What if I told you that my personal goals for the year were:
- Maintain a healthy weight
- Don’t bounce any checks
- Buy groceries once a week
- Wake up on time each morning
- Be a good parent
My guess is that you’d be pretty underwhelmed. These don’ t sound like goals do they? They sound more like the things I am supposed to do as a normally functioning grown up.
So why is it that I often see similar goals in the business world?
- Achieve quality target
- Maintain customer/employee satisfaction
- Complete XYZ project on time and on budget
- Make operating margin of 5%
Like the personal goals above, these goals are just a statement of what you are supposed to do as a normally functioning leader. Your goal shouldn’t be to hit the budget, your job is to hit the budget.
Goals should focus on specific positive changes that you are making to the organization. They should be about results and outcomes.
Part of the reason that these get tangled up is compensation. Goals often play a key role in determining bonuses and other rewards. That’s fine as long as the bonus really is a “bonus”. If you are giving someone a bonus for meeting the budget, aren’t you paying twice for his or her performance? The first time you paid with their salary, the second time you paid with the bonus. If they can’t meet a budget, they should be getting remedial help (or another job).
Leaders have to run your business efficiently and effectively. They also have to improve it continually. Those are two separate issues. Make sure that your expectations, goals, compensation, and rewards are aligned properly. A leader whose goals is to merely do his or her job successfully is not a leader at all.
Chief:
Maybe I am nit-picking, but aren’t you being a little tautological in this post? If you are a leader and your goal is to do your job successfully, then wouldn’t your goal then to be a successful leader? Isn’t being a leader your job? Why then, are you not a leader if you are doing your job successfully?
Also, I guess I don’t see what’s so inadequate about those personal goals. Your criticism that these are things you are “supposed to do” as a “normally functioning grown up” lends itself to an uncharacteristic lack of generosity in your perspective. Or at least that’s how I see it. What gives? You sound crabby today– go chase some kids off your lawn and come back to write another post when you’re more yourself. . . .
Sure, if you are blessed with children, you should be a good parent. But why is it wrong to make that a goal, even though it is something you should do? Look at it this way: when you consider all the structures and resources you need to continually keep in play or develop, all the ways you need to be invested in yourself and your family — just to be a kind, loving, responsive, engaged parent– isn’t that an adequate goal? Why must we all continually strive for “excellence”?
Likewise, in the business world, isn’t it sometimes enough to say I am going to be an adequate leader, try to do my job to the best of my ability, and learn what I can to do better. Of course outcomes and results hinge on performance, but do you really think that the best way to inspire your people is to emphasize that they are not “good enough.”
In other words, it seems to me that sometimes these superlatives get invoked to intimidate. Why would a leader want to operate in this mode?
Well, I’ve chased the kids away and feel much better now.
I can see your point about parenting – perhaps that was too much of a stretch given some of the complexities involved in being a good parent. However, I’m not going to give in totally. Perhaps some of this is an issue of language.
I believe that goals should involve making a positive change. I especially believe that leaders should not just maintain the status quo but should be at the forefront of driving these positive changes. That’s where I was coming from.
I’m not sure that I would use goals to intimidate. I could see where the examples that I provided implied that.
However, if everyone just maintained the status quo and ensured that their day to day transactions and responsibilities were executed where would we be? There wouldn’t be much progress (I don’t think, or at least it would be very slow in coming).
Even with the parenting example, I think that having goals that go beyond the basics of being a good parent are important. Shouldn’t I want to help my kids realize their dreams? Maybe you’d say that was part of being a good parent, but I’d say that is going above and beyond. I can provide food, shelter, safety, and even love without going out of my way to help them.
Similarly, I’m not saying that a businessperson who does their ob well is a poor performer. I’m just suggested that a leader should take on more responsibility to create positive change. I’ve seen plenty of leaders who run their part of the business well, have happy people, and generally look like they are doing the right things. However, over time those happy people find that they are in dead end careers, the department gets marginalized (or maybe even outsourced), and that “good performance” becomes a thing of the past even though the leader hasn’t changed anything that he or she is doing. He or she just didn’t keep up.
Now, perhaps you’d say that the definition of doing a good job included keeping up. I’d agree, my point I guess is that instead of making “keeping up” an implicit part of the job description that you make it explicit through goals.
Wow, chasing kids away should become part of your daily self-help ritual. Next time, use a hose and you’ll be downright giddy.
Maybe we are tussling over semantics. Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought a quality embedded in the definition of a leader is doing your job with an eye toward appreciating and improving whatever context you inhabit. If you are managing people, part of what you do will be to appreciate their strengths, try to improve on them, and challenge them to achieve at levels they may not have considered possible. If you are a parent, the same holds.
But, when you go beyond meeting basic needs, what it means to be a good parent might be more closely intertwined with culture, personal values, and politics than being a good manager is. For example, I’m not sure that I’m as much on board with helping kids realize their dreams as I am with helping to shape the contours of the dreams themselves– by modeling values and behaviors.
For example, what do you do if your kid’s dream is deeply problematic to you? Say your daughter’s dream was to be Miss America and she wanted to compete in beauty pageants. (Don’t know about you, but this would be a HUGE problem for me.) Is your job to blindly help her become a pawn of patriarchy?
I agree with your observation about leaders and the implied idea that they should be pushing things forward. I agree with that. I guess this post was more reactive to something that I often see which is leaders setting their “goals” to be more on the side of maintaining the status quo rather than on driving improvment.
A lot of this is is driven by goals being tied to compensation. If my bonus is tied to my goals, I am proably going to try to hedge my bets and set goals thgat I am pretty confident I can hit. Changing the world is hard, meeting my budget is easier.
So, this was more about trying to remind people that a part of leadership is to improve and extend and that goals can be a good way of facilitating that.
Your other point is much more complicated. What do you do when your kids dreams don’t line up with what you’d like them to be? I guess the answer is to give them the faculties to make good decisions. Would I try to disuade my daughter from becoming Miss America? Maybe although I guess I’d try to give her more constructive alternatives to consider rather than just tell her that Ms. America is a bad choice. However, if she aspired to become a crackhead, I’d probably be a bit more assertive.
Thanks for clarifying. Maybe part of the tension in our different perspectives is that I operate in an academic context rather than the soul-sucking crevasse of late capitalism, though some might argue they are one in the same : )
Thanks for clarifying. Maybe part of the tension in our different perspectives is that I operate in an academic context rather than the soul-sucking crevasse of late capitalism, though some might argue they are one in the same : )
Brad, I find that a snarling,rabid dog does a good job keeping kids away….
As someone who is also in the academic context part of the problem that we run into is the tie in between “success” (with it’s definition du-jour) and school funding. It’s one thing to say that all kids will read by the time they get out of middle school. It’s another to mandate that, not provide any resources or training, and then have funding sources contingent on your success. No wonder some of the best ones in the field get burned out.
Parenting, however, is a totally different issue… 8^)