LESSON: Having a clear goal (what you want to do) and a clear plan (how you are going to get there) are the prerequisites of executing successfully.
RED TECHNOLOGIES was a successful company supplying specialist financial software to the City. It had been built up by two brothers: Tom, the archetypal geek, and Darren, a natural born salesman. The company had done very well and grown quickly.
About a year ago, after their 200th employee had joined, the brothers decided they needed a proper HR director. They appointed Philip who, on his arrival, was pretty appalled by the situation. There’d been a culture of, if not outright sexual harassment, then certainly inappropriate banter. This atmosphere hadn’t been helped when Darren began dating his PA, only for the relationship to end in tears and her leaving – ‘Bloody inevitable,’ Tom had commented to Philip. A similar thing had happened a couple of years before, with a new Head of Marketing. The pay scales were a mess, reflecting Tom and Darren’s tendency to fix problems by throwing a bit of cash at them, and also their pattern of rewarding their favourites. The engagement scores (how happy and fulfilled the staff were) were very poor. Furthermore there were murmurings among the staff about how the company didn’t seem to know where it was going. People didn’t have clear goals to work to, and this meant it was hard to prioritise where they put their effort. This had all been reflected in the company’s performance. The 20 per cent+ historic annual growth had been dropping for a few years, and this year the company had barely grown at all.
Philip had been a more junior HR guy at a client I’d worked with and we’d kept in touch. Having asked me out to dinner, he was explaining the situation with the air of a man who regretted his decision to take on the job. ‘I don’t suppose you’d come in for a couple of days to try and help me figure out what to do?’ he eventually asked over the dessert.
Two weeks later I was sitting at the back of Red’s weekly management team meeting. It was pretty chaotic. There was no agenda, decisions seemed to be taken on a whim and people drifted in and out. Darren dominated, with a mixture of charm and humour that was very seductive. He seemed to pull ideas and solutions out of thin air. The fuel the company ran on was testosterone.
That afternoon I carried out some interviews with key people, as usual reaching across all levels of the company. What became clear was that Red was run like a fiefdom. There were few formal structures, everything was referred to Darren, or, if it was a technical matter, Tom.
This style had worked well when the company was smaller. The brothers could get their arms around the whole thing and people felt connected to them. Today, as one engineer put it to me, ‘You wait around for Darren or Tom to notice you and then bask in their attention for a while, then it’s like the sun’s gone behind a cloud.’ Another said, ‘I feel rudderless. In my last company we had a clear strategy so we knew where we were going. Here, we’re all over the place.’
What the company needed was a more grown-up structure and set of processes, and a more grown-up way for its leaders to run them. I presented these conclusions to the Board, which consisted of Darren, Tom and a few people who’d invested some money in the early days. Darren was polite but dismissive. His angle was that while I understood ‘big corporates’, I didn’t appreciate smaller companies that had to be more agile. I argued back a bit, but at the end of the day, as the Labour politician Gerald Kaufman wrote in his memoirs, ‘Advisers advise, Ministers decide.’ As I packed up my stuff Philip was apologetic. I waved him off. We had tried.
As I was outside their offices waiting for my taxi I heard a quiet, ‘All right mate?’ and turned to see Tom. ‘Got time for a coffee?’
I cancelled my car. After we settled down in a café around the corner, he said that he’d thought I’d been right, but that Darren doesn’t like to admit when he gets things wrong. We had a long chat and as he spoke about Darren and the troubles they’d had setting up the firm, the situation began to make more sense. He also shared his worries about Darren’s womanising and inability to settle down. Tom asked whether I’d have another go at talking to Darren.
What became clear when we met a few weeks later was that several things were going on. Over the years Darren had built up both a rational and emotional resistance to the idea of planning. He’d seen how too much planning and deliberation slowed everything down in the corporate job he’d left to set up Red. And he’d seen how the plans that he and Tom had originally made had also needed to be ripped up as they built the company in its earliest days. They’d brought in someone to help them do some strategic planning a couple of years before, which hadn’t worked out, as they had both felt the person concerned had turned out to be useless.
This is sometimes how pathogenic beliefs are formed. They aren’t always a result of formative childhood experiences. They can be the result of an accumulation of experiences, which slowly form into an attitude that, while understandable, isn’t the true or whole picture.
