Four winning ways to achieve goals

By Tom Wagner

It’s a new year and many companies are about the business of setting goals or working to carry out goals recently established. Individuals also talk - and often joke - about New Year’s resolutions because we know that success is unlikely without clear goals and mileposts. As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Moreover, how can you define “winning” without a goal? 

Here are some sobering statistics: a survey carried out by Harris Interactive revealed only 15% of employees could identify their company’s top goals.  Moreover, less than one in five employees were passionate about achieving business goals because management had not achieved buy-in from most employees. 

Of those surveyed who knew the goals and wanted to carry them out, 51 percent did not understand what they, personally, should do to achieve the company’s top goals. It follows, then, that many businesses suffer from a goal communication gap.  The solution to this gap is found in disciplined behavior.

I often use the word discipline in my management consulting practice because that word embodies behaviors necessary for success, namely:

• Focusing on what’s important

• Setting goals and standards

• Identifying specific actions to reach goals

• Accountability

For example, suppose I ate too much over the holidays and ended up fatter than before. I decide that losing weight is vital to my health (focus), and set a goal to lose 20 pounds in five months.  Then I adopt a specific diet and exercise regimen (actions) and use the bathroom scale to ensure I stay on track.

Accountability makes all the difference and I will change tactics if results fall below expectations. Celebrating wins is also important because that rewards accomplishment and builds momentum to sustain me over the rough patches. In short, I would need discipline to reach my personal goal.

Discipline is more necessary in an organization than for Tom’s weight loss project because competing agendas and communication barriers tend to stifle change.  Organizational inertia is hard to overcome and many people choose the certainty of pain because they fear the pain of uncertainty.  The four disciplines that follow are simple, but require persistence and self-control.  It’s not easy, but the results are well worth the effort.

The first discipline is focus.  Identifying a few really important goals is the foundation for winning in any endeavor.  We humans can only do one thing at a time, and can successfully juggle only a few balls at once. 

Too many undifferentiated goals dilute focus and leads to mediocrity. Two or three top priorities for a company are plenty. The hard part is selecting which two or three top goals. The following exercise is helpful in choosing focus areas, team building and buy-in for corporate goals.

• Bring your company’s key players together for a planning session with a single agenda item: setting strategic goals.

• Two flipcharts are set up, one headed, “How you see my roles and goals,” and a second titled, “How you see your roles and goals.” Typically, the first chart is for the leader, but you can adjust the format as appropriate.

• Each member of the planning team adds comments to the flipcharts until everyone is satisfied they have expressed themselves. 

•  Then discussion begins to clarify expectations and find areas of overlap among goals. 

With the overall strategic goals established, the second step is stetting supporting goals and standards that will be used to measure progress. Progress in key performance areas should be frequently measured and widely reported within the company. 

The point: People behave differently when they are keeping score and often >> engage in healthy competition with coworkers when public scorecards are used. 

A classic example of this type of informal competition involved the day and evening shifts in a steel mill. Following a productivity initiative by management, a night shift employee spontaneously used chalk to write on the concrete floor the number of tons produced in the past eight hours.

The day shift immediately understood the implied challenge as they began work the next day, and wrote their production number on the floor following their shift. Seeking to gain bragging rights, production for both shifts improved. Moreover, teamwork among shift members grew and the men were happier at work.  

Company scorecards are usually more formal than chalk marks on the floor, but the concept is similar. The goals on this scorecard must be relevant, controllable by the people involved, simple and compelling. A good scorecard shows where we are now, where we want to be and the deadline.

Goals and scorecards are necessary, but not sufficient.  The third winning discipline is helping people translate goals into specific actions.  For example, action items supporting goals for a carpenter would differ from those of a project manager. The key is defining the actions within a framework so that the employee, at whatever level in the company hierarchy, can make good independent decisions and use their brains as well as their hands. 

The final discipline is holding each other accountable and is fundamental to winning teams. The enemy of accountability is ambiguity, so clear goals and standards of behavior (Discipline #2) are helpful in holding peers and subordinates accountable. The best way to do this is frequent meetings to discuss results. 

Sharing progress on important goals helps keep the big picture issues from becoming obscured by the tyranny of the urgent. Still, it takes courage to hold each other accountable all the time. 

The Rev. John Stott described the importance of clear goals and courage this way: “Clarity without courage is like sunshine in the desert: plenty of light but nothing worth looking at.  Courage without clarity is like a beautiful landscape at night: plenty to see but no light by which to enjoy it.”