Category: Purpose

When to let go of organizational goals

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markus-winkler-LNzuOK1GxRU-unsplash (1)Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Goals. They are a cornerstone of organizational and performance management. Searching “goal” in Harvard Business Reviews search bar brings up 24,156 search results (as of Sep 1, 2020).  For leaders managing organizations, goals range from revenue, growth and expense goals to operational and customer goals. For employees, they are important motivators and markers of success. Irrespective – goal setting is a both a time of reflection and anxiety for managers and employees alike.

But what happens when a goal is no longer relevant? What if the purpose for the goal no longer exists or changes so drastically? If there’s ever been a time to rethink goals, it’s now. With markets behaving in unprecedented ways, organizations and their teams should be taking a step back to revisit pre-pandemic aspirations. The elephant in the room when doing so is …. does it still matter?

There has never been a better time to flex those agility and pivot muscles and to rethink your goals and approach to the future. Here are 4 steps on your reset journey.

  1. Clean your mental slate. Assume the goals you have today no longer exist (even if temporarily). In doing this, also clear out assumptions you’ve long held in the past about how markets and people work. This will be the most difficult task and will be one you have to come back to time and again.
  2. Study the market and your customers. It can be hard to lift attention away from your company’s performance and focus on external factors – but this is a critical first step. The world came to a near stop in March 2020 for many industries in North America and while some are recovering. Look beyond your current customer base at adjacent opportunities. Understand the market dynamics of the supply chain and activity beyond your current product offering. Derive insights based on market dynamics and people’s behaviours and habits.
  3. Make new hypotheses that impact your business. With a clean slate and insights, develop new and relevant hypotheses about your business and the role it plays in the market and customers. These hypotheses should form a rich narrative that is conscious of residual assumptions. During this exercise, go back to step one and ensure your hypotheses are grounded in new insight driving to the future vs. past experience only.  Take your time doing this – and continually ask yourself. What is this hypothesis grounded in – the past or the future?  Here’s one: “More people will work from home indefinitely, even after the pandemic, which will impact companies supporting commute travel and core commercial areas”. And another: “Borders are closed so we will have few newcomers to the country”. Both are testable and impact numerous industries.
  4. Stress test goals. Assume the hypotheses you’ve developed turn out to be true – develop new goals to meet your business objectives with these truths in place. Is the customer target you were aiming for last year still believable? Should you continue to pour marketing dollars into a channels that aren’t productive? If the answer is no, then it’s probably time for your organization and team to focus on new goals.

Once you’re clear on letting goal of your goals, there are three hard tasks to follow. The first is developing a set of new aspirational goals for your teams. The second is communicating the pivots and changes effectively to your leadership and their teams. The third is ensuring individual goals line up to these organizational ones. Even with companies that are well oiled machines, this can be a difficult task that can lead to confusion. Ensure that you have an engaging “why” narrative, a concise “what” strategy and a clear “how” plan cascaded at each level.

While these activities are not to be taken lightly – clearing the deck of  goals that are no longer relevant can free you and your teams to focus on what truly matters.

 

When things are hard

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I’ve been thinking a lot about doing things that are hard things lately.  Over the past decade+, I’ve been on a journey from being an entrepreneur (which was hard but fun), to taking a career sabbatical (which was fun but hard for someone who really likes work) to my current role as a corporate executive (which is mostly hard and a little fun – so far).

While everyone has a set of things they find hard, the following seem to ring true as the causes for things being hard. People may …

  • Lack the capability (don’t have the skills)
  • Lack of experience (don’t have mental model)
  • Lack of practice (haven’t built the muscle)
  • Things are too ambiguous (no goalposts)
  • Lack of drive (no passion or desire)
  • Lack of perspective (no understanding of why)
  • ….

When encountering hard things, I find shifting my mindset works well to reduce the stress (of which there is plenty!). This looks something like:

  • I love hard things – they push me to learn and gather new experiences
  • Learning this new thing will help me prepare for future events
  • The greater purpose of getting through this is _________________
  • ….

My son is going through his own “hard things” phase with the start of a new school year. We talked about mindset, changing the way we look at the world and he had an epiphany. 

We can do anything except if we do nothing.  

It’s hard to argue with that kind of wisdom and clarity.

Habits make our lives

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The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. While this timeless piece of wisdom from Lao Zi (老子) is uncontested in its truth, the first step is easy. It’s the other 999.99 steps we need to contend with. Research on habit formation and breaking focus on the science of deliberate vs. impulse driven decisions, strength and plasticity of neural relationships and how rewards influence them.

Making and breaking habits is really hard. Our habits form who we are. They become our character and changing them can feel near impossible. Summing up the science in lay terms:

  1. Doing what you know… There’s comfort in the familiar so we gravitate to those things. Can we create comfort in the unfamiliar?
  2. … and knowing what to do. Mastery of a skill begets using that skill. Developing new skills take time and the learning curve can be steep.
  3. What if it _______ (hurts, is boring, sucks, isn’t as much fun… fill in the blank). Fear of the unknown can wreak havoc on the journey to a new habit. How can we replace this narrative?

These apply equally to professional and personal lives. I’m particularly interested in habits at this moment of midlife rebirth. (Habits in progress — writing regularly, moving more, drinking less, sleeping more.) We have the opportunity to do so much at any stage in life— who we are and our journey is created by the things we do every day.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Annie Dillard.