In Darren’s case, his rational resistance to having clear goals and a strategy to realise them was reinforced by his emotional sense of what being a leader meant, and how he personally provided leadership. As he put it, ‘Tom’s the brains, all I do is sell what he does. I make things happen, solve problems. Make myself useful. My job is pulling rabbits out of hats.’ Darren, for all his bombast and bluster, felt inferior to his shy, quieter younger brother. Put at its simplest, Darren’s core pathogenic belief was that if he were to make a clear plan and run things in an ordered, more traditional way, he would lose power. He’d be less important within the company and less needed by Tom.
Darren vastly underestimated what Tom thought of him. We had a three-way session in which I asked each brother to talk about what the other meant to them. It was very moving. In Tom’s eyes he’d be nothing without Darren: a nerd sitting at home, tapping on a keyboard in his underpants, eating Pot Noodles. When I mentioned that Darren felt he needed to ensure there was a bit of chaos around so he could keep producing rabbits out of hats, Tom playfully punched his shoulder. ‘We’re not running a magic show, you berk, we’re running a business.’ Darren laughed, and I felt a great big wave of relief run over him.
We then moved on to surface some of the things that frustrated each of them about the other. We did this using ‘Challenging Conversations’ (outlined in Chapter 5), a tool that I often use when I am working with teams. This work left Darren and Phil feeling they’d cleared the air and got a good understanding of what each needed to do going forward.
Sometimes, when an assignment comes to an end, I feel I have said all I have to say. Other times, as in this case, there are other thoughts I have, or interpretations that I could have made. I had a strong feeling that Darren’s way of working was tied up psychologically to how he was in his personal life. As well as being a serial seducer of women he was, at heart, a serial start-up founder: happiest in the exciting early stages but less suited to the different pace and long-term commitment of a mature company (or relationship). I also felt that Tom was quietly impressive, and that if he were ever to escape from Darren’s shadow, he might actually prove to be the leader the company needed. It might be better either to let Darren go off and start something new, or for him to set up an innovation lab within Red to create and trial new ideas and products. But as I say, I hadn’t been brought in to do business consultancy, or psychotherapy, so I kept these thoughts to myself.
In any event, over the next six months, with Philip’s help, the brothers revamped their company’s culture and ways of working. They started to plan more carefully what they wanted to achieve, adopted some clearer goals and held a company-wide ‘strategy day’ for the first time ever. All this helped get Red Technologies back on a growth trajectory.
A while afterwards I bumped into Darren at a party.
‘Hey, how’s it going?’ I asked.
He smiled, ‘Well, good. I suppose I’d better thank you.’ He sounded unconvinced.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘Honestly?’ he replied. I waited.
‘Well. Tom’s happy. Philip’s happy. The staff are happy. But I preferred it before, to be honest. I was happier then, you know, pulling those rabbits out of my hat.’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘Well,’ he paused, eyes darting round, looking, I assumed, for a woman to work his charms on, ‘Abracadabra, eh?’ and whoosh! He was gone.
‘Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.’
attributed to Abraham Lincoln
Whether you run a company or not, there are a number of lessons to be learnt from Red Technologies. As strange as it might sound, core pathogenic beliefs can get in the way even when it comes to something as seemingly unemotional as planning. For Darren at Red Technologies, planning equalled powerlessness, so it’s hardly surprising he avoided it like the plague. But neglecting planning at Red Technologies had a detrimental impact not only on Darren, Tom and Philip as individuals but also negatively impacted the company as a whole. Tom and Darren had fallen into the common trap of fixing problems in a reactive way, typically by throwing a bit of money at them, but failing to address the underlying factors that had created the issues in the first place. In failing to plan they had fulfilled Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote, and had inadvertently ‘planned to fail.’ They had both fallen into the trap of reacting to whatever immediate situation presented itself, but without an eye on the bigger picture or the overall strategy or the culture they were trying to create.
Their team meetings reflected this. Aimless and with no clear expectations or boundaries around who was expected to attend or what the purpose of the meeting was, it felt like the whole organisation – especially Tom – had made an unconscious decision to defer to Darren’s charismatic but structure-less leadership style. Decisions were random, lacking in any kind of overall strategy, and the whole organisation had a feeling of being run by the seat of its pants (at least to the extent that Darren could keep his on).
