Project Management – Page 7 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

What and Who Are You Accountable To?

April 19, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

When you clearly define your accountabilities, the likelihood of you delivering the results that are expected goes up dramatically.

It’s important to understand your own accountabilities, both what you’re accountable for and who you’re accountable to. You’re obviously your own work but also your team’s work. Now be careful—this doesn’t mean do their work for them. It means you have to hold them accountable for delivering those results. And if they don’t deliver, not only are they accountable, so are you. So ask yourself the question, “What do others expect me to do? What results are they expecting of me personally, as well as from my team?”

In terms of understanding who you’re accountable to, there’s the obvious ones. There’s your team. You’re accountable to them to get them the resources they need and give them the coaching and guidance and leadership that they deserve. You’re accountable to your boss. But think more broadly about your accountabilities. You’re accountable to your colleagues and your peers and other members of the company who are relying on your results so they can do their jobs. Think even more broadly. You’re accountable to your customers, internal and external customers. You provide services to other members of your organization. Ultimately, your results drive company performance in terms of the products and services that you deliver to your ultimate customers who pay you. You’re accountable to your shareholders or the company’s owners. The financial results that you deliver on your team roll up to a broader picture, and you’re accountable for delivering your part so those people get the return on their investment they expect.

Allow me to offer an example. I work with a senior executive who is a hospital administrator. He has multiple accountabilities. He’s obviously accountable to his team. He’s accountable to his boss and the corporation as a whole. He’s also accountable to patients, even though his team doesn’t directly care for patients. The results they deliver do have an impact on the patient experience. He’s accountable to other members of the hospital staff. Because again, what his team does helps the staff do a better job. He’s accountable to physicians who work with the hospital, even though they’re external to the organization. He has to represent their perspectives and opinions to the corporation. So this one individual has multiple accountabilities to multiple people.

As you think about defining your accountabilities, ask yourself the following questions. Who’s going to be upset or disappointed if I don’t fulfill my obligations? Who’s going to be happy or excited if I do deliver those results? Who assigns me tasks or asks me to do things? Who do I offer to do things for? Once you have that clear definition of what you’re accountable for and who you’re accountable to, the likelihood of you delivering the results that are expected goes up dramatically.

Want to learn more about building accountability into your culture? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to build accountability into your culture. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Is It Time to Revise Your Goals?

April 12, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

When your goals become irrelevant, it’s important to revise them and change your priorities accordingly.

Markets can change quickly. Those changes can alter priorities. They can render some of your goals irrelevant. When that happens, change the goal. Do so quickly so the team can change its focus to higher priority objectives. It’s foolish to continue pursuing an irrelevant goal. Be willing to change it and set new goals that are more appropriate for that new environment.

I know one startup that had an original goal of site traffic. They were concerned mostly with how many people are coming to their website. The initial funding they received was based on those initial goals. Follow on funding was based on them hitting those traffic numbers. Their business model changed. They learned more about the customer. They figured out it was much more important for them to focus on how much time a user was spending on their site instead of just overall traffic.

The company was about to have a big meeting with possible partners and a new funding source, but to have that meeting they needed money to fly the executive team out to California to meet with this new partner. When they went to the original investors and asked for money, they original investors said no. They refused to change the original goal. They said they wouldn’t provide any additional funding until the organization hit that metric, but the metric was no longer relevant. The company went under, and it was pretty sad that they did. Even though this is an example of a company versus a business unit, the lesson remains the same. When the environment changes, revisit your goals and see if they need to change.

Review your current goals. Ask, are any of them no longer relevant? Has the market changed? If they’re not relevant, revise the goal. Focus the team on something more meaningful. Change your priorities accordingly. If you’re inflexible and say, “Well, we set this goal at the beginning of the year, and, you know what, we’re going to stick with it even though the market has changed,” you’re going to get results that follow that metric. Be willing to shift. That’s a sign of maturity in your organization that you’re willing to assess the market environment and change your priorities accordingly.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Measuring Goal Performance

April 5, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Regular measurement of goal achievement helps you make adjustments to your plans.

