EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” noted the late Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. Individuals or organizations with too many priorities have no priorities and risk spinning their wheels and accomplishing nothing of significance. In turn, laser-focusing everyone on a single priority — today, this week, this quarter, this year, and the next decade — creates clarity and power throughout the organization. In this chapter, we’ll press hard for you and your company to stay focused. We’ll show you how to wrap a memorable theme around your priority; achieve it — or at least make substantial progress toward it — by a specific due date; and host a celebration with rewards to provide the requisite finish lines and fun, pumping up the energy and engagement of the team members as they achieve something significant together.
Gene Browne didn’t know how to drive a garbage truck when he started a waste collection company, The City Bin Co., in Galway, Ireland, in 1997—and he still doesn’t. In fact, he thinks this is one of the keys to success in his business.
By staying out of his trucks and focusing on steering the company instead, he has scaled the profitable business to $25 million in annual revenue and 120 employees in 2014, up from 80 in 2013. The City Bin Co. is now working toward a Big Hairy Audacious Goal™ of serving 1 million customers by 2020. This is its long-term “main thing.”
In 2011, it became clear to CEO Mark Zuckerberg that “Facebook’s first priority needed to be figuring out a wireless strategy,” noted a 2013 article in Fortune magazine. Jessi Hempel, senior writer, explained: “He was maniacal about it. In December 2011 he reorganized the company to embed mobile engineers in all product teams. In June 2012 he began Facebook’s annual all-hands meeting by explaining that the company’s most pressing priority was to become a mobile company.” Every acquisition, hiring decision, and software development project was focused on one thing for the next 18 months: to go mobile. And in April of 2013, Facebook did. It achieved mobile ad revenue that exceeded all expectations in the next six months, reaching 50% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2013. It was an amazing pivot that saved the company. This was Facebook’s medium-term “main thing.”
Toward the end of 2010, Ignite Social Media President Jim Tobin had a “rock in his shoe.” His 28-member team wasn’t using its newly installed project-management system. With a month left in the year, he wrote on a whiteboard in the break room, “Late: 241; Unassigned: 728” and dated each metric “12/1.” After sending out a short email to his team focusing everyone on getting both metrics to zero by 12/31, he was blown away to find that within 24 hours, late tasks had dropped by 25%, to 193, and unassigned tasks by over half, to 353. By the end of the month, both were at zero. The team was now ready for 2011. This was the short-term “main thing” at Ignite, which has since grown to 110 employees.
Decades ago, Charles Schwab, CEO of Bethlehem Steel, asked management consultant Ivy Lee to show him how to get more done. As the famous story goes, Lee asked Schwab to write down and prioritize his six most important tasks to complete the next business day. Then he instructed Schwab to start on item #1 the next day and not move on to item #2 until item #1 was completed. “Don’t be concerned if you’ve only finished two or three, or even one, by quitting time. You’ll be working on the most important ones, and the others can wait.” Lee encouraged Schwab to share this approach with his executives, judge the value, and “send me a check for whatever you think it’s worth.” Two weeks later, Lee received a check for $25,000 — a king’s ransom in those days — and an accompanying note in which Schwab said it was the most profitable lesson he’d ever learned. This priority list was Schwab’s daily “main thing.”
As the above examples demonstrate, priority-setting is as applicable today as it was 100 years ago, and as critical in the short run as in the long term. As Confucius said, “He who chases two rabbits catches neither.” The key is sequencing a series of #1 priorities that keep everyone focused and heading in the same general direction together.
