Setting goals and delivering value

 

Although positive, productive relationships will be your lifeblood as a new manager, you also need to get tactical. Follow these tips to ensure that you start making a difference as soon as possible after you start working as a manager:

1. Gather all the information you need. (Weeks 1–3)

How will you know what to focus on if you don’t understand the expectations, needs and goals of your supervisor, team, peers, customers and other key stakeholders? You won’t. And the consequences could be disastrous.

This is why you absolutely must get input. Immediately start scheduling informational meetings with key stakeholders. Prepare a list of good questions that will yield fertile ideas. And get ready to listen and observe like crazy. For more details on how to conduct these kinds of informational interviews, see No. 8 in our article How to ace your first week.

2. Zero in on your priorities. (Weeks 2-4)

Once you have a lay of the land — and have started building a solid reputation thanks to a few quick wins — it’s time to think carefully about what to focus on first in your new job.

Most experts recommend that you choose only three to five basic priorities. There might be a whole laundry list of items you’d like to work on, but you need to be disciplined and pick your battles. You’ll be a lot more likely to win them.

A good way to really focus is to ask yourself questions that get to the heart of the matter, such as:

• What will be most helpful to my manager, my team and my company?
• When my team and I look back on things a year from now, what do we want to be able to say we accomplished?
• What absolutely needs to happen for this team to move forward? 

Some priorities might come directly from your boss. Others might bubble up from conversations with your team or customers (make sure you always give credit where credit is due). Others may be ideas of yours that you’ve verified to be on-target during the information-gathering stage.

Examples of priorities to set during your first 90 days:

• Review and optimize all fundamental team processes.
• Meet or exceed the sales goals my supervisor expects.
• Break down communication barriers between our team and the customer success team.
• Improve my team’s morale.
• Remain one of the top-10 websites for technology news.

Tip: Try to also include some priorities that are centered on the human side of your work (e.g., Help team members create and reach long-term professional goals)and stability (e.g., Maintain the team’s status as a customer service leader).

Experienced manager Grayson Morris explains how he brought order to the chaos of a new role by focusing efforts on his top three goals.

Startup leader Jit Bhattacharya describes how his team’s planning process went from excruciating to effective.

3. Create SMART goals.

Once you’ve decided on some priorities, it’s time to get real — and real specific — about how to bring those priorities to life. In other words, you need to break them down into goals.

Stay away from lofty, vague goals. They’re tough to track, never mind reach. Make sure you create goals based on the SMART model. That means they should be:

• Specific: What exactly do you want to accomplish, in what time frame and with whom?
• Measurable: What milestones can you set to track your progress?
• Attainable: Can you really do it? Really really?
• Relevant: What matters most to you, your team and the company? Why mess around with anything else?
• Time-bound: How much time do you need to achieve the goal? How long did it take you or others to achieve something similar?

Example of a not-so-SMART goal: Eliminate long customer service calls.

Example of a SMART goal: By April 30, keep the team’s average number of customer service calls that exceed five minutes to fewer than 15 per day.

Tip: Don’t think about goals in isolation (i.e., as individual tasks to tick off one-by-one). This linear approach doesn’t reflect reality. Instead, think about how your goals interrelate. For example, let’s say you want to see stronger individual performance from your team members. That goal could also be driven by one around communicating better internally or designing more effective incentives. Make progress on one, and you’ll likely make progress on them all. And keep in mind that sometimes goals won’t advance one another; instead they could detract from one another.

Once you determine how your goals are connected, it will likely become more clear which ones are the most important, and how you can best allocate resources and time.

4. Communicate your priorities and goals. Until you sound like a broken record. (Weeks 4-12).

How you communicate your priorities and goals is just as important as which ones you choose. If you fail on this front, you simply won’t get any traction, and a few months down the road, your plan will be a distant, foggy memory.

Some experts have conducted research indicating that ideas aren’t internalized until they’ve been communicated 22 times. That’s a lot. Clearly, talking about or emailing your priorities and goals once just isn’t going to cut it!