Regular measurement of goal achievement helps you make adjustments to your plans. Clearly define the metrics you’ll measure, the data sources you’ll use, the measurement methods, and measurement frequency.

One retailer I worked with had an online, a store, and a catalog channel. Each of those was considered a separate business unit. They all had goals and they all had measures. For the online business unit, they had goals around traffic, orders, revenue, and items returned. The stores had same-store sales growth, revenue, and store budgets. The catalog business had a mailing list growth goal, revenue, orders, and returns. Every metric had well-defined data sources and methods for measuring. The organization built standard reports that were generated on a regular basis. Those reports were delivered via dashboards to the executive team.

When you’re building your measurement method, build contingency plans during the goal-setting phases. This isn’t just about keeping score. You should measure for a reason. When you’re measuring, think about what could go wrong, what could go right, and what are you going to do about it? To the extent you can, put in place triggers for executing those contingency plans.

This retailer had a plan that if same-store sales growth wasn’t where they wanted it to be, they would take action. They would cut back on staffing, delaying new store openings, and launch extra marketing to hit their numbers. There were clear break points for taking action which enabled them to decide and act quickly when business performance wasn’t what they expected.

When you’re laying out your measurement plan, make sure you go through this contingency planning so when things aren’t going well, you can turn your business around quickly.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

The Inescapable Conundrums of Managing

April 3, 2023/2 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Management is a practice, not a profession or a science. To appreciate the true complexities of managing, we have to understand its intrinsic conundrums.

Today’s guest post is by Henry Mintzberg, author of Understanding Organizations…Finally! – Structuring in Sevens (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

Management is a practice, not a profession or a science. It is learned largely through experience, which means that it’s primarily a craft, although some of the best managers make considerable use of art. They also use some science, in the form of analysis, but nowhere near as much as in the professions of, say, medicine and engineering. And that’s a good thing: the overuse of analysis, especially an obsessive reliance on measurement, gets in the way of effective managing.

Watch a manager at work, or step back from practicing management yourself, and you can begin to appreciate the wide variety of things that managers do. They champion change, join projects, handle disturbances, do deals. Managing is collaborating and controlling, doing and dealing, thinking and leading, and more — not added up, but blended together.

All this can be seen to happen on three planes — information, people, and action. On the information plane, managers gather and disseminate information to help their people take action. On the people plane, they lead insiders to function more effectively and link to outsiders for the benefit of the organization. And on the action plane, managers do and deal: internally, doing means engaging in projects and handling disturbances; externally, it means doing deals with outsiders — such as suppliers, funders, and partners.

All this creates enough complexity in and of itself, but to appreciate the true complexities of managing, we have to understand its intrinsic conundrums. A conundrum is some problem that cannot be resolved, although it can be alleviated. Here are eight of them that managers face:

The predicament of planning. This is perhaps the most basic of  all the conundrums, the plague of every manager. How to plan, strategize, just plain think, let alone think ahead, in such a hectic job? Put differently, how to get in deep when there is so much pressure to get it done?
The quandary of connecting. How to keep informed—in contact, “in touch”—when managing by its very nature is removed from the very thing being managed? Yesterday you were transplanting kidneys, today you are managing others who are transplanting kidneys.
The labyrinth of decomposition. The world of organizations is chopped into pieces — departments and divisions, products and services, programs and budgets, vertical silos and horizontal slabs. Managers are supposed to oversee and integrate this whole confusing affair. So, where are they to find synthesis in this world so decomposed by analysis?
The mysteries of measuring. How often have you heard that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The trouble is that many of the most important things to be managed, such as culture and innovation, even management itself, don’t lend themselves to easy measurement. Hence, how to manage what you can’t rely on measuring?
The dilemma of delegating. Managers who are well connected receive a great deal of information, much of it informal — opinion, hearsay, even gossip — all of which can be very useful. (What would you prefer: to find out in a sales report that you have lost your biggest customer, or to hear a rumor that this customer is thinking of taking its business elsewhere?) Thus, how is the manager to delegate when so much of their information is personal, oral, and often privileged?
The ambiguity of acting. When a manager delays making a decision to better understand a situation, everyone else can be held back from acting. But leaping to action without adequate consideration can be even more dangerous. How, then, to act decisively in a complicated, nuanced world, somewhere between paralysis by analysis and extinction by instinct?
The riddle of change. Constant change can be as dysfunctional as no change. How to manage change when there is the need to maintain continuity?
The clutch of confidence. Managing requires confidence: who wants to be managed by someone afraid of the future? But is this any better than a manager who always acts fearlessly? Accordingly, how to maintain a sufficient level of confidence without crossing over into arrogance?

