7

EXECUTE EVERY DAY

“A good plan, violently executed now is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”

—GEORGE PATTON

Principle 5: Goals Aren’t Achieved Without Priorities Put into Action

In 1983, a 21-year-old man got out of his dad’s car to get on a train going to New York City for his first big interview with the Xerox company. Right before he stepped on the train he turned and said, “Dad, I guarantee you I’m coming home tonight with an employee badge in my pocket” His dad responded, “You’re a good guy, Bill, but don’t put all that pressure on yourself. Do the best you can.”

On the train, Bill reviewed the Xerox annual report for the fifth time to ensure he was ready to talk about the company’s current vision. It focused on the reinvention of Xerox and its new strategy called Total Quality Management. He convinced himself he could be a major catalyst in the reinvention of the company. But when he arrived at the hiring center, there were dozens of polished interviewees who appeared more experienced than he was.

A woman finally called his name. Before entering the room, he paused and thought about his humble beginnings growing up on Long Island and the excitement he had felt on the train reading that Xerox annual report. Refocused, he stepped into the interview room.

The next hour and a half was a blur. Bill spoke about his entrepreneurial background, his passion for the Xerox business, and how much he wanted to play a major part in the future vision at the company. As the interview was wrapping up, the hiring manager said, “Bill, it has been a great discussion. Thank you very much; the Human Resources department will be in touch with you in a couple of weeks.” While most people would have been happy with the response, Bill wasn’t satisfied. “I don’t think you understand the situation, sir,” Bill insisted. “I haven’t broken a promise to my father in 21 years, and I guaranteed him that I was coming home from this interview with an employee badge in my pocket tonight.” The hiring manager thought about it for a few seconds and said, “Bill, as long as you haven’t committed any crimes, you’re hired.” As Bill walked out of the building riding a wave of energy, he found the nearest pay phone and called his dad. “Get out the champagne, I got the job.”

Over the next nine years, Bill outperformed everyone else, knocking on doors for cold calls, selling copy machines and electronic typewriters. At the ripe age of 30, he got an offer to take on a leadership position running the Puerto Rico and Virgin Isles office for Xerox. Most people were excited for him, but some said it was a curse because the office was ranked 67 out of 67 in the company’s sales rankings.

Bill went down to scout it out. Feeling good about the people and the opportunity, he made the decision to move his young family to Puerto Rico and take the promotion. For the first two weeks after taking the job, Bill did nothing but listen to the people and meet with the entire team one-on-one. He asked them questions like, “What is making us perform so poorly?” “What is really going on here?” and “Why are we dead last?”

After all the meetings, Bill determined the root cause of the team’s poor performance. What the people wanted was leadership. They wanted a vision they could believe in; they wanted to be motivated to come to work again; and most importantly, they wanted to celebrate again (the last sales leader had cut expenses and eliminated the company Christmas party).

With their feedback in mind, Bill laid out a vision in a teamwide meeting. Making the vision a reality and driving the business forward would require an extreme level of professionalism and accountability. He promised his team, “Not only are we going to be great at what we do, but we are also going to be the #1 Xerox business in the entire world. We are going to go from #67 to #1!” At that moment, all the air left the room. The team immediately thought the goal was unachievable and pictured Bill on a plane back to New York City in just a few months.

Before the doubt and negativity spiraled out of control, he continued, “I have arranged for the return of our annual Christmas party. I have already booked the San Juan hotel and hired the #1 salsa singer in Puerto Rico. When we hit #1, we are going to celebrate like champions. To get there we are going to take it one day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time, and one quarter at a time. I trust you and you trust me. We will work together to will this goal to happen.” As Bill paused he looked over the room and saw a tiny spark in everyone’s eyes.

It didn’t take long to see the transformation begin. At the end the first quarter, Puerto Rico had improved a little in the Xerox stack rankings. The second quarter continued the momentum, and the team moved up even higher in the rankings. By the third quarter, they were on the cusp of achieving their goal. By the time the fourth quarter had come and gone, Puerto Rico had surpassed all the other teams to fill the number one spot at Xerox. Bill lived up to his end of the bargain and threw his team and their families the biggest party Puerto Rico had ever seen.

Bill McDermott has gone on to become the CEO of SAP, one of the largest software companies in the world. Bill figured out that in order for any team to execute at the highest level, it requires people to work on the right priorities and come together to will a dream to happen every day. No one is as smart, motivated, or passionate as a collection of people put together.

Bill’s story isn’t out of reach for anyone. He tied his goal to a system and was able to achieve it. In this chapter we are going to dig into a system you can leverage to achieve big (or small) things.

The GPI System

The person with a million good ideas loses to the entrepreneur who has one good idea and executes well. The football team that can execute the game plan and make the most plays wins. The sales team that executes their sales process to near perfection wins the big deals. The Marketing department that produces content that hits their prospective customers in the heart wins. Same goes in leading a team.

