Archives for November 2006

Setting Goals

I was working for an organization that was attempting to go through a re-branding to become more relevant to their customers. They had hired an outside consulting firm to come in and help walk them through the branding process.

After talking with several of the employees, it became clear to the consultants that the employees didn’t all have the same view about the two and three year goals of the organization. To help get a better understanding, they scheduled a meeting with the CEO to ask him what his goals were.

Several of the employees were pretty excited about finally understanding the direction that the organization would be headed and counted down the days until the consultants would meet with the CEO. When the consultants came out of the meeting they were asked about the goals for the organization. They responded:

“We asked, but you aren’t going to like the answer.”

Evidently the CEO told the consultants that he didn’t like making goals clear for the employees. His reasoning was that if the organization missed goals he had set, people would be disappointed. He felt that would hurt his leadership more than keeping people in the dark about where the organization was headed.

This isn’t as uncommon as it sounds. Many people in leadership don’t set goals for the very same reason, but they aren’t self-aware enough to understand why. This CEO was able to articulate his reason for not setting clear goals, which was a step better than most leaders, but it revealed a misunderstanding about how to motivate people.

Most individuals would rather play a game where they understand the goals of the game and come in second, than play a game where they don’t know what they are trying to accomplish and come in first.

When I was a kid, I was playing with a demo video game in a store. Another youngster came up, took the other control and we started playing a wrestling game together. I pushed buttons as fast as possible in order to try to win. After the first round he leaned over to his friend and commented, “This guy is really good!” referring to my skill at the game. I turned and asked, “Which player am I?”

I was winning, but I didn’t understand the game. I didn’t even know what player I was. This was much less satisfying than other games where I understood the rules—even when I lost horribly.

People want to be challenged. This doesn’t mean you should set goals that no one can reach, but don’t be afraid of setting and communicating your goals to the people you lead. This is your job as a leader—to show people where you are going and how you are going to measure your progress. If you don’t give people these goals, it is hard for them to really get satisfaction from their job.

Leading through Example

By Mark Shead Leave a Comment

As obvious as it seems, many leaders forget that their actions speak louder than their words. I was managing a department at a medium-sized organization that had a casual dress code on Friday. One of the vice presidents decided that casual Fridays were a bad idea and mandated that everyone wear corporate casual every day. For my department, that was inconvenient because we saved most of our dirty work for Friday when we were wearing jeans.

However, even if it was inconvenient for our department, I explained to everyone that the organization was trying to maintain a professional image. No one in my department liked the change, but they were fine with adhering to it.

The second Friday after the change, all of my staff was in the office and wearing the corporate dress code. In walked the vice president who had made the change. He was wearing the same casual clothes that he had prohibited two weeks earlier.

When he left our department, all of my staff turned to ask if they could dress like that as well. We stuck with the mandated dress code for several months before it was finally repealed.

While the vice president had enough authority to get away with not following his own rules, he should have known better. Even if he had a very good reason for it, he should have been more aware that saying one thing and doing another is very poor leadership practice.

If you are going to ask others to adhere to a certain level of conduct, you should expect to adhere to it yourself. If you want your staff to be in the office by 8 am, you should be there before they arrive. If you tell your staff not to park in the customer area, your leadership will suffer if you decide that your importance makes you exempt from the rule.

People can follow what you say without actually following the intent. When this happens, the effectiveness of your organization is decreased. If they don’t see you following your own set of rules, they may follow them to the letter, but don’t expect them to go the extra mile to try to understand the intent.

Management Systems

By Mark Shead Leave a Comment

A lot of leaders know what they want from the people they lead, but are not particularly skilled in getting the desired results. Often, leaders in this position end up blaming the people they lead. Most often, the fault lies with the leader’s inability to focus effort toward a particular result.

A successful leader finds ways to focus effort toward their desired results. There are many ways to do this, but most of them boil down to measuring the results you want to impact. Management is often the art of taking abstract concepts and communicating them in a clear, quantitative way.

For example, the factory manager knows that he wants to lower the number of accidents, but having fewer accidents is a fairly abstract concept. However the number of days since the last accident is a very concrete concept that is easy for everyone to understand. That is why many factories have a large sign that shows the number of days they have gone without having an accident. It helps measure the concept of having fewer accidents in a way that is understood and measurable. Many factories have found they can lower the number of accidents simply by making people aware of how well they are doing at achieving the goal.

The trick is to find the proper thing to measure. There was an IT department where the manager decided to measure the number of trouble tickets they closed each week. This metric was used as part of the employees’ performance review. However, if everything was running just fine with no problems, there were no trouble tickets to close.

Once employees realized that their performance looked bad when things were running perfectly, they began unplugging certain pieces of networking equipment for 15 minutes at a time. The users would log a bunch of trouble tickets and the IT staff would plug the equipment back in and close all of the tickets.

In this case, the manager was basically measuring the number of problems that were fixed. If an IT department is functioning well, the number of problems from system outages will be very low. The manager basically created problems because that is what was being measured.

Making metrics visible keeps people focused on the desired results. A skilled leader can identify the measurements of success and come up with creative ways to make those metrics concrete and noticeable.