How can any manager possibly deal with all these conundrums concurrently? The answer: by facing them, to alleviate their worst effects. If each can be seen as a tightrope, then to manage is to walk through a multidimensional space on all kinds of tightropes: managers have to get the balance right. These conundrums are not distractions; they are managing!

Henry Mintzberg is a Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, the winner of awards from the most prestigious academic and practitioner institutions in management (Harvard Business Review, Academy of Management, Association of Management Consulting Firms, and others), and the recipient of 21 honorary degrees from around the world. He is the author or coauthor of 21 books. His latest book is Understanding Organizations…Finally! – Structuring in Sevens (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Feb. 7, 2023). Learn more at mintzberg.org.

Excerpted from the book, Simply Managing, and applied in the book Understanding Organizations…Finally! – Structuring in Sevens.

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Providing Resources to Reach Goals

March 29, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

If you don’t give your teams the resources they need, they’re not going to hit their goals.

Once your goals are set, you have a responsibility to provide the team the resources it needs to achieve those goals. These resources should be identified during the goal-setting process. Include those resources in budgets and project plans. Failure to conduct resource planning and allocation is going to frustrate your teams. They won’t have what they need to achieve their goals.

At the business unit level of goal setting, resource allocation can be easier in some respects, and more difficult in others. The ways it can be easier are first, you have more control over your business unit’s resources. You can shift those resources more easily. There are also known processes like budgeting that can be linked to your goal-setting process. This ensures that the resources are available for the goals you’ve set.

Now it can be more difficult, too. Getting additional resources outside your business unit can be a challenge. Those resources have to come from higher levels, or you have to negotiate with other business units to get resources allocated to you. It’s not often they’ll give those resources up. If you don’t allocate resources during the budgeting process, you either have to either wait to shift resources or reprioritize all your other efforts due to this new goal.

Review goals that are falling short in your organization. Make sure they’ve got the right resources. If they don’t, shift them appropriately. Ensure your goal setting, budgeting, talent management, and staffing processes have explicit links to one another.

If you don’t give your teams the resources they need, they’re not going to hit their goals. Conversely, if you really think through the goals you’re trying to hit and make sure they’re appropriately resourced, your teams are going to drive the success that you expect.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Communicating Goals to Your Organization

March 22, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Once you’ve built some great goals, you need to communicate them to the organization. Operating in silos leads to missed opportunities.

Once you’ve built some great goals, you need to communicate them to the organization. People in your department need to understand how their own goals, as well as the goals of their colleagues, tie to the broader organization goals. Operating in silos leads to missed opportunities. Sometimes you’ll find people are working at cross purposes. When communicating goals, provide broader strategic context for why goals were chosen and how they tie to the broader organization success.

I worked with one client that was really focused on changing their business performance. They wanted to improve their gross margins. So they got everybody together and made sure they understood how everybody’s goals tied to this higher-level gross margin goal. The supply chain team was given goals around making their top products more profitable. The marketing team was given a goal of emphasizing the most profitable products in the portfolio. Product teams were given SKU rationalization goals to thin the portfolio and remove less profitable products. The sales team was given the goal of selling the more profitable products.

Everyone in the division knew what everybody else was doing. It prevented arguments, like sales reps demanding low margin products or sales reps yelling at product teams for removing a SKU. All goals were communicated by the business unit president at an all-hands meeting. They all heard the same message at the same time.