Throughout the book, we have emphasized setting priorities (that includes deciding which of the 4 Decisions to focus on first and which box on the FACe chart needs to be updated next). On the One-Page Strategic Plan (OPSP), there is a progression of #1 priorities:
1. Core Purpose: the one word/idea/speech driving the business
2. BHAG®: the one 10- to 25-year goal for the company
3. Profit per X: the one overarching KPI representing the core economic engine of the enterprise
4. Brand Promise: the one most important measurable promise (of three) representing the brand
5. The Critical Number: the one key driver for the year and the quarter
And in chapter on “The Meeting Rhythm,” we’ll continue this focus on priorities, imploring the team to pick one key topic to discuss/solve at the weekly meeting and one big issue/opportunity to address at the monthly management meeting. Again, it’s just a matter of sequencing these initiatives so they align and build upon each other. This way, you can tackle the hundreds of decisions and activities that need to be addressed without overwhelming and defocusing the team. As the well-known analogy suggests, you can only eat an elephant one bite at a time. The same is true with scaling up a business.
Throughout this “Execution” section, we’ll cover the 10 routines listed on the Rockefeller Habits Checklist™. Flip back to “The Execution: Introduction” and take a few minutes to review the list, placing a checkmark next to each routine you feel is present (even if not perfect) in your organization. Or download a copy of the Rockefeller Habits Checklist™ at scalingup.com and mark it up, if you prefer.
Managers who’ve completed the checklist often ask us two questions:
1. How did we survive/thrive for all these years and yet have nothing checked off on the list?
2. Are the habits in any kind of order?
Responding to the first question, we remind executive teams that this is an execution checklist. It’s not necessary to implement any of these habits to build a long-lasting organization. It just means you’ve been leaving massive amounts of money and time on the table. And if you have a killer strategy and/or heroic people willing to work 18-hour days, eight days a week, these will make up for the messes created by sloppy execution and lack of discipline.
To answer the second question, you can’t implement any of what we’ve taught in this book unless Rockefeller Habit #1 — “The executive team is healthy and aligned” — exists. The order in which you implement the other habits doesn’t matter. Choose just one or two each quarter, based on what will give you the most immediate benefit, as you would with the rest of our crossword puzzle-like tools. Over 24 to 36 months, you’ll have moved through all 10 habits.
1. The executive team is healthy and aligned.
Team members understand each other’s differences, priorities, and styles.
The team meets frequently (weekly is best) for strategic thinking.
The team participates in ongoing executive education (monthly recommended).
The team is able to engage in constructive debates and all members feel comfortable participating.
Patrick M. Lencioni’s best-selling book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable defines the unhealthy situations that can derail your leadership team: an absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. If one or more of these afflictions exist, address it before you tackle any other aspect of execution. We strongly suggest purchasing Lencioni’s affordable “Team Kit.” Take your leadership team through his assessment and training process to strengthen the levels of trust, healthy debate, commitment, accountability, and results. It’s a great tune-up for even healthy teams. At a minimum, require all leaders and managers to read his book once a year. It’s a quick read, and doing a refresher can prevent new problems from arising within the team as you scale up.
Many of the Rockefeller Habits reinforce routines that keep the team healthy, like taking a few minutes to share personal and professional good news at the start of a weekly or monthly meeting (discussed in “The Meeting Rhythm” chapter). Other ways to help the team build trust:
• Personality and leadership style assessments, which help team members appreciate each other’s differences
• Meal and social time during offsite planning sessions and monthly management meetings
• Shared learning experiences
“The #1 habit is the most important and first.”
Once the team is healthy, then it is ready to tackle the tough work of setting priorities successfully.
2. Everyone is aligned with the #1 thing that needs to be accomplished this quarter to move the company forward.
The Critical Number is identified to move the company ahead this quarter.
3-5 Priorities (Rocks) that support the Critical Number are identified and ranked for the quarter.
A Quarterly Theme and Celebration/Reward are announced to all employees that bring the Critical Number to life.
Quarterly Theme/Critical Number posted throughout the company and employees are aware of the progress each week.
To simplify our methodology, there are two main vision decisions: the BHAG® (Everest) and the measurable next step (one with a 90-day to one-year focus). Everything else in between is just a WAG — a wild-ankle guess. The BHAG®, derived from your strategy, is the main long-term priority anchoring the strategic thinking in the vision. The quarterly or annual Critical Number is the main short-term priority anchoring the execution planning side.
