To Grow Try This…Do the Right Things Now
Now that you’ve delegated with controls, you’re probably still a tad nervous about the potential for chaos. We would be too!
It’s tempting for leaders to assign goals to motivate their employees and curb the risk of chaos.
Try This…Go beyond Goals
You’ve probably become accustomed to creating goals that are based on numbers and goals that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, Time based). Contrary to our earlier promise we are indulging in some business school acronyms as you’re probably familiar with SMART goals. We admit that simple goals like monthly sales targets or hourly widget production forecasts fit the SMART template. However, when trying to imbed a game-changer growth culture in our teams, developing SMART goals for major change creates problems.
A recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article titled “Goals Gone Wild” gave an explicit warning:
Goals may cause systematic problems in organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals to your organization.
That warning is relevant to what we are saying here because, in our opinion, when leaders try to share major goals with others in their organization, the recipients are unlikely to experience the power of the goals in the way the leader intends, often resulting in one or more of the negative outcomes identified in the HBR warning. Employees are typically left with questions: How does this change what I do day to day, other than somehow, I am expected to work harder to achieve more, without additional resources, within the same number of hours in the day? So let’s go beyond goals.
If you’re still not yet convinced, recall, from your memory banks, news (which emerged around September 2016) about 3.5 million fake bank accounts that had been opened without customers’ permission between 2009 and 2016. In March 2019, New York Times reported that
At the heart of its rehabilitation efforts, Wells Fargo said, it has changed how it motivates employees. No longer will they be individually rewarded for reaching sales targets, or punished for falling short. Branch workers were told that their primary job is to serve customers, not sell them things.
Try This…Go beyond a Strategic Plan
Like goals, a strategic plan seems very good to the originators, who have toiled for weeks and months to build it, to steer the business in a new direction. It’s tempting for leaders to share the strategic plans to motivate their employees and curb the risk of chaos.
Yet to the recipients, it’s often a murky document that rarely answers the inevitable question: How does this change what I do day to day, other than somehow I am expected to work harder to achieve more, without additional resources, within the same number of hours in the day? The strategic plan then becomes less relevant as time passes, and the plan starts to expire.
I have no use whatsoever for projections or forecasts. They create an illusion of apparent precision. The more meticulous they are, the more concerned you should be
—Warren Buffet
Instead, your employees need something that lets them take responsibility for their actions as you delegate more to them. Something that helps your team control their own behavior, knowing they are walking the walk. Something that allows the employees to know what they need to do differently, know how they need to behave on a day-to-day basis.
Strategic plans and strategic goals are useful for you and your senior management team in how you allocate your capital and how you might re-engineer your organization. But when it comes to motivating the wider employees, what we need is something to complement the goals, to complement strategic plans.
Try This…Doing the Right Things, NOW
How else to motivate your people? As a Plateau Business—much like any sports team that is going through a difficult patch—you don’t have the feel-good factor that motivates people, that comes with being a start-up or growth business. Your team members aren’t inherently motivated by the experience of the fighting a good fight and that winning feeling that comes with growing. As a leader, you no longer have that inherent positive yet unspoken aura around your business. No doubt you have many techniques for reinvigorating your team. We’re sure at different times during this plateau phase you have had positive response to your motivational speeches—yet the results have not been lasting.
So, it’s time for something different, and radical. No more I have a dream speech. No more, we choose to go to the moon speech and the associated goals. The trick is not to ignore the goals but to focus on the things that need to be done to move the needle toward those goals—on a day-today basis. When we say move the needle, imagine the needle of a measuring instrument such as a speedometer.
We realize that a focus on the present—even though we are not encouraging you to be short-termist—may feel a little counter intuitive to you. Let’s see what football coach Nick Saban has to say on this topic.
With six National Championships to his credit, University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban is one of the greatest college coaches of all time. Although his long-term goals are very clear to him, he says that the focus of the messaging to the team should not be about the outcome, the messaging is about what needs to be done to achieve the outcome. His current advice to his players is:
Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you need to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about how we can be the best in what we can do today, the task at hand.
In 2006 Nick also said: “We’re not going to talk about what we’re going to accomplish. We’re going to talk about how we’re going to do it.”
So, how can that translate to your business? For each business, that will be different. Your business is unique. So we’ll let you pause here for a moment to reflect on that.
Maybe an example will help you. If you run a hotel, your own goals are probably ambitious and forward looking. That’s great. Yet, you know the future is highly dependent on how each employee delivers quality of service. And you have no doubt ensured that your employees already know of the importance of the quality of experience their guests experience. That’s 101 in the hospitality business.
But if we apply what Nick Saban said above: “That’s the process: Let’s think about how we can be the best in what we can do today, the task at hand.” So, for your hotel: To what extent is the service the best it can be? Is that service delivered authentically or superficially? Is there pride in each interaction with the guest?
Written here in letters and words, the distinction between good customer service and the best customer service seems insignificantly small. Yet, you know all too well the difference between lip service and good service is worlds apart, as is the impact. Only the latter causes your customer to say great things about you to others. The success of online shoe retailer Zappos has been well documented: It went from a struggling start-up in 2000 to getting acquired by Amazon in a deal valued at $1.2 billion in 2009. Zappos started off as just an online shoe store in the United States, but always had a bigger desire: to be a leader in customer experience.
Zappos’ founder and CEO Tony Hsieh didn’t just say they will be a customer service leader, they made that the primary criteria for decision making, even in the types of people who want to work at Zappos. Customer Service is the company’s central philosophy aimed at each employee on a day to day basis. So much so, Amazon bought them in the hope some of the philosophy would rub off...
Zappos’ desire influences day-to-day behavior of each employee. It is a journey, not a destination for each employee. And it’s not a superficial statement, as the organization truly embodies this desire. The CEO discussed this desire from the heart, on a regular basis. The organization put a lot of resources in place to ensure their systems and processes were aligned to this desire so that they can be the best in what [they] can do today, the task at hand.
Pause: Did you make notes of things in the Action This Today section in the back of this book? If not, please take this opportunity to review the prior pages to identify again any thoughts and ideas you want to follow up on.