This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Why Goals Matter
I was working with a leader, and he was telling me about his head of marketing and how he felt like he couldn’t tell her, he couldn’t give her difficult feedback and explain to her what she needed to do differently because he felt so bad because she was working so hard.
So I asked one simple question, Does she have goals? What he said was, “Wow, I hate to tell you that’s a brilliant question, but it’s a brilliant question because I realized that she doesn’t have goals.” Now, he’s not alone, right? This happens all the time. It happens in startups and in large companies. We kind of forget to clarify the goals that people have so that they know what they’re working towards.
So it’s really important to be able to do that, because the truth is that you’re not able to give people feedback to encourage them or to really redirect them if they don’t know what they’re shooting for and you don’t quite know what they’re shooting for either. So goals are essential for you to be able to help direct them to where they need to go and correct them if they’re not heading in the right place. The second thing is that people love goals. It’s very motivating to know you’re making progress towards a thing you’re shooting for, and goals are the things that help you do all of that.
So when I checked in with the leader again, he said it was like a miracle. It was so relaxing. They had a conversation about goals. And when he was then going to give her feedback, it took it totally out of the realm of personal and it put it in the realm of analytical. This is what you need to do. How are you doing according to achieving progress on your goals?
So for you, think about recognizing that goals actually free you and free your employees. Everybody knows what they’re working on and how to get on the same page.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
One very popular way to think about goals is through OKRs. OKRs, what does that mean? Objective, key result. So the objective is the thing that you want to achieve. For example, have strong penetration of your product inside of your market. That’s the objective. The KR, the key result, is as measured by. So to have strong adoption of your product inside of your target market as measured by 50% of your users actively using the product by the end of the quarter. That’s the key result on the way to the overall objective.
So for example, one of my clients wanted to have very high customer loyalty. It was really important for them to be close to their customer and to have a back and forth discussion with their customer at all times. But they didn’t really have any OKRs about it. So when we met as an executive team, I helped them think about putting OKRs in place around their customers. So what does that really look like? What that looks like is, they began to send out a survey to test and see how satisfied the customers were. They also checked in on the number of customer complaints they were getting to their complaint line. And between those two measures, they were able to set a baseline of where are we now.
So the objective was to increase customer satisfaction. And now that they had a baseline, they could set the KR, the key result, to be specifically 80% fewer problems come into customer service and 80% higher in customer satisfaction.
Dashboards
Once you have your OKRs, it’s really helpful to put them on a dashboard. So not all the OKRs go to the dashboard, but the most important ones that represent the most important objectives of what you’re working on now. It’s super helpful for everybody to be clear, for it to be visible to everybody where you are in achieving your most important objectives. And you can put each of the projects on your dashboard and then you can code them. Are they green, on track? Are they yellow, off-track but with a plan to get on track? Or are they red, off-track with no plan to get back on track? So if you look at those things, you can then visibly see very easily where the company is going and where are the areas that you need more attention from your overall executive team.
So I’ll give you an example. One company I was working with was trying to launch a specific project, and it kept being delayed, delayed, delayed. We all got together. And then what we saw was that there was a lack of communication between the groups. This group thought this group didn’t need any more information, and this group was waiting for this group to give them more information. One group was working with an outside vendor, and the outside vendor kept saying it’ll be done in a week, it’ll be done in a week, it’ll be done in a week. And nobody really knew how to get things back on track. Once they had a dashboard, they saw they were off track. They were able to get together in a room and communicate about what they are going to do to get this most important project back on track.
That is the value. That is the magic of a dashboard. The last thing I want to say about dashboards and about coding things in green, yellow, or red is this: When someone says something is green, you might want to ask yourself, “Why do they think it’s green? How do they know it’s not yellow? How do they know it’s not red?” I’m not asking you to be suspicious of your people, but I am asking you to ask them to be analytical and here is my evidence that it’s green. Here’s how I know it’s on track. Over time, you’ll have an understanding of who is really realistic and who might be a little over-optimistic and might need a little more questioning when they present green on their dashboard.