For your organization, get your business unit and partner organizations together. Compare goals. Figure out how you’ll communicate it to your entire organization at the same time, so everyone knows and understands the context. Having this clarity at the highest level and making sure that all the goals are aligned is going to reduce conflict in the organization and improve the likelihood that you hit your numbers.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Reality Checking Your Goals

March 15, 2023/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Goals can make sense in isolation, but when you add them all up, you may be asking for unrealistic results from your team. Watch out for conflicting goals.

It’s important to reality check your goals. Goals can make sense in isolation, but when you add them all up, you may be asking for unrealistic results from your team. You’ll need to evaluate how department goals impact one another. If you set a goal for revenue growth, and another goal for cost cutting, you may have created an impossible situation for the team. They can’t spend money to drive revenue because they’re so focused on cost cutting. It’s this kind of reality checking that leads to more reasonable and achievable results.

What I’d suggest is get all your organization’s goals together on a whiteboard. Start with the high-level corporate goals, then lay out your business unit’s or department’s goals. Lay out adjacent business units or functions. Look for dependencies. Look for supporting goals and look for conflicting goals. Go through the same exercise for the teams in your organization.

For supporting goals, make sure there’s no overlap. You don’t want people working on redundant things or getting double credit for going after the same work. For places where there are dependencies of goals, make sure the first goal is properly resourced so the follow-on goal can be met. Also lay out for that second goal the risk in hitting it if the first one isn’t achieved.

In situations where you have conflicting goals, try to get them aligned. You can eliminate one of the goals or carve out the impact of one goal on another. For example, if you have a cost-reduction goal, lower the revenue goal since you can’t market as much since you’ve decided you’re not going to spend. It’s this kind of reality checking, where you take a step back and look at the overall goals and the behaviors that are driven, that’s going to increase the likelihood you hit your most important goals and don’t cause frustration for your team.

This reality check is something that I see people miss all the time. They lay out their goals, their goals are smart, they’re focused, and they understand the behaviors they need to drive, but they never take that extra minute to say, “How do these goals impact one another?” If you do that kind of integrative thinking and look across all your goals, you’re going to spot the trouble spots and understand what you need to change before you launch your team out on its work.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Setting Commit and Stretch Goals

March 8, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

A commit goal gives your team a clear target to aim for, while a stretch goal gives your team an incentive to go above and beyond.

A goal setting technique designed to provide predictability and generate excitement and upside potential is setting commit and stretch goals. The commit goal is a promise of what will be delivered. It’s non-negotiable. Missing it has big consequences. The stretch goal is something for the team to aspire to. If they reach it, the rewards can be really large.

Let me walk through an example of what this can look like. Let’s say we have a corporate profit target of $150 million. Each business unit is given a portion of that target. And when you add those up, it’s $155 million because we want to have a hedge in this situation. Those are commit numbers. One business unit has a $40 million commit and a $45 million stretch. Let’s say at the end of the year they come in at $41 million. Well, they get 20% of the extra bonus that’s available because they got one million of the five million possible.

Let’s say another business unit had a goal of $50 million as their commit. They come in at 45 million. It’s a bad year. No bonuses and poor reviews are going to follow in the performance management process. Another business unit has a $27 million commit and a $30 million stretch. They come in at $32 million through some really good luck and a lot of hard work. That team should get 166% of the possible bonus if it’s an uncapped bonus structure.

The final business unit has a commit of $38 million and a stretch of 45 million. They come in at 40 million and they get a 28% of the available bonus. The corporate result of this entire goal-setting structure is coming in at $158 million on a corporate commit of 155 from this business unit.

When you look at setting these commits and these stretches, it’s pretty clear that the team knows what they have to hit with the commit. They understand what the consequences are. Having the stretch gives them that incentive to work even harder and deliver above and beyond.

One thing I invite you to do is to create a commit and a stretch for all major metrics for your organization. Ensure there are consequences for missing the commit. Make sure there are rewards commensurate with hitting the stretch. By laying out these goals and letting people know broadly across the organization what the commit and stretch are, as well as the consequences and rewards, you can drive exactly the behaviors you want to hit your higher level goals.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Do You Set Supporting Goals?

March 1, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

Setting goals for supporting functions helps link people’s roles and the work they do every day to your department’s larger goals.

