Supporting Your External Cabinet: Goal Setting

Just like with any other role in the chapter, goal setting is part of the foundation for success. As the external vice president, you assume the role of a manager for your committees. Therefore, when setting goals for any position, you should always determine the metric that you can use to appropriately determine success or failure with your work. Because the objective as external vice president includes ensuring progress toward and ultimately successful completion of all goals set related to external operations, you must determine metrics that will allow you to determine success or failure when your position is complete in addition to giving status updates while performing the duties as external vice president. Put simply, you want to determine how you can best judge whether the chapter is accomplishing these objectives. 

With that evaluation, you can begin to make assumptions about how to appropriately accomplish this objective. You can easily assume that holding weekly committee chairman meetings and properly managing your committee chairman to ensure they accomplish the goals for their committees effectively will fulfill the first objective. Nonetheless, this means that because you are a manager of the committee chairman, your goals are dependent upon each committee chairman achieving their goals. This leaves you with your main goals for the external vice president position and allows you to easily get a weekly update on how the chapter is performing with external operations so that you may make changes or corrections if necessary. You should take note of these goals that you have now set and continually revisit them on a weekly basis. The goals you set with your cabinet may include: 

• Athletics
  • First place in ALL intramural sports competitions
  • Provide detailed statistics and pictures from every PIKE team intramural game
• Campus Involvement
  • Every member is involved in at least one other campus organization
  • PIKE holds executive positions (preferably president) of (at least) the five most influential
  • campus organizations
  • Documentation is continually kept for campus involvement for every chapter member
• Community Service
  • Host and photograph one major community service event
  • Host and photograph one major philanthropy event
  • Creating and maintain a community service spreadsheet to track the community service of each chapter member, each event, and overall chapter efforts
  • Create and maintain a philanthropy spreadsheet to track the philanthropy efforts of each chapter member, each event, and the overall chapter
• Public Relations
  • Create and regularly maintain the chapter website
  • Produce print and/or electronic newsletters at least once per semester/quarter
  • Manage social media outlets on a regular basis
  • Write and distribute at least 2 press releases per semester/quarter
  • Submit notes to the Shield & Diamond 3 times per year
  • Manage crisis communication as necessary

• Social
  • Organize and hold at least one formal per semester/quarter
  • Organize and hold at least one semi-formal per semester/quarter
  • Organize and hold at least one social event (either mixers, date parties, socials and parties) per month
  • Evaluate and document risk evaluation, preparation and management before, during and after every event
• Special Events
  • Win homecoming (if applicable)
  • Win Greek week (if applicable)
  • Win all philanthropies participated in
  • Win all other campus competitions (if applicable)