Rockefeller Habit #2 starts with identifying this Critical Number, introduced and popularized through Jack Stack’s classic book The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company. Though all your metrics are critical, reserve the term “Critical Number” for your measurable #1 priority, even when other metrics are nearly as important.
To derive the one Critical Number, imagine the hundreds of important things you need to accomplish lined up like dominoes. Find the lead domino: the one initiative that, when pursued, makes it easier to accomplish everything else. Or identify the constraint — the choke point or bottleneck — and address it first. For more on how to choose this “critical” constraint, read my favorite biz book of all time titled The Goal by the late Eli Goldratt. Scaling up is all about eliminating constraints — in the business and for customers.
At ProService Hawaii, a human resources firm based in Honolulu, President Ben Godsey determined that in the 2014 fiscal year, his Critical Number was getting 600 referrals. This was a major stretch goal. The company, which has $120 million in annual sales, had previously averaged fewer than 200 referrals a year, despite its focus on developing a great service culture and innovative products — indicated by a Net Promoter Score (NPS) consistently above 70% (on par with Apple).
After Godsey’s team talked about how great it would be to get more referrals from satisfied clients, the company created an annual theme around the plan. It set that stretch goal: getting 600 leads from clients in 12 months, three times more than it had ever achieved. And sure enough, the company accomplished this with a couple of weeks to spare— and the entire team celebrated with a trip to Waikoloa Beach.
In addition to tripling leads, this single focused and measurable priority helped to knock over a bunch of other dominoes. “We’ve now made referrals, by far, the biggest driver of our growth — which shows quality and value to clients — through achieving a goal we thought was pretty far-fetched,” says Godsey. “More important, the focus on referrals has become embedded in our culture, reinforcing our service ethic.” Clients and staff understand that as the company grows, getting more referrals helps the firm invest in improving its services and products, and brings new projects that are good for staff development. “We call that the virtuous cycle of growth,” Godsey says.
So, what is the most important and measurable choke point you need to fix/control in your business this coming year? Figure it out. Then give your team a chance to win gold, silver, or bronze rewards (Super Green, Green, or Red at the bottom of column 4 of the OPSP). ProService Hawaii normally has a three-tiered set of goals in its themes. However, in upping its game in lead generation, “we did not have Red and Green goals this time,” notes Godsey. “We set one high bar [Super Green]; the Critical Number of hitting 600 referrals. It was like going to the moon and back: Either we were going to do it, by all working together toward this singular goal [like Apollo 13], or die trying.”
Godsey’s team is experienced in using themes and therefore was ready for this all-or-nothing challenge. For those new to this routine, give your team some wiggle room in the beginning by setting a three-tiered target. Using the ProService example, we might recommend setting 200 leads as the minimum target (Red), with the reward being a party in the company’s parking lot; 400 leads as the goal (Green), with the reward a local beach party; and 600 leads as the stretch goal (Super Green), with a company trip to Waikoloa Beach.
The Quarterly Theme is a fun motif you can use in your internal marketing to rally everyone around achieving your Critical Number.
NOTE: Especially for those new to the process, we encourage teams to start with a few initial themes that last no longer than a quarter. It takes several quarters to master choosing and setting Critical Numbers.
Gene Browne thought he had tapped into the ideas covered in Mastering the Rockefeller Habits as he grew The City Bin Co., but with Ireland’s economy hit hard by the global economic crisis, he decided he needed to dig deeper into the habits in 2009. “Ireland was in a deep recession,” he recalls. “I thought we needed to do something new. We needed to get out of the quagmire.”
That year, he flew his leadership team to Orlando, Florida, for a two-day “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” workshop. There, he realized that he hadn’t been focusing enough on using Quarterly Themes to align his company’s employees as their numbers grew. “It was stuff we thought we were doing, but weren’t, really,” Browne says.