It’s easy to focus on big departmental goals, but not everyone on the team can directly affect those numbers. Setting goals for supporting functions helps link people’s roles and the work they do every day to that broader departmental goal.

To do this, it requires you to break those big goals down into component parts. Assess which supporting activities make that big goal possible. With those activities identified, you can proceed to set goals for those supporting groups. That will help them drive departmental alignment around that bigger goal.

For example, I know one organization that was trying to reduce their costs by $100 million over a two-year period. Now, not everyone in the organization owned a budget, and they were asking, “How can I contribute to hitting that big number?” Everyone in the organization had to contribute something. They looked at those supporting functions and tried to understand what activities does that function do that drives that higher-level cost number?

The supply chain group understood that if they increased their inventory turns and improved their truck fill rate, it would make their operation more efficient, which would then allow the broader organization to take some costs out. The manufacturing team looked at their processes, and they understood that if they cut the line changeover time, it would make their process more efficient, again, contributing to reducing costs. The real estate team even chipped in. They looked at space utilization, and they deferred some new expenses to future years. Every group had a smart goal that linked their work to that higher-level $100 million cost reduction goal.

Something I encourage you to do is to take a big goal for your department or your business unit and think about the support teams that contribute to hitting that goal. Build out a process map and understand how the support teams’ work impacts that big number. Then be sure that their individual and team goals are tied to those drivers of hitting your larger goal.

When you pull everybody together and understand how they contribute, then make it clear to them how their goals drive that business unit goal, you’re going to get more alignment and excitement around the work they do and hopefully help you hit that goal more easily.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Setting Different Types of Goals

February 15, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

There are two major types of goals you can set for your business unit: quantitative and qualitative goals.

When you set goals, there are commonly two types: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative Goals

When you set goals that are quantitative, they’re going to focus on things like financial results, operational metrics, customer dynamics, or quality. You can typically track these types of goals pretty easily. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to be thoughtful about these metrics. A focused set of critical driver metrics is more valuable than a broad set of less relevant metrics that your team can’t affect.

Let me share an example. Let’s imagine you have a sales team. The overall goal for the division is to grow revenue. The driver metrics that affect revenue are price and volume. Now, we’re talking about the sales team here. They have no control over product price. If you just give this team a revenue goal for their business unit, it won’t focus their efforts appropriately. It could lead them to argue or complain about pricing policy. That’s just not productive. The business unit also doesn’t control customer service. Using total revenue for this team’s goal isn’t fair because they don’t control all of it.

When you go to set the sales team’s goal, focus their goals on what they can control. In this case, it’s new sales volume. Think about that sales team going out and trying to get more customers. The driver metrics, for their ability to acquire customers, are things like the number of prospects they talk to, the number of sales calls they conduct, and the conversion rate from a prospect to a paying customer. By focusing on these driver metrics for this sales team and focusing it on what they can control, you’re going to get better results.

When you think through your metrics for your business unit, think through the drivers. Consider the team’s ability to control those drivers. And make sure the goals you allocate to them are only focused on that which they can control. If you build your goals this way, you’re going to get a more concrete set of goals that your team feels empowered to actually drive.

Qualitative Goals

In addition to setting quantitative goals, which are pretty easy to set, a lot of times you’ll have to set qualitative goals. You can look at things like major project completion or milestones in completing that project. Sometimes, you want to measure things that are difficult to measure. You’ll have to infer from indirect quantitative metrics whether you’re making progress on that desired outcome. Things like culture are hard to measure, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to measure it. You can construct a set of indicators that let you know if you’re moving culture in the right direction. You can look at things that’ll tell you if you’re succeeding in reaching that higher-level end goal.

Let me offer a couple of examples. If we’re looking at culture, maybe we create a balance scorecard to measure our performance on cultural improvement. We want to be a top place to work. We want engaged associates. That’s hard to measure. But, we can look at quantitative metrics to tell us how we’re doing. We can look at associate retention, how many people stay in the organization. There are measures out there like a Gallup Q12 poll that can tell you which direction your culture is moving. You can look at things like absenteeism. I can measure if somebody’s not at work, and that’ll tell me if I have a good culture or a bad one. I can look at referral hires. Are people telling their friends, “Hey, you should come work here—it’s a great place to work?” Some organizations have kudos programs where associates reward one another for doing something great. How many people are using that program?

