Chapter 4
Goals and Leadership
In Chapter 2 you examined your assets and liabilities and recognized the fact that you need people around you to offset your liabilities. In Chapter 3 you examined your personality traits and determined which ones are necessary to be in a leadership role. The next step is to establish goals.
It's always been a bit confusing to me when companies write five-year goals and then they revise them every year for the next five years. It's always made much more sense to me to set goals for no more than a year at a time and to be able to reflect on them so that everything you do every day relates to your 12-month outcome. This avoids the possibility of wasting energy by getting off track and having to recover. But, more important, by setting goals every day, I think you become much more focused, you know what you need to do and when you need to do it. To do this, you need to make sure that your goals are such that you can examine them every single day and determine whether or not you at least made progress.
To do this there are basically four characteristics goals need to have. The first is that they need to be specific. Doing the best you can is not a goal. Working hard is not a goal. Even working 12 hours is not a goal. Goals are specific when they give you direction.
When I work with corporate individuals and I see overly general goals, then we go back and reexamine them, break them down, and analyze them so we may try to come up with very specific things that we can measure at the end of the day.
The second trait of successful goals is that they need to be difficult every day. If a goal is not difficult every day, then you find that you get into a mode of complacency and you don't really make yourself better every day. And if you don't improve and learn something new, then I'm not sure why you would set goals in the first place.
If all you want to do is survive, then goal setting is obviously not a necessity. But if you want to win and you want help your team win and you want to set an example for your team as a leader, then you make your goals difficult so that people around you know that you're trying to get better every day.
The third key in setting goals is that they need to be time oriented. In other words, you need to set goals and put a time limit on them so that you can evaluate and adjust if you need to.
The fourth thing, which I think is the most important, is that goals need to be attainable. It's psychologically devastating to set a goal for the day and at two o'clock in the afternoon to realize you're not going to get there. To keep your sanity, you lower your goal so that you can feel some type of achievement. It's not healthy. It's much better to set goals for every two hours or three hours so that when you achieve that, you can raise the bar. Psychologically it's better for you, it makes you feel better about who you are, it makes you feel better about what you're trying to do, and it also keeps you on track. So being attainable is critical, but at the same time you need to strike a balance between trying to push yourself and making them overly difficult.
Now, after you've set goals, it's a really good idea to go back and review Chapters 2 and 3, which deal with assets and liabilities and personality. It's easy to set goals and then try to get there without examining your assets and liabilities. It makes no sense to set goals that you cannot achieve because you don't have the assets you need. It doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't make you an unintelligent person. It's just a reality check that everybody needs to go through every day: These are my goals and I have the assets to achieve them. That's a major boost.
As I previously mentioned, when I deal with athletes, we laminate their goals on a business card so that they have their goals where they can see them all day, every day. It takes five to ten seconds to review that list, and it keeps you on track, not only with understanding where you are professionally, but also understanding whether you can achieve what you set out to achieve that day.
It's a boost to your system. It gets you back to what we like to call the emotional edge. It gets you back to a point where your emotions become assets in your work as opposed to being detriments. It's critical that you keep your assets list close by when you're examining your goals. And it's also good to know that if you set goals and you don't have the assets to get there, you can look at your liability list and determine who on your team can offset those liabilities and help you achieve your goals. This is where we begin to see better teamwork—when you involve other people. And as a leader, it's critical that you do this. You begin to involve other people with the achievement not only of your goals but also of the team goals. This also makes it necessary to examine the team goals so that your own are consistent with them.
This sounds simple. As a leader, aligning individual and team goals should be a part of your commonsense leadership, but most of the time it's not. Instead, we get complacent in our environment, we get lose sight of our goals, and then it takes a lot of energy to get back on track. We probably waste about 60 percent of our energy thinking and worrying about things we can't control. If you could get back 50 percent of that wasted energy and apply it to achievement, then you're going to be much more effective, not only as a teammate but also as a leader because people see how you use your energy. And I keep repeating the old cliché: What you are talks so loudly people can't hear what you say. That's basically how leadership is determined, by people observing you as the leader, your work ethic, and your ability to stick with your goals and stay on track.
