What's Your Finish Line?

In a previous blog post, I talked about how to gauge the success of functions within your organizations - functions like HR, sales, marketing, and IT. In this post, I want to talk about something a little different. How do you gauge the success of a priority?

My clients create priorities. Every member of a leadership team creates one or two priorities each quarter, and when you create a priority, it's very easy to get caught up in what you're going to do. HR might say, "I'm going to create a new performance planning process." Sales might say, "I'm going to implement a brand new sales training program." Marketing might say, "We're going to update the website." But my question is, for each of those things, what does the finish line look like?

Just because HR does 10 different things to put a new performance planning process in place, is that really adding value to the organization? If I can check all those things and say I've done it, have I really been successful? If sales implements a brand new training program, but nobody goes or nobody gets any value from it, have they succeeded? If marketing updates a website, but there's no results from that, have they succeeded? So the one question I ask my clients all the time when they create a priority is: what does the finish line look like?

When I ask what the finish line looks like, I mean specifically, at the end of the completion of that priority, what value are you adding to the organization? So in the case of putting a new performance plan in place, the finish line may look like we have increased our percent of A-players in the organization by 15%. In the case of putting a new sales training program in place, it might be that we've increased our closing ratios on our sales calls from 35% to 50%. In the case of updating a website, it may be we're going to double the number of marketing qualified leads coming from our website.

So when you're creating a priority, the question I want you to ask yourself is: If I look at all the steps I need to complete to get that priority done, if I complete all those steps, is that truly success? Most of the time, the answer is going to be no. Success is a measurable result that gets you closer to your purpose, to your vision, to your annual plan, to your revenue and profitability targets as an organization.

So if you've got priorities in front of you right now, what's your finish line?