This can and does happen to many an individual as well as in organisations, and in fact Darren and Tom’s story demonstrates how permeable the boundary is between an individual’s working style and the culture of the organisation, especially if that individual is in a leadership position.
When working with organisations, I use a very simple model (opposite) that encapsulates all of this. It identifies the three interlocking elements of any high performing organisation.
At one point in my work with Red I had showed this slide to Tom. He laughed ruefully, pointing at the Purpose circle and saying: ‘well we had that but I’m not so sure now.’ The Culture circle prompted the comment, ‘That’s all pretty dysfunctional’, the Design circle caused him to sigh and say ‘and that is just a bloody dog’s dinner’. He looked at me and admitted, ‘we’ve never stopped and thought about any of this stuff. It’s time we did.’
Choosing between various goals, strategising around these, and drawing up a plan that flows from that requires time and space, and these often feel too scarce to spare. Our frantic, multi-tasking minds and double-booked schedules suggest that time used to plan will be wasted time. As well as believing that we’re too busy to plan properly, we also look at a world where change is the new homeostasis and wonder ‘what’s the point?’ If we are all at the mercy of endless disruption, surely planning is futile? Reflecting this, a Harvard Business Review report found that just 11 per cent of CEOs believed that strategic planning is worth the effort. For sure, five and ten year plans are dead – for individuals and organisations – with many entrepreneurs advocating 12–36 month plans at most. None of this means, though, that planning per se should be abandoned. While we may need to plan over shorter horizons, or in less detail, we still need some roadmap so that we can anticipate what is ahead of us. We may need to rip up that map and draw up a new one more frequently than before but that is still preferable to driving blind.
The High-Performing Organisation model
When I met them, Darren, Tom and their company had reached a point where they had outgrown their childlike way of working; they had to let go of running Red Technologies the old way, or risk letting the old way squeeze the life out of what it had the potential to become. They had to grow up as leaders, and planning (like the other eleven practices outlined in this book) is central to that process. Creating space to plan requires discipline. It means overriding the primal ‘lizard brain’ – the amygdala – which is responsible for fear, self-protective rage and the urge to reproduce, and which doesn’t want to slow down, review or really think. Darren and Tom had to deal with the discomfort of implementing more formalised structures and processes as part of their inevitable evolution.
The real difficulty with planning isn’t in figuring out which system or tool to use, it is that you might have to face up to some really tough decisions and choices that you’ve been avoiding. You might realise that hitherto you have been working in a state of semi-permanent vagueness about how you spend your time and the company’s money.
The real challenge, though, is as much psychological as operational. You run the risk of disappointment if plans go wrong, like the brothers had experienced during the early days of Red Technologies. Planning also forces you to face unpleasant aspects of your personality, unhelpful habits or outright immature ways of working. You might discover in the process of planning, that much of what you think you ‘have to do’ is actually fairly unimportant, leaving you feeling a bit lost at sea or embarrassed at all the meaningless work you’ve put in. You might come face to face with your lack of discipline or your laziness. You might feel the pain of facing your past mistakes. You might have to acknowledge some uncomfortable truths about yourself, like Darren did when I met him at the party – perhaps that there are certain types of work that you are more suited to than others. In short, planning forces us to face ourselves.
The more tangible benefits are legion. Planning allows us to allocate our limited resources in a meaningful way. It allows us to have a sense of progress – where are we on the plan? It also allows us, by dint of the intellectual process behind it, to have considered alternative scenarios and options. As we face external pressures, anticipatory thinking may better prepare us to react well. It also allows us to harness the widest canvas of people’s views. Planning should be a process where everyone, at whatever level, can contribute. This will make our plans better but also creates a shared sense of ownership of the plan we eventually arrive at.
There’s another phenomenon that points to the benefits of planning. Psychologists have long studied something called the Zeigarnik Effect, which describes the tendency of the human mind to fixate on unfinished tasks and forget those we’ve completed. In a 2011 study, psychologists Roy F. Baumeister and E.J. Masicampo found that people were less competent at a brainstorming task if a simple, unimportant warm-up task was left incomplete; the warm-up task got stuck in their active memory, distracting them and interfering with their attempts to complete the main brainstorming task. What the psychologists learned was fascinating: it was not the task itself that needed completion in order to free the participants from being preoccupied with the warm-up task; they simply needed to be able to make a plan to complete the task. The simple act of making a plan freed up the participants’ cognitive resources, making them fully able to concentrate on the task at hand.