You also need to relate your goals back to your personality. Many times I find that in dealing with corporate individuals they have personality traits that prohibit them from achieving certain goals. That doesn't make you a bad person. It's just a fact that certain personality traits are necessary to achieve certain goals. And if you in particular don't have the necessary traits, then you need to involve teammates who do. Involving people in goal achievement is a team asset.
Over the years, I've worked with so many athletes who set 12-month goals and then don't look at them again until well into the season—and sometimes not until almost a year later. Probably the best example was a player I met during baseball spring training. He told me, “I'm going to quit and I want to take you to dinner.” And so we went to dinner. It was March 12th, just before the start of the season. I asked him, “What do you hope to achieve by the end of October?” He gave me very specific numbers, including such things as batting average, RBIs (runs batted in), base hits, on and on.
I said, “Well, if you're going to quit anyway, let's play a game. Humor me for a while.” I took a stack of napkins and I said, “Okay, if this is what you want to achieve specifically by the end of October, what do you want to achieve by July, the All-Star break, which is the middle of the season, in regard to this goal?” He wrote it down.
And then I said, “What do you want to achieve by Opening Day, April 1st, that relates to your goal?” And he wrote it down. And then I asked him, “What do you want to achieve tomorrow, March 13th, that relates to your goal?” And he wrote it down.
And I said, “Okay, what do you want to achieve in each at-bat tomorrow and what do you want to achieve in each swing tomorrow?” He wrote all that down and we did that for every specific category that he had included in his 12-month goals. We used a stack of napkins.
Well, to make a long story short, he didn't quit. Every week we would go over those numbers and by the end of the season he had significantly surpassed every single number that he had set on his achievement list. It wasn't magic; it was common sense. If you make everything you do every day important to your eventual outcome, then you avoid wasting energy by going off track and having to recover. You basically begin to use most, if not all, of your energy every day to achieve something specific.
I did that same exercise with a corporate individual recently. We sat down and we talked about what he wanted to achieve at the end of the year in productivity. We worked backwards, starting with the 12-month mark, which he thought was quite odd. But six months into the program, he was far beyond everything that he had hoped to achieve by that benchmark.
What this means basically is that the process is critical. If you don't execute the steps well on the way to 12 months, you can't get that lost time back and there's no way to make up for it as your deadline approaches. So every single day you must execute whatever process is necessary to achieve something during that specific day.
I spend a lot of time with everyone who I work with talking about the process. For example, in baseball if you execute the process well—you have good swings and you hit the ball hard—and you go 0–4, to me it was not an 0–4 day because the process was good in every single at-bat. To me, you had a 4–4 day, you just didn't get any base hits. But if you keep hitting the ball hard and you keep swinging the bat well, those hits will come. You can't hang your hat on end results, but if you've executed the process well, you can hang your hat on the process.
Many times, especially in the corporate environment, you find that people set goals for you. I have strong reservations about that because I think that the people who set them don't really understand an individual's assets and liabilities or what a team is capable of, and all that factors into the end result. Too often, the people who set goals are more involved with revenue and stockholder value, and they lose track of what the assets and liabilities are: the workforce.
Many years ago I worked with a company that was one of the largest hazardous waste disposal plants in the United States. They called me in to work with middle management, and from there we worked up and down. When I went into the plant, they were disposing of 3 million pounds of hazardous waste a month. Then, I went up to the corporate office, which was up on the hill in a really nice building, and I talked to the executives about what they wanted to achieve.
The response was, “Well, we need to do more than 3 million pounds a month.”
I said, “Well, what are you doing to help your workforce understand where you're trying to go?”
The answer was, “We told the workforce we need to increase to 4 million pounds a month.”
And I said, “Well, what did you do in addition to that?”
“That's all we did. If they do what they're supposed to do, they'll achieve it.” They mentioned that they had considered keeping the plant open longer hours, including on weekends, but the workers had refused to come in.
I went back to the plant and was very interested to learn that they had all heard the goals from the corporate office but they had not been educated on the process to make the increase in productivity happen. At this point in the day I needed to use the bathroom, so I asked where it was. The workers told me there was no bathroom. This company had just completed a $10 million renovation in the plant and there were no bathrooms. Instead, they had porta potties.
I went back up to the corporate office and I asked, “Why didn't you put bathrooms in?”
Their response was, “It wasn't in the architectural plan. We just forgot to do it.”
“Where do your workers change clothes?”
“They change in the car or before they come to work.”
“Where do they take a break?”