While your purpose trifecta of mission, vision, and values remains solid and steady over time, it must be put into action. In order to do that, it has to be broken down further into an actionable system everyone on your team can buy into and use as a grounding force as they take ownership of their daily decisions. It’s what I call the GPI System: goals, priorities, and initiatives (Figure 7.1).

FIGURE 7.1   The GPI System

GPI puts the purpose trifecta into an actionable format that leaves nothing to question. It’s the step-by-step directions your team will follow to get you from a short-term goal to a long-term vision.

Goals

David Schroeder had come to Quicken Loans Mortgage Services from a technology start-up to bring entrepreneurial ideas to a business that sorely needed it. It didn’t take long for the six-foot-five-inch man with perfect hair to build great relationships and make a positive impact. With Schroeder at the helm, the group soared to new heights of achievement and was recognized as one of the best places to work in their region.

One of Schroeder’s responsibilities was managing an internal technology and development team. The team had done incredible work over Schroeder’s tenure, but they were falling behind on a big software development project that was critical to the rest of the company’s success.

Schroeder set a short-term goal to complete the project prior to a big all-hands meeting in Las Vegas at the end of the year. He went to his development team and said, “If we finish this new software development project prior to the all-hands meeting, I will let you guys shave this beautiful head of hair in front of the entire company.”

Putting his hair, which was never out of place, on the line created an immediate positive reaction from the team. He wrote in big letters on the team’s whiteboard, “Project complete before Las Vegas = shave David’s head.” David and the team began by listing the major priorities that needed to be focused on in order to achieve the aggressive goal. Day in and day out the team focused their work efforts within the priorities and worked with an intensity Schroeder hadn’t ever seen before. The team completed the major project on time, and at the all-hands meeting, everyone in the company roared with excitement as the team shaved David’s glorious coiffure onstage.

What did the story of Bill McDermott during his time in Puerto Rico and David Schroeder at Quicken Loans Mortgage Services have in common? They both used a formula to set a team goal that helped their team achieve more than they would have without it:

Clear Objective + Completion Date + Carrot

In McDermott’s story, he had a clear objective: become the top-performing organization at Xerox + completion date: the end of the year + carrot: the biggest party Puerto Rico had ever seen.

In David’s story, he had a clear objective: complete this technology project + completion date: by the all-hands meeting + carrot: the team could shave David’s head in front of everyone.

The verb form of the word team means coming together as a group to achieve a common goal. Setting a clear goal for your team is instrumental in achieving your vision.

The team will be far more likely to succeed if the goal is specific and each member gets behind it. Research done by Dr. Gail Matthews found people are 42 percent more likely to achieve a goal if it’s written down. The key after defining the goal and a completion date will be coming up with the “carrot” that helps motivate the team to achieve the goal. If this important step is missed, the likelihood each individual sustains the amount of work ethic required to achieve the goal every day is drastically lowered.

If you haven’t already created a clear goal for your team, don’t fret. Use the formula to come up with one.

Clear Objective + Completion Date + Carrot = Your Team Goal

Your team goal should be revisited every year, or it can be leveraged to help accomplish a big objective on a shorter timeline. One of the most popular questions I get in the Building the Best workshops is, “Is it okay if my team goal is a revenue goal?” If you lead a team in the business world and revenue is how you as a leader are measured, it is completely acceptable for the goal to be a revenue or earnings number. However, if the team doesn’t earn any additional compensation when they hit that number, then it shouldn’t be the only goal. In that particular case, the achievement of the team goal would only benefit you and not the team. The key to your goal has to be something the team will get excited about achieving. Here are a couple of examples of things you can tie your goal to:

   Customers positively impacted

   Games won

   Industry award received

   Highest ranking team in the company

   Perfect execution

   Revenue or earnings

   Number of new customers won

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on what you should do if the team goal can’t be achieved because I know your team will make it happen. However, if you must know when you should disengage your team from a previously set goal, evaluate the following two components:

1.   When the cost gets too high

2.   When it takes too much time

Cost can mean many things. It can obviously be financial, but it can also be the ruining of personal relationships or your health or that of team members. Time, on the other hand, is one of the few things we can never get back. So if the amount of time required to achieve the goal is so great that it is taking away time from doing more important things, reevaluate the goal.

The leaders who build the best do an incredible job of setting both team and individual goals. They go through the same process for setting individual goals as they do with setting their team goals to help elevate the performance of each individual member of the team.

Priorities Accelerating Growth

If you’ve ever set a personal goal for yourself, you know setting the goal and achieving it are two very different things. Consider the last time you went on a diet. Let’s say you started your diet with a goal to lose 20 pounds. Twenty pounds is the ultimate result you are trying to achieve. In order to achieve your goal of losing 20 pounds, you have to focus on three big areas: exercise, diet, and motivation. These are the things that, if you make them a top priority, will help you achieve your goal. If one or more of them are lacking, it becomes extremely difficult to know what to do each day, and ultimately, your odds of achieving your weight loss goal are slim (pun intended).