When Browne and his team returned to Ireland, they decided to put the Quarterly Themes front and center. Every quarter, they ask themselves: What is the single most important thing going on in the business in the next 90 days that we want everyone to be aligned on? Then they assign a “Champion” to prepare a presentation, using guidelines from a sheet of best practices for Quarterly Themes that the company outlined. A designer in the software division creates a humorous visual theme to align everyone in the company around it. The Champion who selects the theme can be any employee, but Browne and his managing director have final approval.
The presentation is shared in an hourly meeting with all of The City Bin Co.’s employees each quarter. Within each theme, the company lists smaller “Rocks” (column 5 of the OPSP) that need to be addressed in order to achieve the company’s big goal for the next 13 weeks, helping to focus everyone on execution. Though employees do not discuss the themes during daily huddles, which are focused on daily operations, they devote 30 minutes at weekly meetings to addressing progress toward the Quarterly Theme. Particular employees are asked to take ownership of the Rocks in their areas of responsibility, and the company’s managing director and finance manager track progress toward meeting the goals, using key metrics. “It transformed the company,” Browne says.
Here are several examples of The City Bin Co.’s Quarterly Themes:
With price pressure in his industry especially high, one of the themes that Browne introduced in the first quarter of 2014 was “Saving Mrs. Ryan.” Borrowing from the military theme of the movie Saving Private Ryan, the 90-day campaign focused on attracting 10,000 individual new customers, homemakers now identified as “Mrs. Ryan” (the company’s core “Who”). The cover of the presentation was illustrated with the silhouette of a soldier, flanked by the company’s trash cans. “Competitors’ contracts were coming up for renewal, and we wanted to bring onboard 10,000 new Mrs. Ryans,” says Browne. “We wanted to save these Mrs. Ryans from the ‘Soviet era’ service of a rival firm, so we sent a door-to-door ‘assault’ team to rescue them.”
Giant posters in the company’s main office and depot reminded employees of each quarter’s theme. In this case, above office workers’ cubicles were “Saving Mrs. Ryan” posters, designed to look like the movie poster from the Tom Hanks film. A board in the company’s main office tracked the number of contracts being signed, providing daily progress reports to the entire company. At weekly meetings, there were more detailed updates, in which the managing director presented a slide — in military green, with a stencil font similar to the one used by the US Army — showing progress in meeting the subsidiary goals, or rocks. The City Bin Co. provided bonuses to particular employees who moved the needle toward the goal each month, to keep the momentum going. “Instead of waiting until the end, this is better,” says Browne.
To motivate its team to exceed its goals, The City Bin Co. sometimes picks a Super Green benchmark that is above and beyond its target for a given theme. For the “Saving Mrs. Ryan” theme, the company selected a Super Green target of saving 12,000 Mrs. Ryans.
The City Bin Co.’s themes have varied along with the constraints confronting the company each quarter. To raise profitability while recovering from the recession, the company ran the “Life Begins at 40” campaign from August to October 2011, with an image of a Las Vegas slot machine hitting the jackpot gracing the guidebook’s cover. The idea was to increase the company’s monthly earnings by 40,000 euros a month, either through annual savings or recurring revenue. Employees were invited to submit ideas to raise cash or slash the budget.
The theme was lighthearted, but Browne knew it was necessary for the long-term survival of the company. “The economy had contracted so much that a lot of companies in Ireland were closing down,” says Browne. “‘Life Begins at 40’ was saying that if we can get to this magic figure, it’ll ensure that we can ride through this economic storm.” The company managed to achieve its goal to fuel growth.
180 to One
Another lighthearted, betting-oriented theme, “180 to One,” focused on having each of Browne’s 60 employees spend one day a month job-sharing during the first quarter of 2012 (60 employees × 3 job-sharing days = 180), to improve customer service throughout The City Bin Co. “We wanted to get people thinking outside of their own department and get an appreciation of what the other departments do,” says Browne. That meant having the accounts people work in the call centers, asking the customer center workers to ride around in the company’s garbage trucks, and enlisting the truck drivers to answer the phones at the customer center.