“They walk outside.”
Things were becoming much more clear to me. When I went back down to the plant, I looked around and I put myself in that environment and I tried to determine what we needed to do. I came up with the idea to institute a program where the plant's processes were evaluated. I also found out by asking questions what the workers liked to do in their off time.
Armed with this knowledge, I went back to the executive office. I said, “These workers like to hunt and fish on the weekends. They're not opposed to working on weekends, but they think they've done all they can during the week. They would also like to have a place to take a break. They would like to have somewhere to walk around other than just walking outside of the plant.”
Now, it's very important here to note that if you have workers who are disgruntled, you have low morale, and the last thing you want to do is to provide a gathering place so they can talk each other into being negative. The corporate office took this into consideration and made a few key changes. They put a track around the plant so the workers could walk during their breaks. They also put mobile homes inside the plant area so they had a place to take a break that was still nearby. The mobile homes also had showers so workers could change clothes and clean up before they went home, and they didn't have to use their cars anymore. They also put a horseshoe pit and basketball court out behind the mobile homes. Finally, the organization went out then and leased 1,500 acres close to the plant (at a very affordable price) so that the workers would have a place to hunt and fish. It was very interesting that, in addition to the reeducation process about how to reach the increased goals, we had changed the basic environment and given them the perception that the company cared about them. (We will talk more about the environment in Chapter 7.)
Over time, within the next two to three months, they had increased production to 5 million pounds a month. They were happier people. They knew they had a place to go on the weekends. They knew when they took a break they had a diversion from the plant. And it was, to me, a very simple, commonsense solution to what had become a morale problem in the plant.
Everyone was satisfied with the progress, then in one meeting the director of human resources said, “I've got an idea. If one of the departments sets a record, we'll go visit them, shut the plant down, call that department up, congratulate them, and give them pen and pencil sets with the company logo on top.” I thought that was the strangest thing I'd ever heard. If you're going to give them something, give them a gift certificate so they can take their families to dinner.
But they decided to go ahead with the human resources plan. It didn't go over very well. The first month they called a group together and congratulated them, they gave them a pen and pencil set. The next day, of the 40 pen and pencil sets they gave out, 35 were back on the human resources director's desk because the workers had no use for them.
So we made a revision to the plan and gave them a certificate to go to dinner instead, and that went over very well. People were excited about it. It's a reward. It's not the size of the reward or the cost of the reward. It's the fact that they're being recognized for achieving specific goals. And it's very important that you, as a leader, make sure that your team is recognized for things that they accomplish.
Too often we're limited in our positive reinforcement and liberal in our negative reinforcement. However, we know from research over many years that negative reinforcement may be effective for the short term, but positive reinforcement is going to cause long-lasting results.
You know, there's nothing more critical than employee buy-in to goals. That example at the hazardous-waste plant illustrates that employees need to be able to feel and taste the goals. They need to be able to get a real piece of the success that comes with goal achievement. There are many times when the goals are proven to be unattainable or unacceptable. If that's the case, leaders don't wait until they get deep into the process before they begin to recognize that these goals are inappropriate. Maybe they're not achievable because of a lack of equipment or a workforce shortage. Any number of things may prohibit you. It doesn't mean you're incapable of getting there, but there may be peripheral things that are inhibiting the achievement of goals.
As a leader, it's your responsibility to notice the soft spots around the workforce; to notice that your people are working hard, they're bright people, and they're doing whatever they can to make things happen, but as a team you lack certain things that are necessary to enable you to achieve. You, as a leader in the group, are in a position to make changes and analyze what's happening on a daily basis. And you really shortchange your team if you don't address these issues with the appropriate people who can make changes. What that means is that you need to be a leader; you need to perform and let your teammates see you do it, but you also need to be a coach. You need to coach your people, but it's just as important that you're able to coach up as you communicate with the people above you.
I had an experience with a company whose CEO was a marketing person, but operations wasn't doing well. He hired an operations manager with a good reputation, who changed the procedures and the mechanics of how the company was working. As a result, the company began almost immediately to perform much better. Six months into this change, the CEO fired the operations manager.
I asked him, just out of curiosity, “Why did you fire him?”
He said, “In six months, he never taught me anything about operations.”