First drafted Sept 5, 2017

Why having fun matters in work

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I’ve just come back from brunch with a good friend who I would characterize as one of the leading thinkers in leadership and organizational design. She does a good job in prioritizing what matters for her and this is something I have been working through of late. While her advice, includes some of the elements of other prioritization frameworks  (top 2-3 important things etc.) she also considers how much “fun” a project is. I’m a big believer in having fun at work. It makes hard work easier. It turns challenges into opportunities.

But you might say, having fun is subjective – I thought you wrote about objectivity. Let’s ground fun in another psychological concept coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – being in flow – when an individual is in a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. So why does it matter? When you’re having fun, you are also experiencing flow.  It is a self perpetuating positive cycle – when you’re in flow, you are working on things that matter to you, that you have developed (or are developing) skill in and there is purpose and intention – regardless of how long or how much effort it takes – which creates the desire to do more of it. It’s at the intersection of inspiration, ambition, skill and mindset.

So as you’re thinking about how you spend your time and the projects you take on, consider the kind of work you find fun and how to bring those elements into your day to day. The old adage that if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life continues to ring true. Have fun and work can be play.

Return on time

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The choices we make about how we spend our time don’t just speak to what we value, but often more about the habits and routines we’ve developed. Time is scarcest of resources and yet we often waste it on frivolous things. Can we calculate return on time so we understand the tradeoffs? Our actions are based on three primary motivations

  • We are obligated to – if we don’t we get in trouble – Fear of repercussion
  • We like to – this is intrinsic motivation in the activity – Joy of activity
  • We don’t think – these are automatic motions – things we do without much thought – Habit and formation

The last category is the most wasteful, but likely eats up many hours in our day – flipping on the television, surfing the web (I just procrastinated for 40 minutes writing this post on irrelevant content), looking through unimportant emails amongst others etc.

So what would we measure? Below is how I would think about return on time.

  • Impact / Outcomes:
    • Pleasure
    • Financial gain
    • Recognition
    • Building relationships
    • Improving our health
  • Effort / Energy
    • Physical
    • Financial
    • Mental
  • Time Value
    • The value we place on the time

I’d visualize it something like this:

Return on Time

It’s an interesting exercise to go through to plot how we spend our time. If we approached all of our actions with this kind of evaluation, I wonder how it would change our decisions. What would your matrix look like?

The power of streaks

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Streaks are an extremely powerful motivational tool that act as a positive flywheel to achieving your goals. Streaks are typically a continued set of daily actions with a specific goal. Examples of streaks from wildly different applications:

  • Snapchat streaks – when you send direct snaps back and forth with a friend for several consecutive days
  • Pokemon Go catch streaks – when you catch Pokemon for several consecutive days
  • FitBit active days – when you reach your step / activity goal daily
  • Starbucks challenges – some challenges require purchase / try a new product for several consecutive days
  • Streaks – there’s even an app that helps you form habits!

This gamified mechanism is powerful for a number of reasons:

  • They’re habit forming. The longer you do the same thing, the more your brain and or body become familiar with the action(s).
  • Streaking is self strengthening and highly addictive – every day you successfully complete a streak, seeing the progress motivates you for tomorrow.
  • The positive momentum of streaks taps into loss aversion theory – once you are on a roll, you don’t want to stop for fear of ending your success

I personally love streaks and it’s an extremely powerful tool.
I’ve used streaks in the past to:

  • Track daily exercise / walks
  • Cut something out of my diet – caffeine and booze
  • Write daily
  • ….and many others

These were all successful while the streak was going. That said, once you miss a day, it is very easy to fall back to old habits. That’s the downfall of streaks – there is no mechanism to continue the motivation once an activity is stopped which has a rebound effect.

What do you think about streaks?

How to set your priorities

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If you’re like me, the days are packed to the brim with an unending set of meetings, events, coffees and to dos that seem important but ultimately have little impact or outcome. And, if like me,  you are on the hunt for a model to help you set priorities, this is the right place:

Big Rocks, Pebbles, Sand:
Fill a jar with big rocks (the most important things you have going on),  then pebbles (the things in your life that matter, but you could live without), then sand (remaining filler – material possessions). If you start with sand in the jar, there won’t be room for rocks or  pebbles. Keep your big rocks to 4-5 at a time, manage the pebbles and try not to have too much sand.

The Urgent / Important Matrix:
This one is fairly self explanatory. Do and Plan the important things, Delegate and Eliminate the unimportant. And do them on the appropriate timescale mapped to urgency.

Priorities Matrix

Timeline Model:
The final of the models is to look out 10 years (any longer isn’t tangible enough) and imagine what you would like to accomplish across key categories such as your health, family & friends, career, finances, spirituality, etc.  Once you have a clear understanding of those goals, bring it to the near term with near term steps that will help set you on journey. Then go back out and connect the dots from today until tomorrow. Anything that deviates from the goals and that line should not be made a priority.

These don’t need to be independent models – in fact I use them in conjunction depending on the context I’m in. Regardless of which one(s) you choose, using these frameworks will help guide how you spend your days.

Energy ebb & flow

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There is no doubt you have a million things on your plate. With the demands of work and personal life – how you manage energy will make or break you – literally. Speaking from experience (and still trying to figure it out every day), energy drives outcomes, whether desired or undesired. Managing the ebb and flow of energy in high performance, high pressure environments is incredibly difficult – but for those who have found it, all the power to them. To help manage my energy, I think about this idea:

If the house isn’t on fire, don’t worry about it
If the house is on fire and you do your job, it will go out
If the house is on fire, you do your job and it didn’t go out, it wouldn’t have anyway

Put your energy where it will matter. Avoid putting out fires that aren’t there or dwelling on fires that couldn’t be stopped after 100% effort.