You need to think about both how to relay your message, and the best media to use in doing it. And then you need to do it again. And again. And again. Think about this question whenever you tell or write to people about your intentions: What’s in it for them? The best way to get people to pay attention is to answer that question and address it immediately.

You should also consider the different forms of communication at your disposal. Do you want to give a presentation? Hammer home your priorities during one-on-one and group meetings? Use thank-you and update emails? Leverage your company’s intranet?

5. Enact your plan and measure progress. (Weeks 5-12)

Your priorities and goals won’t be perfect. That’s OK. If they are 80 percent of the way there, it’s time to run with what you’ve got. Break each SMART goal down into action items. Start delegating. And track your results. Every mini-goal reached along the way (or missed) is an opportunity to communicate your message, thank or course-correct your team, and ensure your legacy as a great manager.

For a full list of activities that we recommend you complete during your first 90 days, see our New manager to-do list.

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How to evaluate and improve your team’s goal performance

 

Hit or miss, once your team finishes a goal, you may feel compelled to rush to the next one. Don’t do it. Otherwise you could end up repeating a costly mistake next quarter — or realize, a year from now, that you got too comfortable with your “fail-safe” process, and other teams are passing yours by.

To guard against these kinds of painful (and potentially career-limiting) outcomes, you’ll need to continually hone your goal-setting process. Try pausing after each big goal to follow these tips:

1. Evaluate your team’s performance, including how much they learned and improved their process.

People tend to make win-or-lose evaluations of goals, but performance is rarely so absolute. For example, if you end up at 95 percent of a goal, is that the same as meeting only 50 percent? Would it have been worth the effort to push for those final five percentage points and burn everyone out in the process? Maybe. Maybe not.

Also be sure to consider less quantifiable yet critical factors, like whether your team learned, improved their process, and worked well together. Did they broaden their understanding of a new market, implement new time-saving software, or better leverage each other for problem solving? These kinds of things — more than whether they hit 95 percent versus 100 percent of a forecasted metric — will lead to future success.

So, how’d the team do on the goal? Factoring in all of your performance considerations, grade your team’s success — for example, on a scale of zero to one. Maybe your team earns a 0.9 if they hit their target metric but you think they could have collaborated more effectively, and a 0.6 if they fell well short but showed some improvement. You’re not always aiming for a one here — too many perfect scores could mean your goals are easy.

Then, walk through the full evaluation in a team debrief (see point No. 5). By including the team’s learning and improvement, you’ll be letting your team know that those things matter to you, and should matter to them, too.

2. Consider what you learned about your team’s dynamics and address areas that need improvement.

How your team worked together toward the goal is one of the best predictors of how they’ll work together in the future.

As part of assessing your team dynamic, consider the important informal roles that team members played during the goal process. Ask yourself:

• Who stood up for the values and mission of the team or company — for example, by trumpeting these things or by subtly modeling a value in their behavior?
• Who provided support when others needed it (technical, emotional, or both)?
• Who acted as an expert, and on what tasks (and did the rest of the team view them as expert)?

Depending on your answers, you may realize that some of these roles still need filling. Consider who on your team might fit the bill. Or, you may need to encourage a team member to embrace their informal role more fully, or gently suggest that someone tone it down (for example, by saying to an overzealous expert, “Wei knows a lot about this too, and I’d like to be sure she has a chance to share her expertise”).