Now, many people would think that's unfair, but to me it made sense because it's very important that leaders are able to not only lead their team but also, in some instances, to become a coach to people above them. That makes them feel better about giving you what you need to get the job done.
Leadership isn't only about protecting your team and being a leader to them; it's about including upper management in the process. Even though upper management many times is not involved with day-to-day operations, they appreciate when the leader on the team lets them know what's going on, what needs to happen, and what they need to become better. As a leader of the team, when you're dealing with your goals, it's important that you make sure that upper management understands what it takes to execute those goals.
One particular company I worked with in hazardous-waste disposal passed down the word through five or six levels of management about a cost-savings plan. If you have any common sense, you know that the orders and the directions change with every level of management that they pass through. It's almost like a game of telephone that you might have played when you were a kid. One person whispers a story to somebody else and it goes all the way around the room and, by the time it comes back to you, it's a completely different story because everybody puts their own interpretation on it. Two things are important here. First, directions need to be very specific and there should be nothing left to interpret.
In this particular company, they were cutting back. On the plant floor, they put hazardous waste in big barrels, and there's a yellow line that the barrels must not cross. There also are a bunch of other regulations. One day inspectors from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) came in and they found a violation. The top of one barrel wasn't secured and OSHA fined the company $100,000.
What had happened was that a worker was locking the lid on a barrel and noticed that another barrel was over the yellow line a little bit. In his pursuit of saving time and money, he stopped what he was doing and went over to push that barrel back into place—then he forgot to go back and finish his original task. He left the barrel unlocked. In a room of about a thousand barrels, OSHA came in and found that one unlocked barrel and fined the company $100,000.
Now, if the company had really communicated specifically how to get where they wanted to go in cost savings, the worker would have been able to shut the first barrel and then go move the other barrel back over the yellow line. Instead, he chose to do things as quickly as possible and it cost the company a lot of money.
So many times workers are confused because they hear the goals but they don't hear any explanation of how to get there. Many times the goals are sent down through the system without any attention to the workforce's assets, liabilities, and personality; and, in turn, people are put in a very uncomfortable position because they're doing what they can and it doesn't match up with the goals they were given.
It's critical that everyone up and down in a company understands what needs to be done in a very specific way, as I said before, so that nothing is left to perception.
In the next few pages, you're going to be asked to list your goals and action plans to get there. You'll also learn firsthand how to examine your goals by working backwards, and then how to communicate those goals to the people who are responsible for getting there. You continue to evaluate and to adjust and to be flexible as you go through this process because, as we will learn in Chapter 5, people don't leave jobs many times because of money. They don't leave because of a position. They don't leave because of the work environment. They leave because they've never been given specific instructions other than to work hard and do their jobs.
Have fun with your goals, and in the next chapter we're going to talk about expectations and how important it is to evaluate your assets, liabilities, personality, and goals when you're writing your self-examinations. Too many times these things are looked at separately. These first five chapters are critical in setting a foundation for who you want to be and where you want to go.
Goals
Goals as a Leader
For every long-term goal, list related short-term goals. Each statement must be specific, and each goal must be difficult but attainable within the stated time frame.
- Goal A:
- A-1: ____________________________________________________
- A-2: ____________________________________________________
- A-3: ____________________________________________________
- Goal B:
- B-1: ____________________________________________________
- B-2: ____________________________________________________
- B-3: ____________________________________________________
- Goal C:
- C-1: ____________________________________________________
- C-2: ____________________________________________________
- C-3: ____________________________________________________
- Goal D:
- D-1: ____________________________________________________
- D-2: ____________________________________________________
- D-3: ____________________________________________________
- Goal E:
- E-1: ____________________________________________________
- E-2: ____________________________________________________
- E-3: ____________________________________________________
Personal Goals
- Goal A:
- A-1: ____________________________________________________
- A-2: ____________________________________________________
- A-3: ____________________________________________________
- Goal B:
- B-1: ____________________________________________________
- B-2: ____________________________________________________
- B-3: ____________________________________________________
- Goal C:
- C-1: ____________________________________________________
- C-2: ____________________________________________________
- C-3: ____________________________________________________
- Goal D:
- D-1: ____________________________________________________
- D-2: ____________________________________________________
- D-3: ____________________________________________________
- Goal E:
- E-1: ____________________________________________________
- E-2: ____________________________________________________
- E-3: ____________________________________________________