Regardless of your industry or the nature of the work your team does, you must have defined priorities if you want to hit your team goal. These are specific things that are regarded as more important than other things. The team at LearnLoft has a goal for the year: impact the lives of 10,000 leaders using the Building the Best Principles. In order for us to reach that goal, we identified five priorities for the entire team to focus on. These priorities are visible at each team meeting.

1.   Developing the core Building the Best curriculum

2.   Proactive marketing

3.   Building sales pipeline

4.   Fostering current client relationships

5.   Delivering the Ultimate Leadership Academy

These priorities remain the same through the year, but their order of importance shifts, depending on the season of the business. This allows each member of our team to make their own decisions about their task lists as long as they remain within the five priorities.

Warning: it’s easy to get caught in the “shiny penny” mode where everything you come across looks like a worthwhile pursuit. While exhilarating at the moment, a “shiny penny” detour puts goal achievement in danger. An old mentor always tells me you should be careful of the words you use in front of your team because “suggestions become orders.”

A great example of the dangers of this came from a frontline manager in one of our workshops. He was surprised when he opened up his BTB Leader Report to find a common theme in the comments section under “What is one thing your leader could do to improve?” Every single response included the word focus. When asked, his peers shared examples of how his new ideas were quickly put into action by his team, while other, more important initiatives were abandoned. Instead of getting defensive, he had a moment of clarity. In front of his peers, he defined the five biggest priorities for his team and committed to sticking to them for the next six months in order to achieve a team goal he established in the workshop.

No one is immune to the temptations of a new idea or exciting project. To ensure you don’t unintentionally veer off course, come up with the top priorities that will help achieve your big goal. These are things that I have come to call PAG, short for “priorities accelerating growth.”

If you have never defined priorities consider specific areas within products, people, projects, or job functions. When evaluating your own priorities in these areas ask yourself, “Will focusing on this help our team achieve our goal?”

Here are some examples of priorities accelerating growth for leaders in different industries to get you started:

Vice President of Sales

1.   Team skill development and knowledge acquisition

2.   Aligning with marketing

3.   CRM adoption

4.   Sales process execution

Vice President of Accounting

1.   Talent development

2.   Technology enhancement

3.   Accounts payable / accounts receivables

4.   Serve internal and external customers

5.   Reporting

Head Football Coach

1.   Physical fitness

2.   Team building

3.   Dedicated and purposeful practice

4.   Film study

5.   Game plan design and study

Your PAG list (Figure 7.2) is an incredible place to focus if you’ve never defined priorities. Much like defining a goal, priorities by themselves don’t do a whole lot. Your team must make decisions every day in alignment with those priorities in order for them to drive real results. That’s why the GPI System goes one step deeper into initiatives.

FIGURE 7.2   Priorities Accelerating Growth

Initiatives to Make Impact

An entrepreneur for over 20 years, Mac Lackey has built and sold five companies and raised more than $75 million in capital. Needless to say, he knows a thing or two about reaching a goal and leveraging priorities. In his first startup, he and his cofounder were working 70+ hours a week, doing everything they could to help the business grow and mowing through tasks. One day about six months into the start of the business, Lackey was sitting at his desk staring at his to-do list, and it hit him like a ton of bricks. He was exhausted, overwhelmed, and working on the wrong things. It was in that moment he thought back to a lesson a college professor had taught him called the Pareto principle. The principle states that if you spend your time working on tasks that rank in the top 20 percent of importance, you will see an 80 percent return on investment. As Lackey looked back at his to-do list, he could tell instantly which things would likely produce an 80 percent return on investments versus the others.

Lackey came up with a simple method that focuses on daily tasks that will “move the needle” for his company. Each day he pulls out a three-by-five notecard and writes WMN on the top. Underneath he fills out his to-do list with initiatives that will help his company “move the needle.” He aptly calls his method WMN or “what moves the needle.”

Lackey’s WMN daily strategy is a fantastic way for you and your entire team to execute within your previously defined PAG list. Instead of thinking of this as a big change, just consider the fact that you and probably everyone on your team either writes down their initiatives each day or keeps a mental checklist. WMN ensures you aren’t just making a to-do list full of tasks to check off, but instead working on things that will move the team or business forward (Figure 7.3). It’s not about the number of things you get done, but rather the weight your work carries. Once you and your team get in the habit of completing daily initiatives in alignment with the PAG list, it will only be a matter of time for the positive results to follow.

FIGURE 7.3   Sample WMN List

Putting It All Together

The beautiful thing about the entire GPI System is that all three parts work together. Every leader, regardless of experience level or role in the organization, must make the team aware of a clear goal and get buy-in. If everyone is on the same page about the achievement of that particular goal, set up the priorities accelerating growth to ensure the team knows the things that are regarded as more important than another in order to reach that goal. Once everyone is clear on the priorities accelerating growth, team members can have the autonomy and ownership to take control of their daily initiatives to help the team be successful.

Communicating GPI to your team once or twice a year isn’t enough. Add chief repetition officer to your title. Consistent communication is critical to ensure your team gets into the habit of using GPI as their grounding force.