When I look at all of these quantitative metrics together, it gives me an indicator on whether my culture is strong or weak and if it’s going in the right direction. You may have situations where you’re doing a big project. And again, qualitative goals can matter here. Let’s look at implementing a large technology system. We may take an approach where we set goals based on milestones. We may set goals around use case completion, user acceptance testing, and training completion. Setting qualitative metrics is the same as setting quantitative ones. Understand the desired high-level outcome you’re trying to achieve. Think of drivers that point toward that outcome. For the ERP it’s things like “Are you hitting your milestones to get the project done?” For things like culture, maybe it’s several indicators that you tie together and say, “Does this picture tell me I’m going in the right direction?”

Qualitative goals can really help you understand how your organization is doing. Pay as much attention to them as you do to your quantitative goals.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How to Set Business Unit Goals

February 8, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy /by Trevor Jones

When you go to set your business unit goals, there are a few principles you should follow. Any goals you set should be SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Performance expectations in your organization are probably pretty high. A key to hitting those expectations is a solid goal-setting process. Setting department and business unit goals requires leaders to translate higher-level corporate goals down to the business unit and then break them down further into team and individual goals. This means defining goals, then linking them to strategy, financial results, and incentives.

Leaders must also sanity check goals to ensure there are no unintended consequences arising from goals that are improperly set. Going from corporate to business unit to individual goals helps drive alignment of activity with the company strategy. For more on team and individual goal setting, watch my course on that subject.

I have one client that was trying to grow internationally. They set a corporate goal for a portion of revenue coming from outside the United States. The business units were each given a target. Functions that supported those business units were given enabler targets, like building a pilot plant in India for the R&D group. If the R&D built that plant, then they could sell product in India, which would help drive the high-level goal of driving revenue outside the United States. Individuals on that project had milestones for their personal goals. By linking the corporate strategy to the business unit to functional goals down to individual goals, the organization had the alignment it needed.

When you’re thinking about the goals for your organization, make sure you’re making those clear linkages from the highest-level strategic goals all the way down through your business unit or function down to your teams and down to the individual level.

5 Goal-Setting Principles

When you go to set your business unit goals, there are a few principles you should follow. Any goals you set should be SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. These principles improve the team’s understanding of what they need to deliver. These principles also help you ensure you’re able to track performance against the achievement of the goal and gain the team’s commitment to achieving it. There are multiple versions of SMART, but they all get to the same thing—creating clear and actionable goals that matter.

Specific

Specific gets to spelling out the behavior or outcome that you desire. It lets people know what to focus on and what actions are expected.

Measurable

If you can’t measure it, you don’t know if you succeeded. Setting measurable goals also ensures you’re driving the right outcome, like profits versus sales. You’ll get very different behaviors depending on how you measure.

Achievable

Your goals should be achievable. If it’s not realistic, people are going to give up and not even try. They’ll get halfway through the year and say, “We’re off course, so you know what? Forget it.”

Relevant

Goals need to be relevant. This drives the activity that’s tied to a broader organizational goal. If I set a cost-cutting goal for the company, but we’re trying to grow sales, that cost-cutting goal is not going to be relevant or helpful in achieving the broader goal of hitting sales.

Time-Bound

Your goal should also be time-bound. People need a sense of urgency. Specifying time also enables better work and better project planning.

I worked in an organization where we were trying to increase the number of dollars that we were getting back from consumers who owed us money. The goal was specific. We said, “Here is the metric that matters. We need to achieve 100 million dollars of incremental dollars collected.” It was also measurable. We knew exactly what data to get and how we would track it. The 100 million dollars was achievable. Sure, it was a big number, but we looked at last year and we said, “We think we can hit 100 million this year.” That goal was absolutely relevant—one of the bigger goals for the company was driving down our losses. It was really dependent upon bringing in these incremental dollars collected. Finally, it was time-bound. We said, “By December 31st, we need to collect these incremental 100 million dollars.”