Customer service and staff cohesiveness improved tangibly. A truck driver now knew what types of complaints would come into the call center if a bin was not picked up. “We’ve seen a big change in relation to the culture,” says Browne. “If you ask people what the one thing The City Bin Co. is about, they will say, ‘Customer service.’” At the end of the quarter, the company celebrated beating the odds and accomplishing its goal by inviting its team to the dog races.
Bin it
Some themes have focused on improving efficiency. One, adopted in the second quarter of 2012, was called “Bin it.” It asked employees to submit index cards listing wasteful practices and unnecessary tasks they wanted to stop doing — anything that was depleting time, money, energy, or space without a valuable result. “People like me, in senior management, ask people to do things and load them on,” says Browne. “We never take away stuff.” Often, employees may hesitate to speak up or to question a manager about why they’re doing something, even if it’s obvious to them that it isn’t necessary.
Browne had one reminder of how much time could be wasted this way after he asked a team member to keep track of customer signups on a spreadsheet that he intended to monitor for three months during a marketing campaign. Nearly three years later, in a casual conversation, the employee mentioned that she was still keeping the spreadsheet.
“You’re still doing that?” Browne asked. “I haven’t looked at it in two and a half years.”
To inspire employees to clear the decks of projects like this and focus on what really matters, the “Bin it” campaign awarded prizes — ranging from tickets to the cinema to a weekend break — to those who submitted items that were approved to be “binned.” As with its other Quarterly Themes, The City Bin Co. introduced this one with a launch party; it celebrated with a barbecue upon meeting its goals. And lest employees forget about the theme, floor-to-ceiling red posters at the company’s offices reminded them to “Bin it.”
“We binned more than 150 activities over that quarter, many of which affected several individuals, so the total impact was huge,” says Browne. “It also brought a new phrase and philosophy to the company culture.”
Bin’s Health
After the company invested heavily in a marketing campaign, it introduced the “Bin’s Health” theme for May through July 2013. The presentation of the theme was a play on the magazine Men’s Health — complete with David Beckham on the cover, with an image of The City Bin Co.’s logo superimposed on his chest. The company had been splurging on marketing spending as it made a major move into a new market that helped grow its customer base 250%. “However, at a certain point, there’s no more bang to your buck” says Browne — and it was time to get lean again. The presentation outlined the company’s goals for cutting spending by set percentages in salaries, transportation, advertising and design, legal and professional services, vehicle hires, and landfill costs.
In this case, The City Bin Co. didn’t meet its goals, but it made progress toward them. “It was very clear some time into it that we were probably a bit too aggressive on our goal,” Browne says. While the company held its customary parties to kick off the theme and to celebrate the end of the 13 weeks, it did not offer any awards, as it did when the team met goals in other quarters.
NOTE: The City Bin Co. alternates between a Critical Number and Quarterly Theme that are focused on improving the People side of the business (“180 to One,” “Saving Mrs. Ryan”) and the Process side of the business (“Life Begins at 40,” “Bin it,” “Bin’s Health”). It’s important to find the same kind of balance as you sequence your #1 priorities.
What if in the middle of a Quarterly Theme or an annual one, you feel the team is going to miss the Critical Number, maybe substantially? Do you adjust midstream? Do you lower the target?
If the organization misses the mark, you have three options:
1. Repeat the Critical Number in the next quarter if it’s still crucial that the organization achieve the target. We’ve seen this when a quality or a customer service score needs to be reached.
2. Move on to another Critical Number if you sense that enough momentum was created with the previous target to keep the organization trending in the right direction.
3. Do a root-cause analysis to uncover the reasons your organization didn’t achieve your Critical Number. Choose one of those reasons to fix in the next quarter. For instance, The City Bin Co.’s “180 to One” theme addressed an organizational health issue. Browne felt team members needed to step back and gain more empathy for each other’s situations so they would be ready to work as one to achieve the next target.
Like the river making its way from Everest to the ocean, your organization will have to constantly navigate obstacles and take a step back (or pause) every once in a while. One reason we encourage organizations new to this process to start out with Quarterly Themes, rather than annual ones, is that it isn’t uncommon for teams to fall short of their goals in the beginning. Don’t change the goals. It can be inspiring to stick with a target to see if the team can pull out a victory in the last few days.
