of their capabilities, but this requires based on the key factor that people are, for this we must first work on motivation, because if people do not want to, they will not put their best effort, second by enhancing your skills through knowledge and training.
