8 Characteristics of Great Company Priorities
I know I'm not telling you anything new when I say that one of your most important jobs as a leader is to work with your team to set goals. Now, although most of us know that's important, most companies, most leaders, do it wrong. They either do it totally wrong, or they do mostly right but they miss one step that blows up the entire process. If you don't do it right, it leads to frustration, it leads to missed targets, and you're not adding the value you could be adding - you should be adding - to your team, your clients, to the community.
What I want to talk about is the idea of setting what's called “company rocks.” They are the most important things the company is committed to do to improve. It's not your P&L targets. You don't have a rock to reach 3,000,000 in revenue this quarter or 30,000,000 in revenue for the year. The rock is: what are you going to do to improve the business, and that may help you meet those P&L targets?
Here's what most companies do wrong in goal setting:
The goals aren't clear. They set goals like: we're going to improve communication. What does that really mean? It's not clear. We have no idea whether someone is meeting that goal or not because it's fuzzy.
It's the wrong time frame. People create goals or priorities or rocks or whatever term you want to put on it, and they set them for the year. Well, if I set a goal of losing 25 pounds this year, I have no problem eating a cupcake this afternoon because I've got plenty of time to lose that weight. The problem when you have the wrong time frames on a priority or a rock is number one, that you don't have that sense of urgency, and number two, if you set something that's 12 months long, there's too much in the world that's going to change. The world changes drastically every three to five months, sometimes quicker than that. And when that happens, we set priorities and they die because they're not important anymore.
Poor accountability. Poor accountability is when as leaders, we set goals, we work with our teams to set goals, and then we don't really hold people accountable. We either don't meet about them and talk about them seriously, or we do but we're willing to accept every excuse about not meeting that goal.
Goals are not aligned. They're either not aligned with longer term priorities or they're not aligned with each other and you get teams working against each other.
Companies don't set goals at all because they're so frustrated by the whole process. They say the world is changing too fast, so I'm not even going to set goals - we're all just going to work as hard as we can. I think we all know that doesn't work.
I want to share with you eight characteristics of a great company rock - and again, I call these priorities rocks. Rocks are the most important things that a company should be working on to improve. So here are my eight characteristics of a great rock:
A rock is not about working in the business - it's working on the business. If I'm a salesperson, I don't have a rock that says I'm going to go make a bunch of sales calls today. If I'm in product development, my rock is not necessarily to design a new product. If I'm in service, my rock is not to answer the phone today. A rock is about working on the business, not in the business. It's about how could we improve the business, it's not about doing the day-to-day.
You should have two or three rocks at any given time. Have a smaller number of these rocks, not a larger number. We need to focus. When I work with my clients privately, I try to get them to two or three rocks, certainly no more than four or five.
A rock should have a 90-day time frame. You should have quarterly rocks. It's that 90-day sprint. 90 days is long enough that you can get something of substance completed. It's long enough that the world is not going to change drastically typically within 90 days, but it's short enough to light that fire of urgency that you've gotta get cracking on it right away to get working.
Your rock should be aligned with your annual priorities. I call 12-month priorities “priorities,” and 90-day priorities “rocks.” Your rocks for the quarter should be aligned with what you're trying to accomplish for the year. A great way to think about a rock is if you've got a 12-month priority, your rock is what's that 90-day chunk. What's that 90 day bite we're gonna take out of that annual priority?
The rock should be aligned with other rocks the company is working on. If you have a sales rock, which is all about introducing and selling a brand new product to market, as a sales team we're going to go out and sell this new product; however, your service team is not ready to service that product. Or you have a sales team that has a goal of sell, sell, sell, and you've got an inventory team that's all about managing inventory turns and lowering inventory. Those two may not be aligned with each other. So rocks need to be aligned with annual priorities, but they also need to be aligned with each other.
A rock should have one and only one person accountable. That's the definition in my mind of accountability. One and only one person. Now, one person owns it, one person's accountable, but many are responsible. The person that’s accountable owns it. They're who we're looking to to make sure there's a plan, to make sure we're measuring whether it gets done. One person accountable, many people responsible.
There should be a clear 90-day finish line. When we say it's 90 days, it just doesn't mean in 90 days it's up. What's that finish line? That's the question my clients get tired of me asking them when they come up with rocks. If you don't have a clear finish line at the end of 90 days, then you don't have accountability for that rock. Now, very often you're working on a rock that is part of a project that's going to take much longer than 90 days. So sometimes I'll get the answer, "Well, it's not going to be done in 90 days. It's going to take us a year to get this done." That's fine. That's perfectly appropriate for a rock. But we need to know: what's your finish line in 90 days? If you're putting in a new ERP system, the 90-day finish line may be that you've got your requirements done. So what is that 90-day finish line?
Try as best you can to get that finish line for your rock focused on a result. If you're trying to improve employee engagement and you have a finish line of a rock to say we're going to implement a new training program, and we're going to implement the new performance evaluation process, and we're going to talk to all of our employees and find out what they want - if it's task driven, you could do all those things and not improve employee engagement. What are you doing at that finish line to make sure you're not just doing a bunch of stuff, but you're actually adding some value? You're achieving a result. In this case, it might be: our employee net promoter score goes up 40%.
So eight characteristics of a great rock, of a great commitment, of the team to work on the business. Which one are you missing? What are you going to do to improve your priority and goal setting process for your team today?