3. Determine whether you or your team made undue sacrifices for the sake of reaching your goal.

Goals give you tunnel vision — great for helping you and your team focus on an objective, but potentially terrible for noticing what that focus may be costing you. So when reflecting on the goal process, check whether high expectations or stress have caused you or your team to:

• Skip out on regular obligations. Canceling 1-on-1s lately? Not making time to give advice or help other teams? Missing more dinners at home? It may be totally worthwhile to make these sacrifices once or twice, or for a short period. But have they become a destructive habit?
• Lose interest in the work itself. Sometimes as the pressure of meeting a goal number or deadline rises, the work you or team members once loved just doesn’t seem that fun anymore. Psychologists would call this a reduction in intrinsic (or internal) motivation. This trade-off tends to happen slowly and, over time, can hurt performance and even lead to burnout.
• Take shortcuts. Some types of shortcuts may be improvements, like reducing steps in a legacy process. But plenty of others, like signing low-quality customers or deliberately inflating cost estimates, are potentially dangerous. It’s easy to say, “That doesn’t happen on my team!” But one third of workers report observing misconduct on the job, according to global surveys by the Ethics & Compliance Initiative.

If any of these sound familiar, you’ll need to address the issue, either with individuals or through team feedback.

4. Assess your coaching and leadership performance.

Self-reflection is critical to improving as a manager. Think back to pivotal moments in the goal process: expectations you set (or didn’t set!) around the objectives, feedback you gave to both individuals and the team, tasks you delegated, coaching you delivered along the way. What were the results of your actions? For example, in the case of feedback you gave, did the team heed and implement it? If not, you might want to work on giving feedback and your persuasion skills.

You’ll get a fuller picture of your performance if you ask your team members for feedback. Ask them what you did that worked well and what didn’t, so you get specific results that aren’t all positive. For help navigating what can be a tricky ask, given the power dynamic, see the video below.

Experienced manager Grayson Morris explains how he “seeds” the conversation to get more honest feedback from direct reports. 

5. Conduct a debrief with your team.

Whatever you call it — a debrief, post-mortem, retrospective — schedule it soon, before you and the team are onto the next project or packing your bags for vacation. Your goal should be to walk out of the room knowing what the team’s going to do differently next time, and who’s responsible for making what happen.

This is often tougher than it sounds; teams tend to focus on dishing out recognition and possibly blame during a debrief — to the exclusion of what to do with this information. As these acknowledgments come up, you can incorporate the feedback you developed while evaluating yourself and your team, as well as ask, “What steps can we take to improve this next time? Who might be responsible for making this change?”

6. Resolve to implement at least one change that comes out of the debrief meeting.

Too often, teams go back to their desks after debriefs and forget what just happened, which means everyone just wasted their time. One debrief may not give you all the answers, but likely it will give you at least an idea or two to test, which will provide you with even more data to learn from.

You’re not looking to do some massive experiment that stakes the team’s reputation on the results. As experienced manager Michael “Zipp” Zippiroli explains, he prefers small, controlled tests: “I am uncomfortable with my team doing whatever they want,” he explains. “I am comfortable with them saying, ‘I have a hypothesis I’d like to test. My hypothesis is X, and I’d like to do five calls to try it.’”

Just make sure you’re measuring what you think should change (as well as important things you don’t expect to change, to check your assumptions). Also have a group doing it the old way, so you have a comparison for your test.

7. Communicate your results and plans beyond your own team, sharing what’s working and how the team intends to improve.

Once you have your team’s results, you’ll also have an audience — your manager and peers want to know how things went. And there may not be a better time to give your team’s ideas a voice. In addition to communicating how your team performed:

• Ask for additional input from your manager. Hopefully, you’ve been getting your manager’s feedback all along. But it’s worth asking for more now that results are in and everyone is thinking about what comes next.
• Ask peers how their teams fared, and solicit feedback. If your team is an outlier — performing really well or really poorly — it’ll be valuable to learn more about why. And if a bunch of other teams struggled, too, that may ease the pressure on your team.
• Consider getting feedback on any planned tests (point No. 6). Peers facing similar challenges could offer some great input, as could your manager. Or, you may need approval from your manager before doing a test, depending on your relationship and your organization’s culture.

https://www.franklincovey.com/

Mission and Goals as a Part of Strategic Marketing

 

Alexey Cherkasov

As promised, following The Concept and Essence of Strategic Marketing, today I’m gonna describe the first step of the strategic marketing – the mission and the goals.