So there’s no doubt that planning is essential if we are to utilise our time, energy and resources optimally. The more complex the organisation and difficult the task the truer this is. That is why a lack of planning became more detrimental to Red Technologies as they grew in size. Darren, as well as having various psychological hang-ups about planning also failed to see that planning is not the enemy of agility but its partner. An idea best summed up by the man who planned some of the key battles that led to Allied victory in the Second World War and later became US President, General Dwight D. Eisenhower: ‘In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.’
The setting of your goal, the devising of the plan to make it happen and the execution of that plan combine to form what we might grandly, but correctly, call your strategy. The sine qua non of setting your strategy is choosing your goal. The great 1960s adman David Ogilvy hit the nail on the head when he remarked, ‘The essence of strategy is sacrifice.’ Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to choosing what it is you want to achieve. You need to create the space to really think through what you want to achieve – and how – before rushing on to try and do it. If you don’t, you will be building your house on the proverbial sand.
You are very familiar with the last big goal I set myself – you’re reading it. After a couple of years’ preliminary work on this book, and a few false starts I finally committed to making it happen. I typed out this little card and then put it in a small frame on my desk. It kept my commitment very front of mind!
As you can see I set myself a twelve-month goal, though I broke it down to what I needed to do daily.
Quite a few people I’ve worked with like the idea of quarterly goals (possibly because it reflects the way big corporates tend to plan and review their financials). In his 2002 bestseller Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish suggests that working in ninety day blocks will provide enough time to make tangible progress on one or more important projects, but is short enough for you to see the finish line.
Ultimately, how long you set for your goal depends on what it is and what resources you can commit to it. I would offer a word of caution, though. We tend to get carried away with excitement when we set ourselves a goal, and this can lead us to underestimate how long it might take. We also forget how much we will likely be blown off course or hit obstacles. We will also have work (and maybe personal) emergencies and inevitable fallow periods when our mojo gets a bit depleted. So it’s a bit like when you get the builders in to do work on your house: always add a third on to the time they say it’ll take and the same onto the cost they quote.
One useful exercise is to take a moment to list the goals you are currently pursuing and see if they need pruning back, or, potentially (but less likely), adding to. It always amazes me that when I ask people to do this very few have actually articulated what their goals are. They usually have a vague idea of what they are and can talk around them, but usually they have never taken the obvious and essential step of being crystal clear about them, and writing them down so they can monitor their progress. Another, surprisingly large, set of people don’t have any sense at all about what their personal goals are. Talk about shooting in the dark.
However many goals you may have, one of them should stand out as a fundamental, more ambitious goal. Your ancillary goals can be met with some hard work in the ‘business as usual’ mode, but this other ‘big goal’ is the one that could be transformative and which you really need to make space for. It’s the one that might seem too big or ambitious, or – if not thought out properly – too ill defined or nebulous. Take your inspiration from the military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz who, at the beginning of the 19th century, wrote: ‘Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.’
Often, this goal will be developmental, about you, part of what I call your personal strategy, which I will explore later on. It could, on the other hand, be an intrinsic business goal, tied up with the strategy of your workplace. It might not even be about work at all. Or it could be a precursor to a professional goal, like the work Almantas has to achieve in Chapter 12.
One client I worked with felt that unless she spent considerable time improving and renovating the beautiful but ramshackle house she lived in, she wouldn’t be relaxed enough to really pour herself into work. She prioritised getting it all done within a year, achieved that and then turned her focus onto work where she eventually led a management buy-out.