At the same time, no one’s paycheck should suffer because the senior team chose an overly aggressive goal or one that the team was not prepared to achieve. Pick celebrations and rewards that are mostly for fun.
And having three potential targets — Super Green, Green, and Red — ups the odds that the team will earn a medal. Even if you don’t hit the minimum goal, convene the team for an event to announce the results. One company promised a barbecue at which management would cook if the team achieved certain employee-retention goals. The higher the target, the better the menu. If the team hit 75% retention (Red), employees would dine on hot dogs and hamburgers. If they reached 80% (Green), management would serve chicken and ribs. The company promised steak if the business held on to 85% of employees (Super Green). When the team missed even the minimum, management instead hosted a soup kitchen.
Last, as the company matures in the use of quarterly and annual themes, you can dial up the rewards. At Jack Stack’s SRC Holdings Corporation, a group of companies with revenue totaling over half a billion dollars, roughly 15% of employees’ compensation is tied the achievement of the Critical Number. Again, we strongly encourage you to read Stack’s book The Great Game of Business, and have a team travel to Springfield, Missouri, to attend his two-day “Get in the Game” workshop. It’s particularly useful for CFOs and COOs.
Jack Harrington, CEO of Virtual Technology Corporation (VTC), was hosting the company’s first quarterly offsite to determine the Critical Number and theme. Coming off a previous quarter of phenomenal growth, the senior team focused on continuing to drive revenue, aiming to add $6 million in revenue to the pipeline in the coming quarter.
While there, in preparation for an upcoming strategic-planning offsite, the company conducted an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and a survey of management to learn their top three priorities. It also surveyed employees. It found that the frontline team was deeply concerned that VTC was in danger of failing to deliver on projects already in progress, risking the firm’s stellar reputation.
Fortunately, the senior team was “healthy” enough that an executive spoke up during the offsite and advocated for the employees’ viewpoint. In the end, Harrington and the team pivoted their focus to recruiting, hiring, and onboarding 16 hard-to-find distributed-simulation experts in the next quarter, to both relieve pressure on the existing team and prepare VTC for the additional business it planned to acquire. This removed the constraints on the company.
Going with a “Sweet Sixteen” theme (who would have imagined that a bunch of techies would enjoy such a thing!), VTC engaged all 120 employees in the process, structuring internal bonuses for anyone in the firm who could recruit one of these specialists. Mara Harrington, Jack’s wife and the head of human resources, was relieved to get the help, and in the end, the company brought on board 20 of these critical team members, exceeding its goal. The following quarter, it followed up with a “Six Million Dollar Man” theme based on the classic ’70s hit television series (people still talk about VP of Sales Doug Greenlaw running into the Quarterly Theme launch event dressed in a Lee Majors-like red jumpsuit!), where employees continued to pour on the gas and ramp up the sales pipeline.
Later that year, the company was purchased by Raytheon for a hefty multiple of EBITDA precisely because VTC had almost all the quality distributed-simulation experts on its team. It controlled a critical constraint/choke point in the industry! In the “Strategy” section, Verne shared Harrington’s post-VTC story at Raytheon as he went on to head billion-dollar divisions for this global conglomerate.
WARNING: The Critical Number, like the rest of the organization’s strategy, cannot be set in isolation from the realities of the company and the marketplace. Employees and customers will think the senior team was smoking something if they come down from the mountaintop with “the tablets” pronouncing the latest strategic plan without having completed the necessary preparation. And as Jack Stack strongly suggests, it’s best if the Critical Number is benchmarked against an external standard (e.g., “If that company can achieve 12 inventory turns, why can’t we?”), so employees don’t think the senior team was just making stuff up!
At ProService, a group of employees who are not part of the executive team developed every aspect of the 600-referral theme. Their efforts included producing a “Happy” video to celebrate the achievement of their goal (search “Happy ProService” on YouTube).