The mission of the company is usually described as the public purpose of the organization. The mission, in the first place, is the answer to the question of what the company’s activities are and what it plans to do.

The formation of the mission lays the main content and activities and allows you to position the company giving it its own distinctive features. The mission is the path of development of the enterprise.

When defining the company’s mission, it is necessary to answer several important questions:

• What needs will be addressed by the company’s activities?
• What technologies will be used in the company?
• Who will become a consumer of the company’s products or services?
• What is the quality level of the products/services to be produced?
• What price category they will belong to?
• What are the company’s core values?

Ask yourself several questions

Answering all the questions above you should come to an understanding of your company’s mission. Formation of the mission is one of the most difficult tasks for any business in any industry. In the course of solving the problem, it is worth considering the influence of the following five factors:

• company history
• the vision of business owners
• market environment
• existing and potential company resources
• the ability of key persons of the company to conduct business

The mission should be as close as possible to the market on which the company is located, and be based only on what the company can do in the best possible way. The mission must be realistic and absolutely accurately take into account the wishes of those who determine the future of the company.

As a rule, missions have three main characteristics:

• defining a limited number of targets;
• determination of the main directions of development of the company;
• definition of the field of competition

Usually, the company develops the mission when it enters the market. However, many companies form their missions having worked on the market for more than five or even ten years.

After you formed the mission, you have to determine the goals of the company.

The goals of the company are the short-term and long-term results that the management of the organization wants to achieve. Setting clear and unambiguous goals contributes to the development of an effective company strategy, and also allows you to break down the organization’s mission into certain steps and actions.

Break down your mission into goals

Goals are the management commitments to achieve specific results within a given time frame. They are usually formed by decomposing a mission into its component goals.

There are disputes about what a mission is, and what the goals of the company are. The main differences are as follows:

• The mission is not limited by time. Goals always have clear time limits.
• The mission aims at the external environment for the organization. Goals often relate to the internal environment of the company. They are expressed in the use of the resources available to the organization to achieve the targets.
• The mission is relative. Goals are determined based on their reachability.
• Mission and goals can be measurable, but in the case of a mission, measurability is only qualitative, and the goals, on the contrary, are quantitative

When developing the mission and goals of the organization in most cases, the following two approaches are used:

• study and analysis of internal regulatory documents
• interviewing the management of the company

You can use both approaches at once since they make it possible to form a full-fledged mission and a tree of goals.

Right after you complete your mission and goals, you have to go to the next step of strategic marketing

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SMART

 

SMART is a methodology used to define goals and set tasks. The inventor of the SMART scheme is George T. Doran. He described this approach in the article ‘There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives’ for the magazine Management Review in 1981.

There are various ways to decipher the abbreviation SMART. The most well-known interpretations:

SMART is Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Assignable, Relevant/Realistic, and Time-bound/Time-limited.

There are also extended versions of this model, for example, SMARTER, in this case, two more criteria are added, which are interpreted variously in different sources. You may encounter the following options: Evaluated and Reviewed, Evaluate consistently and Recognize mastery, Exciting and Recorded, and others. Each criterion in SMART has its characteristic. Let’s see what they mean.

Specific

At this stage, you should answer the questions that begin with What? Who? Where? You must set a goal so that it is clear not only to you but also to everyone else who will participate in the process of achieving it. You can ask questions such as:

What do we want to achieve? What exactly do you need to do for this? Who will do it? Where will you do it?

You must plainly understand the result of your actions. Unambiguously formulate the goal, so that there is no temptation to interpret it differently.

Measurable

Here we are talking about indicators. It is necessary to set some value that we need to achieve. As a rule, it is expressed in quantitative terms (pieces, percent, money, etc.), but qualitative indicators can also be used. Everyone chooses the right one for themselves, the main thing is that these selected metrics can be tracked and compared. It is with the help of this data that we will be able to see the progress, as well as understand whether the goal has been achieved or not.

