How to Give Backbone to Your Business Objectives

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There’s no greater tool for improving the performance of an organization than setting well-thought out goals.  Goals give individuals working together on a team a common target to aim towards.  Well written and developed organizational goals provide the guiding structure that teams and individuals need to set objectives for the important outcomes in their respective areas.

The value of goals is diminished however, if a comprehensive Action Plan for “how to” accomplish the goal is not also created.  This is where you put the ‘meat on the bones’ of the goal setting process.  Action Plans break goals & objectives into bite-sized doable actions, which makes it easier to get started and helps avoid getting overwhelmed. 

The key to developing an Action Plan is to have clarity on the deliverable.  The deliverable is what you have when you are done.  It might be something like: “Create Board of Advisors by the end of the second quarter.”  Once the deliverable is clear, the Action Plan needs to indicate the specific steps that need to be taken, by whom and by when. 

For instance, before an Advisory Board is created, a business owner might want to first do research into best practices, talk with business owners who already have a board, and talk to her attorney to determine any legal ramifications.  Each of those steps needs to be defined, given a deadline and assigned to one individual.  Ideally, every major business objective has a corresponding Action Plan.  Well written objectives which are backed-up with detailed Action Plans provide the structure a leader needs to grow their business.

The Single Most Neglected Element in Selling Today

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In today’s professional selling environment, STRATEGY is a prerequisite to tactical success.  Tactics refers to the techniques you use when you’re actually face to face with a prospect and includes all the tools of the trade such as questioning techniques, overcoming objections, presentation skills, trial closes, etc. 

Strategy, on the other hand, describes the process you use to position yourself with the potential customer before the sales call even begins.  Good strategy, like good tactics, can be learned.  It’s ironic then that strategy is the single most neglected element in selling today.

Integrating strategy into the sales process requires a conscious, planned system that is visible, logical and repeatable.  Creating and defining a sales process eliminates the phenomenon of individuals reinventing the wheel and creating something that’s unsustainable. 

An organization’s sales strategy needs to be based on best practices and includes a logical sequence including the following steps:

1)     Conduct a situation analysis.

2)     Define goals & objectives.

3)     Isolate critical success factors & barriers.

4)     Identify strategies & create an action plan.

5)     Create a feedback loop for monitoring, measuring and reporting.

6)     Meet on a regular basis to review, reassess, adapt & train.

Top Performers Need Purpose and Plan

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Top performers want to belong to an organization with purpose and a plan.  In a survey done to evaluate what employees value most in an organization; the number one quality cited was the “feeling of being in on things”.  It wasn’t a higher salary or time off employees wanted but rather the sense they were engaged in meaningful work. 

Work is more fulfilling when it’s building towards something that’s growing and expanding.  Top performers in an organization want to know the game plan and they need to see how they’re contributing to it in a meaningful way.

It’s not uncommon for a disconnect to exist between the purpose and plan in the mind of the business owner and that of their employees.  The leader often “assumes” his people know where the business is headed because he’s shared that vision.  The biggest problem with communication though, is the illusion that it has taken place.  And that problem is especially true in a growing organization as the complexity of communication grows exponentially with each new employee. 

This reality drives home the need for every leader to ‘over-communicate’ the purpose and plan for the organization.  Ideally that message is being delivered and reinforced on a quarterly or even monthly basis.  Helping employees stay focused on that vision will go a long way towards insuring they stay connected and have the feeling of being engaged they desire.

Key to Performance Management is Accountability

The key to performance management is accountability.  Accountability requires each person in the organization to be able to point to what they have personally done to move the organization closer to its preferred future.

Holding individuals accountable for results is what brings discipline to a culture.  A focus on results that matter is what gives individuals the guidepost they need to make daily decisions about how they use their time.  The single biggest obstacle for every employee is the plethora of competing priorities they face every day.

Determining results that matter requires us to be clear about expected outcomes and engaging individuals in defining what it will take to accomplish those outcomes in a detailed Action Plan.  An accounting of progress against the Action Plan needs to happen on a monthly basis ideally using a consistent, transparent process for creating and sharing monthly Progress Reports.

Monthly Progress Reports provide the accountability every individual needs to stay on track with their performance.  Time spent between a manager and their direct report reviewing monthly Progress Reports can be focused on problem solving, evaluating resources and making course corrections.  Everyone in the organization needs to be able to connect their daily work with the long term goals of the company.  Although it may initially feel like another ‘to do’ on a long list, that accountability is actually the key to performance management.

Employees Favor a Metrics-Oriented Culture

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Well designed metrics strengthen performance by improving morale, promoting accountability and encouraging creativity.  The key is identifying measures that provide relevant information which can be used to guide and modify activities and behaviors.  Well designed metrics provide insight for decision making but there is a point of diminishing returns.  As Theodore Levitt observed, “The more abundant the information, the less meaning it will yield.”  

Well designed measurements in an organization benefit employees in several ways:

1. Measurement is good for morale: it may seem contradictory, but people want to know what is expected of them and they want to know how well they’re performing. Quantifiable measures give employees reliable feedback in a consistent way.

2. Measurement promotes accountability & transparency: even the best performers will tell you they do better when they know their performance is being monitored and measured. It enables them to identify issues and make changes before problems get too big.

3. Measurement promotes creativity: in an odd way, metrics actually promote learning & creativity, because an individual can try new things and determine whether or not they’re working and how they might need to be tweaked.

Creating a culture of measurement is an important part of any business strategy and every role in an organization can be enhanced by attaching meaningful and applicable measurements.