Making Goals Work | BTalk Australia

Janet Horton

(Episode 348; 12 minutes 03) Are you happy about the way goals are set and tracked in your business? In large companies it’s often a HR driven process that is carried out once a year, used as a tool for appraisals, and bears little relation to what occupies people day to day.

On today’s BTalk Australia Phil Dobbie talks to Janet Horton, the founder of Handspring Consulting, who has recently tackled the subject in her blog on handspring.com.au. It all begins with setting goals that the employee actually wants to do.

What are your thoughts on goal setting? Add your advice on how to make them more effective in the Talkback section at the end of this post.

Subscribe to BTalk Australia on iTunes.

View all BTalk Australia podcasts here.

• Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie. Welcome to BTALK Australia. Today, setting goals that work and seeing them through.

Well how often have you or your boss set goals then you push them to the back of your mind, then a year passes and you check through the list and oops! You missed a few targets there, it happens doesn’t it? Well Janet Horton is the founder of Handspring Consulting. And she has taken on the challenge of goal setting recently, over a few of her posts in her blog on handspring.com.au. Now Janet, I think a lot of goals are missed aren’t they, because the wrong goal is set in the first place. So how do you actually set the goals that actually mean something?

Janet Horton: Well you got a great point there, Phil. And often, what I say to people is that they are setting the wrong goals because their goals tend to be about the business rather than about the employees. So as much as the business tries to ask the employee to do something, ultimately, it’s up to the employee whether they are actually going to do it or not. So it’s really hard to get motivated by other people’s stuff.

As a business we think about, I’m the manager and this is what I need my team to do. But people aren’t motivated by what’s important to you as the manager. There motivated by what’s important to them. And this is especially true in the sort of Gen-X and Gen-Y people that we tend to be managing. Often, what is most important to them isn’t keeping their job, what’s most important to them is learning something new that’s going to help them build their resume.

So finding that stuff that is most interesting to them is what will motivate them, to help you reach your goals.

Dobbie: Right. OK, so you’ve got to understand more about the people who are working for you. And if you’re a lazy manager, that’s a change in management style, isn’t it?

Horton: And that could be a huge switch. But an easy place to start would be to start asking a few more questions, before just imposing goals on people that aren’t important to them. Because ultimately, that is about your stuff and you want it to be about their stuff.

Dobbie: So we’ve got the goals, their happy with them. How do we make sure that they actually turn them into action? How do we create action plans that are going to be workable?

Horton: I think this is a place where businesses often fall down, because by the time they spend all that time negotiating about the goal, they sort of put it in a box and like you said in your introduction, put it on the shelf and it’s not until a year later for people to realise that things didn’t actually get done. It really comes down to coming up with a good plan of action. And what I sort of like to tease and tell people is, you know you have got a good plan of action if you can pick up your action plan and it tells you what you should do tomorrow. So it’s taking that goal and tying it to actually what the person needs to do next.

And being very specific. Until it gets specific enough, I know what I need to do next Friday, it’s probably not specific enough.

Dobbie: So you can’t plan out every day for the next year though. So are you saying that you need a series of action plans over that year and you take it step by step. Is that what you’re saying?

Horton: Exactly. And so you might set off on a goal that says I need this employee to help me increase sales of a certain product by 20 percent, or increase a usage of a certain area by 20 percent. Well, they obliviously can’t figure out how they are going to do that over 12 months, but they may be able to figure out what they need to do over the next 30 days. I need to run some reports and figure out where my starting point is. I need to figure out who my key users are today, so I can get them more engaged. I need to figure out what is motivating them. And get them involved in the plan we are trying to move forward. And that’s probably enough to say, OK, I know how I am going to spend my next 30 days getting ready. Then I come back and I re-due my action plan and figure out what I am going to do for the next 30 days.

Dobbie: And I guess a good manager is using this as an opportunity, aren’t they? To have a once a month meeting, where you are saying, “well OK, let’s revisit those goals we set for the year. Let’s look at the action plan for the next month.” I mean they’re managing, but they’re not micromanaging. And I guess the employee is feeling as though they are involved in the process.

Horton: Exactly Phil, and if they have done this action planning well, then that monthly meeting can go very easily. Because that action plan naturally leads into, where did I expect to be versus where am I. Otherwise, and I think we have all been in this situation, the employee tends to come back and you say how are you doing on that particular goal? And they say, oh good, I’ve made some phone calls, I’ve done this, I’ve done that. Well they’ve done something, so I can’t say that they’re not doing it. But that doesn’t really give me the comfort that we are going to reach that end goal, which is to increase usage of a certain product by 20 percent.

Dobbie: It’s not specific enough. Specificity, as our Prime Minister likes to use the word.