Achievable

We all dream about something, we want something, but we need to clearly understand which of our dreams are real, that is, feasible, and which are not. The same applies to goals. If you set a goal that is not achievable for objective reasons, then you will at least waste your time and effort. You will only be left with a sense of frustration, and this is certainly not what we are aiming for. Therefore, set achievable goals, to assess the situation and the resources that you have.

Relevant

Before you set a goal, you must understand its necessity. Is the chosen objective important? There are cases where even when you reach some goals, you do not get what you expected, because, in the end, your goal does not relate to the overall direction of the activity. This can be seen especially clearly in the business sector. Your specific goal should correspond to the company’s mission, its overall development, and relate to other tasks. If you notice contradictions after the analysis, then you should think again about your goal.

Time-Bound

The time frame is also very significant, if you do not limit yourself, then the whole process can be delayed for an indefinite period. Your goal may lose its relevance when you complete it. You can set intermediate values, each period will correspond to the steps to achieve your goal, and then track whether you are investing in the schedule. There must also be a deadline by which you must reach your goal.

So, we looked at five criteria for setting a goal using the SMART methodology. All five criteria have the same meaning, it is by adhering to all five points that you will be able to correctly formulate the objective.

This methodology is suitable for various fields of activity. Let’s look at it on the example of marketing.

SMART Marketing

The company XXX has designed a development strategy, according to which the management would like to see a strong and recognizable brand. To do this, it is proposed to prepare a plan of marketing activities that will be aimed at achieving strategic goals. For each event, an objective must be set in accordance with the SMART methodology. For example, increase the company’s brand awareness by 10% among subscribers of print industry media in Western Europe through advertising by the beginning of Q4 2021.

This objective matches the five criteria, it is clearly defined and understood, measurable (10%), achievable (we chose the real figure and the real deadline), corresponds to the strategic goals, and has a specific deadline (by the beginning of Q4 2021).

SMART helps you set a goal correctly, and when you have a distinct objective, it will be much easier for you to reach it.

https://www.marketing-psycho.com/

The 4 Disciplines Of Execution®. Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

 

People and teams play differently when they are keeping score.

The right kind of scoreboard motivate players to win. People play differently when they are keeping score. If you doubt this, watch a group of teenagers playing basketball. See how the game changes the minute scorekeeping begins.

The lag and lead measures won’t have much meaning to the team unless they can see the progress in real time. Bowling through a curtain is not that much fun. Discipline 3 is the discipline of engagement. People perform best when they are emotionally engaged, and the highest level of engagement comes when people know whether they are winning or losing.

The best scoreboard is designed for and often by the players. A player’s scoreboard is quite different from the complex scoreboard that coaches love to make.

Keep a compelling scoreboard

The scoreboard is not just for the leaders. The scoreboard is for the whole team. To drive execution, you need a players’ scoreboard with a few simple graphs indicating where you need to be and where you are right now.

With a successful scoreboard, anyone looking at it can determine in five seconds or less whether the team is winning or losing.

Great teams know at every moment whether or not they are winning. They must know, otherwise, they don’t know what they have to do to win the game.

— Chris McChesney, Co-author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution

People Play Differently When Keeping Score

The third discipline is to make sure everyone knows the score at all times so that they can tell whether or not they're winning. This is the discipline of engagement. If the lead and lag measures are not captured on a visual scoreboard and updated regularly, they will disappear into the whirlwind.

People disengage when they don't know the score. 

Great teams know, at every moment, whether or not they're winning. They must know, otherwise, they don't know what they have to do to win the game. A compelling scoreboard tells the team where they are and where they should be, information essential to team problem solving and decision-making. 

When team members themselves are keeping score, they truly understand the connection between their performance and reaching their goal, and this changes the level at which they play. 

Four questions to create a compelling scoreboard

1. Is it simple?

Think about how many pieces of data the coach is tracking on the sideline. Coaches need this data to manage the game, but the scoreboard on the field shows only the data needed to play the game. 