I suspect that any big goal (what Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras in their book Built to Last call your BHAG or Big Hairy Audacious Goal) should have a year horizon. If you do want to commit to a three-month goal or a six-month one, fine, but if I were coaching you I’d be asking if that timescale was realistic and, if it was, whether it was actually a big enough goal. If we do assume a twelve-month rhythm, your goal template should be something like this:
| My Goal: In one year’s time I will … | ? |
| To achieve that every month I need to … | ? |
| To achieve that every week I need to … | ? |
| To achieve that every day I need to … | ? |
Did I write 500 words every day? Of course not. Did I think I would when I set out my plan? No. But it was a good rule of thumb. Sometimes the demands of the ‘day job’ overwhelmed me. One day, I remember, I wanted to meet the kids straight from school and take them to the park for the first sunny day of spring instead of ploughing on with the writing, so I did. But overall I pretty much stuck to the plan. Which is the only reason I reached my goal and you’re reading these words now.
Opposite is what my own mindmap for my goals looked like at the point I decided to prioritise writing this book.
So many people stagnate or flop around because they ‘can’t decide’ between various possibilities. But you only get one life, so stop dithering, choose a path, and set off down it. You can always adjust your route later. Don’t wait for the perfect decision that can’t go wrong. Have faith in yourself and set off.
Prioritised Goals Mindmap
Other people decide to do ‘too much’. They have a whole list of things that they want to do, and, unsurprisingly, they spread themselves too thinly and they fail to make an impact. This can sometimes be due to undisciplined thinking and lack of willpower, but it can also be indicative (as I think it was with Darren) of an inability to commit. This in turn can stem from worrying that you haven’t got enough knowledge to make an informed choice. But no one ever has perfect knowledge. Again, it’s about forcing yourself to make a choice and then committing. If you can’t or won’t do that you will never get off the starting blocks.
One last point about your goal. Research tells us that writing down a goal increases our chances of achieving it. Even better than writing it down is to share the goal with someone else and ask them to help you hold yourself accountable. I’m a huge fan of mentors but this is a bit different. Find someone who you trust, that you feel achieves the things they set out to do, and make them your ‘goal mentor’. Have a coffee with them and explicitly ask them to be your witness on this journey. Share why the goal is important and put it in your diaries to meet or at least speak every month with the express purpose of talking about how things are going. Use them as an external, ancillary source of willpower.
ASK YOURSELF: Do I have a clear set of goals? Do I have a ‘big’ goal? Is it stretching enough? Do I measure my progress towards it? Do I have allies to support and encourage me?
Once you have set your goal, you need to devise the strategy for achieving it. Strategy is a word that is thrown around and is sometimes used to intimidate people. But you don’t need an MBA to understand it (though if you want to understand it better, there is a reading list on my website). Strategy is simply the way in which you seek to achieve your goal. It describes how your ends (goals) will be achieved with your means (resources) and how. It should play to what Michael Porter, the great strategy theorist, calls your ‘competitive advantage’ – what can you do differently or better than others.
You may be in a position where you are responsible for building the process and culture that drives execution across all or part of an organisation. Or you may not have that level of management responsibility. The next section applies in all cases. I tell clients that in practice, they should always be guided by a dual strategy. You should have a strategy for achieving your business goals, as you are obviously beholden to your organisation’s strategy and objectives, and your success will be bound up with delivering on these. But you should also be following a strategy for you for achieving your personal goals, which is just as clearly thought through. I am endlessly struck by how almost everyone I work with, and especially senior executives, will have a clear sense of the first but not the second. But as soon as you raise the question of why you would have a strategy for your role but not for you, they instantly get it and want to get on with creating one. Here’s how that would look. You will see that your goals should be broken down into SMART objectives, the business acronym popularised by management guru Peter Drucker, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timebound. These are the core of your plan:
Personal Strategy Execution Roadmap
This effectively becomes your personal plan. It should be as clear and detailed, and as ruthlessly executed as the plan you have for your ‘day job’. Indeed you will notice how closely it mirrors a standard strategy roadmap that you might have for your business, and this is the one I use with clients if that is what we are looking at:
ASK YOURSELF: Do I have a clear strategy for what I want to achieve? Is it written down? How much of my time and effort do I devote to it? Am I on track?
Once you have set your goal and your strategy to achieve it you can begin the more detailed process of planning. At the heart of any good plan are three things, and each flows from your personal strategy:
1. Stages – what are the specific steps that will lead to my goal being achieved?
2. Timeline – which of these steps will I do when?
3. Resources – How am I going to do these things? Using what time, energy etc?
Good luck!