“Basically, the team said, ‘Let’s put together a fun video to celebrate achieving our goal,’” says Godsey, the president. “They started to riff and innovate, and then invited people to participate in the celebration, saying, ‘Show us your happy dance.’ Different teams made up different fun little dances. And then bam! The end result of the video was even better.”
As at ProService, you should delegate the actual creation of the theme to a nonexecutive team. Almost every company has a team member who is skilled in using a computer to create videos, posters, and other themed collateral. The senior team doesn’t need another job, and it’s best if an employee-run team drives the theme activities.
Powerful Celebration Question
At the celebration, skip the usual speeches by the senior team about “How we couldn’t have done this, that, or the other thing without so-and-so’s help, etc.” Instead, ask the most powerful question a leader can pose when a team has successfully completed anything: “How did you do it?” Stand up and say “Congratulations. We said we would do X, and we did it!! How did you do it?” Then pick someone who you know contributed to reaching the Critical Number, and have that person share his or her story. This hint is courtesy of Aubrey C. Daniels, author of Bringing Out the Best in People: How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement (a foundational business book that all leaders should read). By the way, if you’re a parent, this is a great question to ask your children when they come home with a success story. Rather than shower them with praise, simply say: “Congrats. So how did you do it?” and let them share their story.
Nothing builds momentum and energy like hitting specific targets. If your company has been through some rough times lately and the culture has taken a couple of body blows, pick some really short-term goals, focus everyone on the same thing, “play to win,” and get back your mojo!!
Rockefeller Habit #3, Meeting Rhythm, will be covered in its own chapter at the end of this section.
Rockefeller Habits #4, #7, and #8 have already been covered extensively. But here are quick recaps:
Rockefeller Habit #4 — Every facet of the organization has a person assigned with accountability for ensuring goals are met — was covered in “The Leaders” chapter. We include a mention in the chapter on “The Priority” because the related worksheets focus on determining the one person accountable for the functions, outcomes, and processes of the organization.
4. Every facet of the organization has a person assigned with accountability for ensuring goals are met.
The Function Accountability Chart (FACe) is completed (right people, doing the right things, right).
Financial statements have a person assigned to each line item.
Each of the 4-9 processes on the Process Accountability Chart (PACe) has someone that is accountable for them.
Each 3-5 year Key Thrust/Capability has a corresponding expert on the Advisory Board if internal expertise doesn't exist.
Rockefeller Habit #7 — Core Values and Purpose are “alive” in the organization — was covered in “The Core” chapter. It’s important that the Core Values and the Purpose are given priority when making hiring (and firing) decisions — and when sharing praise and constructive criticism. It’s also crucial that the leadership team formulate its one passionate stump speech that can be repeated to reinforce the bigger Purpose of the organization.
7. Core Values and Purpose are "alive" in the organization.
Core Values are discovered, Purpose is articulated, and both are known by all employees.
All executives and middle managers refer back to the Core Values and Purpose when giving praise or reprimands.
HR processes and activities align with the Core Values and Purpose (hiring, orientation, appraisal, recognition, etc.).
Actions are identified and implemented each quarter to strengthen the Core Values and Purpose in the organization.
Rockefeller Habit #8 — Employees can articulate the key components of the company’s strategy accurately — was covered in “The One-Page Strategic Plan” chapter. In essence, it speaks to the need for all employees to understand key aspects of the Vision and Strategy of the business, as reflected on the Vision Summary worksheet. And it helps drive alignment if all the employees have the same “elevator pitch” they share when asked the question, “What does your company do?”
8. Employees can articulate the following key components of the company’s strategy accurately.
Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) - Progress is tracked and visible.
Core Customers) - Their profile in 25 words or less.
3 Brand Promises - And the corresponding Brand Promise KPIs reported on weekly.
Elevator Pitch - A compelling response to the question "What does your company do?"
The balance of the Rockefeller Habits (#5, #6, #9, and #10) will be covered in the next chapter, “The Data.”