2. Can I see it easily?

It has to be visible to the team. The results become personally important to the team when the scoreboard is displayed where it can be seen by everyone. 

3. Does it show lead and lag measures?

The lead measure is what the team can affect. The lag measure is the result they want. 

4. Can I tell at a glance if I'm winning?

If you can' tell within five seconds whether you're winning or losing, you haven't passed this test.

The 4 Disciplines and Team Engagement

Many believe that engagement drives results, and so do we. However, we know now that the results drive engagement. Nothing affects morale and engagement more powerfully than when a person feels that they are winning. 

People will work for money and they will quit over money, but many teams are filled with people who are both well paid and miserable in their jobs. 

A winning team doesn't need artificial morale-boosting. All the psyching up and rah-rah exercises companies do to raise morale aren't nearly as effective in engaging people as the satisfaction that comes from executing with excellence a goal that really matters. 

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Gain a deeper understanding of the skills, processes, and disciplines that are essential to strategy execution. Register to attend a complimentary 4 Disciplines of Execution webcast. 

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The 4 Disciplines Of Execution®. Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures

 

Once a team is clear about its lead measures, their view of the goal changes.

While a lag measure tells you if you’ve achieved the goal, a lead measure tells you if you are likely to achieve the goal.

No matter what you are trying to achieve, your success will be based on two kinds of measures: Lag and Lead. Lag measures track the success of your wildly important goal. Lags are measures you spend time losing sleep over. They are things like revenue, profit, quality, and customer satisfaction. They are called lags because by the time you see them, the performance that drove them has already passed. You can’t do anything to fix them; they are history.

Lead measures track the critical activities that drive or lead to the lag measure. They predict the success of the lag measure and are influenced directly by the team. An example of a lag measure is weight loss. Which activities or lead measures will lead to weight loss? Diet and exercise! Proper diet and exercise predict the success of weight loss, and they are activities that we can directly influence. Simple enough, but be careful: even the smartest people fall into the trap of fixating on a lag measure that they can’t directly influence. This is because lags are easier to measure and they represent the result we ultimately want. Think of a lead measure as a lever that moves your Wildly Important Goal®.

Act on the lead measures

Long-term plans are often too rigid. They cannot adapt to the constantly changing needs and environment of the business. Discipline 2 requires you to define the daily or weekly measures, the achievement of which will lead to the goal.

Then, each day or week, your team identifies the most important actions that will drive those lead measures. In this way, your team is creating a just-in-time plan that enables them to quickly adapt, while remaining focused on the WIG®.

Focusing on the wildly important requires you to go against your basic wiring as a leader to do more, and instead, focus on less so that your team can achieve more.

— Sean Covey, Co-author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution

Lag Versus Lead Measures

While a lag measure tells you if you've achieved the goal, a lead measure tells you if you are likely to achieve the goal. 

For example, while you can't control how often your car breaks down on the road (a lag measure), you can certainly control how often your car receives routine maintenance (a lead measure). The more you act on the lead measure, the more likely you are to avoid that roadside breakdown.

We call them lag measures because by the time you get the data the result has already happened. A lead measure is predictive, meaning that if the lead measure changes, you can predict that the lag measure will also change. A lead measure is also influenceable; it can be influenced by the team. 

It's the data on lead measures that enables you to close the gap between what you know your team should do and what they are actually doing. Without lead measures, you are left to try to manage to lag measures, an approach that seldom produces significant results. 

Defining and Tracking Lead Measures

If you are serious about your WIG, then you must create a way to track your lead measures. Without data, you can't drive performance on the lead measures; without lead measures, you don't have leverage. 

Lead Measures and Engagement

Coming up with the right lead measures is really about helping everyone see themselves as strategic business partners and engaging them in dialogue about what can be done better or differently in order to achieve the WIGs. 

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In a perfect world, your team would magically show up to work fully committed to their goals—one of the keys to accomplishing anything as a team. But, since that's not an option in the real world, download our guide to get your team on board and moving in the right direction.

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