Horton: But what you’re bringing up is a really good point. If you, as the manager, have gone in maybe too specific, and said, I need you to do such and such everyday at three o’clock, you’ve tried to prescribe sort of too low in the activity of the employee. Then there’s not much room for movement. But if you’ve given the employee more flexibility, say this is what I need you to do to help contribute to this business goal. And then the employee has some flexibility in how they do it because we are really talking about the goals as the what, but how they’re doing it, if you leave that to the employee. As long as we know what the goal is and we’ve got some monitoring, which we can talk about. Then they’ve got some flexibility, they can’t change the goal because that was still an important goal for the business. But they can change the how they get there. In whatever makes sense. What they need to do along the way.

Dobbie: Now the monitoring is interesting, because before the goals are set, you might not have the mechanisms in place for that monitoring. And also, something’s are easier to monitor than others. So should everything be able to be tracked and measured?

Horton: I think businesses can get too fixated on measurement for sure. If you think whatever the employee is working on is important enough to be measured and monitored, then maybe the first goal has to be to allow them to suggest how they’re going to monitor. You know, that could be the thing that they work on for the first 30 days. I suppose the whole question about monitoring is we start to set a plan of action. Now this is sort of how do we know where we want to be by when. Or in other words, how will we know if we are on track or not? I think in my blog, I used the example of navigating — you point the boat in the direction of Australia and hope for the best, you’re probably not going to end up in Australia. You need some way to kind of monitor: there’s where the stars say I am, there’s where my clock says I am and that’s how I know if I am getting speckle or not.

Dobbie: The important thing as well is that if you’re the boss, you’re looking at the end goal, not necessarily looking at those interim measures. Those measures to help you get there, to help you navigate your way through should really be used by the employee; that should be their tool. Because otherwise, if they get measures directly on them, you are starting to micromanage them, aren’t you?

Horton: Yes, and so the employee should feel like they own those. But at the same time, the manager probably has a responsibility for getting this thing done too. So if the manager and the employee have together agreed on what that sort of map, that navigation map, is going to look like, it’s much easier to have that conversation. How are you going? OK here we are in the 1st of October, here is where we said we were going to be. How are we doing against where we said we were going to be? Oops, it looks like something is wrong. You know, without the monitoring its sort of you set the goal; you set the plan and you hope for the best? And it’s sort of like magical thinking.

Dobbie: Absolutely. There’s a lot of that around, isn’t there.

Horton: Yes.

Dobbie: But it can be dangerous as well though, can’t it? The example might be that you tell a salesperson or a salesperson says, in trying to achieve these sales, I am going to make five sales calls a day. And because it’s not the number of sales calls, it’s the quality of sales calls that really counts at the end of the day. So if you put those measures into place and that’s all you’re focusing on, and you’ve got to have your eye on the end goal, in other words, at the same time.

Horton: Yes and again, don’t go too specific. Don’t go too low in that activity. If the employee understands the end goal is to increase the number of sales. How they get there is up to them and then they got flexibility. If the five calls a day aren’t working, then they got to change how they’re behaving. But if you ask them to make five sales calls a day, you’re absolutely right, they just say, well, I did my calls, it didn’t work. They don’t have any ownership of the outcome.

Dobbie: Now Janet, what’s your experience of big business in this area? My experience is that goals were something that were set and they weren’t looked at for a year. It got to the end of the year and it became assessment time. And I know at that time of the year I was paranoid, I might not have been very good at my job, so it might have been justified that I was paranoid. But no one likes to be judged. And it was always the time when you were judged. Let’s look at those goals, because there hadn’t been any of that discussion, looking at the how did you do it and how did you monitor it in the interim. Is that how you see big business still working, by in large?

Horton: Absolutely, it’s lovely to talk about all this stuff. But the fact is that everybody in the business is generally too busy to be doing this stuff really well. And so everybody races around because HR tells them it’s time to set goals or it’s time to do bonus or it’s time to do assessments.

It’s the only time that they are revisiting this stuff. So one thing I would say to people, and I frequently do say to people, is accept the fact that you’re busy. If you’ve got 10 employees and you’re giving every employee four goals, you’ve got 10 times four that you have to monitor over the course of the year. That’s probably too much for you to manage and it’s probably too much for the employee to manage if they’ve got other stuff to do. What if they had one big thing, rather than 10?

Dobbie: Yes, makes a lot of since. At least you get something done at the end of the day.

Horton: At least you get one thing done instead of a bunch of zeroes or a bunch of kind of half-hearted tries.

Dobbie: It really does get down to the manager spending a lot more time day to day or month to month with their employees, doesn’t it?

Horton: Also it doesn’t have to be painful. It can actually be fun. Sometimes I think about it in terms of — I like a good history documentary now that I’m an adult, but I hated history class as a kid. So my history teacher could’ve done a better job making history fun for me.

A manager can have a little more fun with the goals and with the employees as well.

Dobbie: Yes, fun history teachers. I wonder if they do exist, Janet, or if they are just a figment of our imagination. Janet Horton, thanks so very much for your time.

Horton: Thanks, Phil.

Dobbie: Just thinking about my history teacher, I think he was so old he actually lived through most of the events that we studied in history. They were firsthand accounts he was giving us of the Battle of Waterloo.