By setting that SMART goal, everyone in the organization knew exactly where we were going and why it mattered. When you’re setting your business unit or department goals, take the time to think through every goal and make sure that those goals are SMART.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How to Identify and Motivate Slackers on Your Team

January 25, 2023/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Project Management, Strategy, Training /by Trevor Jones

You put in a lot of time and energy into leading slackers, but you don’t get anything back in terms of results. Your job as a leader is to figure out what will motivate them to perform.

One type of detractor you might deal with is a slacker. These people are in the lower left corner of the leadership matrix. You put in a lot of time and energy into leading them but you don’t get anything back in terms of results. Slackers have the talent to get the work done. They just done care. They’re not motivated to do it. Leaders spend a disproportionate amount of time managing slackers. They require constant supervision and motivation. What’s so frustrating about them is they have the capability to do the work. They just choose not to.

Identifying Slackers

There are some easy ways to spot a slacker. They tend to be smart and have a strong resume. They can tend to be very self-promoting. They might be a frequent job changer. They’re difficult to get work out of because they constantly debate the merits of your request rather than doing the work. They might renegotiate their deadlines frequently. They’re more interested in other people’s work than their own work. They can tend to be outspoken. They annoy other team members because they always wander into that team member’s lane instead of focusing on their own responsibilities. Other team members push back a lot of times on covering for the slacker because they know the slacker has the capability to do the work.

I know one slacker very well. He was me. I had a role where I had previously been excited about the work I was doing. My boss changed my responsibilities. I was not thrilled with those new responsibilities so I started mailing it in. I just didn’t care. I became very frustrating to lead. I absolutely had the ability to do that work. I just wasn’t excited by it. My form of silent protest was to just not do the work and focus on everything else that was going on in the division. I drove my boss nuts. He was at my desk all the time pushing me, asking where the results were. I never had results to offer. If you spot a slacker on your team, get ready for what might be a long, drawn out engagement trying to motivate them and understand what’s going to get them to deliver the results you expect of them.

Motivating Slackers

Your slackers are in the lower left corner of the leadership matrix. You have to put in a lot of time and energy into managing them, and you don’t get anything back in terms of results. The issue with slackers is they’re unwilling to do their job. They drag the team down with their poor attitude. Slackers require motivation.

The leader’s job is to figure out what will motivate a slacker to perform. This can be in the form of incentives or punishments if need be. Slackers need to have expectations and consequences clearly laid out. The leader has to figure out what motivates the slacker. Whether it’s new responsibilities, compensation, or visibility, once a slacker’s motivated, their performance tends to improve quickly because they have the capability to do the work. The leader’s goal with a slacker is to unlock their motivation. Sometimes that includes moving them to a new role or even out of the organization to a job where they’re going to be happier. This requires the leader to invest more leadership capital in the near term figuring out how to motivate this individual.

For example, let’s say you have a slacker on your team. They have a big presentation that’s two weeks late. You sit down with them and you understand that they have the capability to do the presentation. They just don’t seem to be doing it. When you ask them what would excite them about working on that presentation, they tell you, “Well, you always present the presentation. I never get any visibility here for all the work I put in. That’s not a lot of fun.”

Now you have the key. You can unlock that slacker’s motivation. In this situation you might say, “Well, I’ll tell you what—if you finish the presentation, I don’t need to be the one who presents it. You can present it in front of the leadership team.” You might see their performance change dramatically to the positive in that moment. You’ve unlocked their motivation. You understand they want visibility. As soon as you connect the visibility with the work you’re asking them to do, you might see their entire attitude change.

The benefit of more effectively leading a slacker is that they could quickly become a higher performer. They’ve got the skills, just not the motivation. You’re also demonstrating to your team that you’re focused on results and that you will hold people accountable. If you do decide to move that slacker out of the organization because you can’t find proper motivation, make sure their attrition is as positive as possible. Help them transition to that new organization.

Your key as a leader when dealing with a slacker is figuring out with that motivation is. As soon as you know that motivation, you can get them to change their performance.

Want to learn more about developing your team? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to assess and improve your strategic plans. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!