Hudson Valley organizations won”™t get people to change their behavior simply by asking them to commit to “total quality, innovation, or re-engineering.” Setting properly communicated “stretch” goals can encourage people to take creative, even risky approaches to solving problems.
For people to expand beyond their limits, put their pride, reputation and self-worth on the line, goals must have very well-defined end results that enable everyone to make a commitment to specific performance benchmarks. This provides the thirst to succeed and pour out their very best to quench it.
A company might set a goal to reduce the time to market of new products by half while doubling the number of successful new products. If focused only on speed, this challenge would risk lowering the number of winning new products. A focus on only new product successes might take a very long time.
By choosing, to deliver both faster and more hit products, the company is challenging people to work creatively to introduce successful new products at a faster pace. The more tightly any organization can define the goal, the more directed and focused its people will be.
Goals must be measured if they are to be achieved. Setting lofty goals can be inspiring and motivational. The higher we aim, the more we achieve. Make sure those goals are actually achievable. Impossible goals create a predictable path to failure. By setting realistic stretch goals, you encourage success, breeding even more success.
Be sure to give credit to the people who have met the performance challenges. According to Ben Dattner author of “The Blame Game,” there are hidden rules of credit and blame that determine our success or failure. Everything falls apart if proper recognition is not bestowed on those deserving it.
Does everyone understand the cycle of cause and effect?
Ӣ Financial performance attracts good employees to the company.
Ӣ Customers are more likely to choose a healthy company as a supplier.
Ӣ Adding value at any point reinforces the entire cycle and breeds success.
Let”™s assume the effort to create quality comes first. Greater customer satisfaction results from increasing quality and higher profits result from customer satisfaction. This is a cycle with clear cause and effect relationships. Stated another way, you can say that profits come after customer satisfaction, and the customer satisfaction is a direct result of higher quality. If you only measure profit, you may not see the underlying quality problem if the profits aren”™t there.
The Blame Game states, “Between teams, credit and blame dynamics can help explain why collaboration and trust are present, or why negative spirals of mutual recrimination are occurring. How credit and blame are assigned can even determine whether entire companies take the right steps in order to move forward, or get stuck in dysfunctional finger-pointing and score-settling.”
All of the performance-based objectives of organizations are ultimately achieved by individuals who are part of a team. The company that delivers on performance depends on the management of individual and team contributions as it relates to their attaining well defined outcomes.
Challenge people to reach beyond their limits and to take creative, even risky approaches to solving problems. Carefully define what success looks like and give credit to the individuals and teams that have worked together to make success possible.
Questions for discussion:
Ӣ Do we currently accept mediocrity or consistently stretch for success?
Ӣ How can we raise the standards even more and have people committed to succeed?
Ӣ Does everyone in our organization, including suppliers, consultants and outside venders understand our interdependence, cycle of success and their role in it?
Joe Murtagh is The DreamSpeaker, an international keynote speaker, meeting facilitator and business trainer. For questions or comments, Joe@TheDreamSpeaker.com, www.TheDreamSpeaker.com or call (800) 239-0058.
