Why The Way Leaders Set Goals Does Not Work

It’s already two months into your business fiscal year but not everyone on your team has clear goals. In fact, you are still working on your own priorities and haven’t yet agreed on them with your boss. I understand, multiple priorities can cause distraction from articulating and communicating goals to your organization, but the lost productivity of a team adrift without a destination is far greater than some realize.

I have been working with many of my executive clients on developing robust and meaningful goals rapidly.  

Here are the six biggest mistakes I see when executives are setting goals for their teams:

• You fail to mention profit, revenue, costs, market share and business-impacting metrics. Yesterday I was working with a newly appointed technology executive whose organization is viewed as detached from the business, we created meaningful goals that were framed in the language of what the business needs to achieve in market share and revenue growth.

• You spend so long developing them, they are irrelevant when published. A sales organization I worked with never gave their sales team their sales targets until 12 weeks into the new fiscal year as they waited for the goals to cascade from above. The calendar year is no surprise, we reduced and shifted their planning cycle so that sales teams knew on day one of the fiscal year what was expected from them and no longer were adrift for 25% of your year.

• Your process, system, technology, for capturing them is so arduous everyone avoids completing them. All you need is a list that you can share. I have seen more complex performance management systems than JPL uses to get rover on Mars.

• You create goals in a silo. Many executive teams create goals in a vacuum and treat them as trade secrets amongst your own executive peers. Look left and look right across your technical, creative, and business teams to make sure everyone’s goals are heading in the same direction. 

• You ignore your people. You forget to include a goal that is focused on building leaders and an organization that will accelerate your results (and no that doesn’t mean training!)

• Your process becomes a source of company amusement. The forms, questions, and information requested is so pointless people start ridiculing it. I knew of one leader who told me every year he had written a comical paragraph in his goals to test whether anyone actually read them, nobody ever did.


Ask yourself what impact will your organization have on your company profits, revenue, and market share and hook your goals into those metrics.

To your continued success,

Val

Why Being Unfair Makes You Successful

Your job as a leader is not to be fair. 

Unfairly allocate your time amongst your team spending more time with your newest and highest performing people. 

Unfairly treat your promotion budget as a pot to be unevenly distributed rewarding your most successful team members. 

Unfairly pick which meetings are graced with your presence. Don’t feel you have to show because you were invited, or haven’t been for a while. 

This week I’ve told three different executives of my 50% rule. If you have open headcount on your immediate team you need to spend 50% of your time hiring for that role. Defining, outreaching to your network, interviewing, validating, and preparing for their first year in that role. Nothing holds you back as an executive more than being one or two people down on your team. That might seem like an unfair balance of your time but it is just what is needed. 

Complaints about fairness come from kids for a reason. I have my own laboratory at home to prove this with eight year old twin girls with a ten year old sister.... whether it is who got the most carrots on the dinner plate, who last sat next to which parent at the movie theatre, or whose turn it is to put the star on top of the Christmas tree, they are keeping a running tally of fairness points so they can cry foul if it isn’t in perfect balance. 

But as we tell our three daughters, our goal isn’t fairness, our goal is to give each daughter what they need when they need it. They might not want it but that is parenting for you. 

Same applies to leadership. Forget what your team wants, simply give them what they need. Don’t get caught up in the illusion of fairness.

Dedicated to growing your business,

Val

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How To Rapidly Get Your Fear Into Perspective

There are few fears we face in our life that truly warrant it. 
 
My fear at the top of a double diamond black ski run is different to my fear of writing on a new topic I never have spoken about before and wondering how people will react. I recently wrote about being a woman executive and I deleted it over and over again until my mentor, Alan Weiss, told me to just submit it to the Los Angeles Business Journal, which resulted in it being published and a new regular weekly column.
 
Real fear is when I was working in Rackhams department store during my corporate days in England back in 1993 when there was an attacker on the shop floor literally cutting the throats of my co-workers. Real fear was when I was put on bed rest for 16 weeks when pregnant with twins with an 18 month old running around. Real fear is being diagnosed with a rare auto immune condition that could have resulted in me losing my eyesight and being in a wheelchair. I don’t talk about those fears because they are insignificant compared to the tragedies and difficulties others have faced. But they put into perspective the fears that consume people’s decisions to quit a job, try something new, move to a new city or country, or to just simply say what you really think.
 
When I am advising CEOs, Board members, executives and entrepreneurs on growth strategies for their business, what is often behind their question is fear:

• Fear that you will make a mistake

• Fear that you will look needy

• Fear of trying an alternative way than your usual approach

• Fear that you will pick the wrong path

• Fear that your outrageous idea may not pan out

• Fear that your hiring bet may fall through

It isn’t the same kind of fear that is life-threatening but it is success-threatening because it causes you to freeze, doubt yourself, or not go as fast as you could.
 
What do you secretly fear and what is honestly causing it?
 
This was one of the topics I talked about with my incredibly talented sister-in-law who just overcame her fear and quit her successful career with a Mercedes Benz group dealership and now has launched her own photography company. You can see a selection of the photos she took at a recent talk of mine with Chartered Management Institute and University of Wolverhampton over on my Facebook page here. You can also read my interview with Sally here.

To overcoming your fears,

Val