Entrepreneur – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

Using Stretch and Commit Goals to Drive Performance

September 21, 2020/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

Goal setting is tricky business. You’ll get much better performance if you set two goals for your team. Once you’ve done so, paying for performance is more of a math equation than it is black magic.

Incentives can, and have been, a topic of great discussion but one thing that is hard to argue is this: you want to complete a goal, incentives work.

Sometimes incentives are money. Incentives can be salary increases or bonuses. You may offer stock or options. Other incentives can be awards, time off, or promotions. Incentives need to be something that’s meaningful and exciting to your team, collectively.

When you set the incentives, make a direct linkage between the goal and the reward. I’ve always liked setting “commit” and “stretch” goals. The commit goal is something where folks are signing up to deliver it no matter what. There’s zero bonus associated with hitting a commit. It’s the “you did your job” level of goal. A “stretch” is the furthest point that folks think is in the realm of possibility. They have an idea for how they’ll achieve 70% of it but no clue where the last 30% will come from. And to be clear – that first 70% will take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to hit. With a stretch goal, people can max out their bonus.

If you have a commit goal and a stretch goal, put the bonus on a sliding scale between those two instead of creating an all-or-none scheme. A “commit” goal is the minimum that someone will deliver to the organization. At the “commit” the bonus is zero. A stretch goal is a high level of impact that will take a tremendous amount of effort to achieve. If someone hits their stretch, the bonus should be 100% of what’s available as an incentive.

Teams can get extremely frustrated when they hit 85% of their stretch goal and they get nothing for it. They should get 85% of the possible bonus. I’ve been in both of these situations. I was in one organization where we had a commit of $50 million of profit and a stretch of $75 million of profit. At $50 million dollars, our bonus was going to be zero. If we hit the commit, there was no bonus. At $75 million of profit, the bonus was going to be 10% of our salary.

Miracle Minded Entrepreneur: How to Move Past Fear and Start Your Own Business

February 17, 2020/0 Comments/in Books, Career, Entrepreneur, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Ryan Shaw

Fear keeps us from doing a lot of things in our life, but if you can move past that fear and get out of your head, the possibilities become massive.

Today’s post is by John Murphy, author of Agent of Change (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

It was 1988 and I was suddenly unemployed. My position was being eliminated due to an acquisition. I was 28 years old and the sole breadwinner for my growing family. My wife was pregnant with our second child and we had very little savings. What should I do?

Logic suggested I polish up my resume and start interviewing for a similar job, head of human resources. Surely, with my credentials I could find something decent. I was also given a reasonable severance package, so I had a few months to figure things out. No need to panic.

That’s when creativity and innovation kicked in. Questions like What if, Why, and Why not started rolling around in my head, pushing logic aside. What if I do something different? What if I start my own consulting company? What if I figure out a way to be my own boss? Why do this? And, why not do it? Little did I know that these questions would spark a new, life-changing career for me.

Of course, fear kicked in too. I now think of these fears and doubts as the “Yeah, buts.” Yeah, but you don’t have any money to get started. Yeah, but you have a family to take care of. Yeah, but you don’t know anything about consulting. Yeah, but you don’t have any advanced degrees or credibility. Yeah, but you’re only 28 years old. Who is going to take you seriously as a consultant?

I gave these “Yeah, buts” a lot of thought. On the one hand, they seemed negative and restrictive. On the other hand, they served a useful purpose in identifying and mitigating risk. So, I used the “Yeah, buts” to come up with a business plan. Who knows? Maybe writing a business plan, with thorough research and analysis, will talk me out of my idea.

Developing Your Team Members

November 13, 2019/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Ryan Shaw

It’s never a great idea to work in a silo, but you also have make sure you’re working with a strong team. Learn about how you can strengthen your team and your leadership.

Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS.

Personalizing Your Leadership Approach

Do you feel like you’re investing a ton of time in your people and not getting the results you expect? Do you have team members who are performing well, but you just can’t get them to improve? Are some of your team members disengaged and you worry about them leaving your organization?

I’ve dealt with all of these situations, and I’ve taught countless leaders how to overcome these challenges. As a result, I developed a framework called the Leadership Matrix to help deal with these issues. I’ve also written a book that explains this matrix in depth.

Here, I’ll cover how to assess how you’re spending your time and energy. How to reward and inspire your high performers. How to get results out of team members who aren’t contributing. How to train and motivate your low performers. And how to reclaim your time from team members who tend to waste it. By using this approach, you can generate better results by being more efficient in how you lead your team members.

Components of High-Performing Cultures

October 30, 2019/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Leadership /by Ryan Shaw

Driving a strong business starts with the people who work for your business and those people align on the business through the company culture. How are you shaping yours?

A high performing culture is one where people drive performance because of the right behaviors. They’ve embedded these behaviors in their everyday life. People in high performing cultures require less supervision. They’re empowered to achieve goals that are consistent with the organization’s direction.

As a leader, you need to understand how to build a high performing culture and your responsibilities for making it happen. I found that there are six components to building a high performing culture.

First, you have to define the culture. What is a high performance? What are the desired behaviors? How will you know when you’ve achieved a high performing culture?

Second, set direction. What’s the vision for the organization? What’s the organization’s purpose? You have to be able to articulate this to the team. Third is communicating the culture. What are the communication vehicles and techniques you’re going to use to reinforce culture ever day?

The Basics of a Cross-Functional Team

October 16, 2019/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Ryan Shaw

Almost all industries are segmented, but sometimes big changes require creating a team with representation from all sides of the business. Here are the basics of working with cross-functional teams.

Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS.

Imagine an orchestra made up of nothing but trumpets. Imagine a baseball team of all catchers. Imagine a medical team that’s nothing but radiologists. Those aren’t good situations.

A cross-functional team is a group of people with different functional expertise working toward a common goal. It can include people from finance, marketing, operations and HR, and other key functional areas.

Employees from different levels usually participate on a cross-functional team. The team might include frontline operators, managers and directors, you may have analysts and project managers on the team. There may be other job families involved. These teams can also include people from outside the organization like suppliers, customers, or consultants. The important thing to note about a cross-functional team is you’re bringing together people with different experiences, different perspectives, and different skill sets to jointly solve a problem or implement an initiative.

Different perspectives and skills are designed to give you a higher chance of success since you’re involving relevant experts from relevant areas. If you get the opportunity to lead a cross-functional team, I encourage you to jump at that chance. You’re going to learn so much about different functions that you may never have experienced before and you’re going to see the power of bringing together those diverse perspectives and experiences and pointing them toward a common objective.

Leadership Capital and Keys to Leading Effectively

September 18, 2019/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Ryan Shaw

Leadership isn’t an unlimited resource, because time isn’t an unlimited resource. Learn how to be a more effective and efficient leader.

Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS.

Do you work a 40 hour week or are you working 24/7? How much effort are you putting into your work? How much stress do you experience from the energy you’re putting in? Your time and energy are finite resources. You can squeeze more time out by taking away from other activities in your life but you can’t do that forever. That time isn’t unlimited.

If you squeeze out too much, bad things can happen. I’m speaking from experience here. I’ve had two heart attacks because I was spending too much time and energy with my work. Something needs to change. To reduce the time you spend at work, reduce stress, and improve performance, you need to approach how you spend your time and energy differently.

Leadership capital is the time and energy you invest in leading your team. It needs to be invested carefully like any other scarce resource. When’s the last time you assessed where you’re spending your time and energy? Who are you spending it with? How are you spending it? Are you getting the results you want from those investments? These are all questions I want you to consider as you assess how you’re spending the valuable resource of your leadership capital.