Week #2: Turning goals into action

July 3, 2009
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If motivation alone drove goal achievement, we would all be skinny, planningrich and fit.  Getting motivation right is essential, but it is not enough.  To actually achieve the goal, you need a plan of action.  Good action plans are specific.  Not only do they say ‘what’ and ‘how often’, but they say them in a way that is meaningful.  This is where the manager can help.   

Back to Julie and Joe (continued from last week’s post)…

Remember that Julie’s goal was to increase store kiosk usage by 20% this year.  Now that Julie can see that the store kiosks will help the people she cares about, she is motivated to start.  Yet, when she writes down her action plan, it sounds something like this.

·         Print and review usage reports every Friday

·         Provide usage data to other franchise managers

·         Visit stores to discuss/review progress

·         Develop training materials to fill knowledge gaps

Sound good?  Not quite.  With just 30 minutes of conversation, Julie’s manager uncovers a bunch of problems with her plan.  She can only run the reports when she is in the office and she is often in the field visiting customers.  When she does have time to run the reports and share data with the managers, it often falls on deaf ears.  She doesn’t know which stores she will visit. And, since she is already suffering from time constraints, it is unlikely that she will be able to develop training materials, even though she thinks this is a good idea.  Her action plan simply won’t work.   Julie and her manager refine the plan as follows:

·         Block schedule for Thursday and Friday next week to review usage reports

·         Select a group of stores with sufficient customer traffic to impact overall usage by 20%

·         Schedule a meeting with regional GM to discuss rewards for participating stores

·         Meet with franchise managers of these stores and ask them to take part in a pilot study between August and December

·         Work with each target store to write an action plan for their pilot

·         Review results weekly and make adjustments (more on monitoring next week)

·         Review progress in January and create new action plan

Our goal for Joe is to get him to change the way he is designing software features.  Because he was not convinced of the problem, Joe’s manager decided to give him a learning goal – to review user feedback and find out how his peers in other software companies have addressed this problem.  Joe loves to read and talk to others about industry trends so he has already started.  His first action plan sounded like this:

·         Post a question on the social networks and industry blog sites

·         Attend the user-centred design conference in the UK in September

·         Subscribe to the technical journals

·         Report back by December

The good news is that Joe has taken some ownership of his goal already – he has been researching information sources and forums.  The problem might now be making sure Joe doesn’t treat this goal like a blank cheque.  Also, he seems to be more focussed on the learning than the reporting back.  His manager works with his enthusiasm, but tightens up the goal and ties it to the desired outcome:  an actionable report and recommendations to management.

·         Spend 4 hours per week monitoring industry forums, journals and blogs related to user-centred design

·         Subscribe to the association’s webinar series (sorry, there is no budget for a boondoggle to London this year)

·         Agree content elements of report with manager by end August

·         Provide progress reports weekly and a draft report to the manager by end September

·         Review results and create new action plan to refine findings and begin feasibility studies in October and November

In both cases, we don’t really know what Julie and Joe are going to find as they get started, so we can’t create a complete action plan for the whole year.  But, we can create a partial action plan that includes a reminder to update it once more information is known.

Anyone who has ever been to Human Resources training will know about the concept of setting SMART goals (specific, measurable, attractive, realistic, and time sensitive).  This is a great model to follow.  But, in my experience it does not get to the heart of the matter:  The goal is just the ‘what’.  The action plan is the ‘how’ (and how often).  It’s the ‘how’ that is often the difference between success and failure, yet managers and employees don’t spend nearly enough time there. 

Next week…the final piece of the puzzle…building a good monitoring plan. 

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