Week #3 Charting the course

July 13, 2009
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planningImagine yourself for a moment not as a leader or manager in your organisation… but as William Dawes – navigator responsible for 1000 convicts and crew of the First Fleet as it sailed from England to Australia.  Your goal is Australia, your plan is charted on the maps, and you monitor your progress using the ship’s clock, telescope, and a sky full of stars. 

Setting a goal without a monitoring plan is like pointing the ships toward the South West and hoping for the best.  Things rarely go to plan.  Success isn’t in the goal setting, it is in the monitoring. 

Yet, meaningful monitoring is often absent from our business objective discussions.  Busy leaders of organisations barely have time to construct meaningful goals for employees, much less worry about how they will be monitored.  Goals are distributed to employees and managers hope for the best.

If you are stretched for time, try setting fewer goals and spending more time on action and monitoring plans.  Make sure the monitoring is easy, timely, and motivating.  Most importantly, make it specific.  Where do we want to be?  By when?  How will we know?

Monitoring Julie and Joe…

Last week they both flagged the need for monitoring as part of their action plans.  Julie said she would review the kiosk usage results weekly and make adjustments.  Joe said we would provide weekly progress reports between now and September. 

Without good monitoring, you get updates that are subjective.  ‘Ran reports and distributed to local managers’.  ‘Spoke to 4 people about their company user-centred design processes.’    The information is meaningless because there is no monitoring plan for comparison.   

Julie’s goal is measurable – a 20% increase.  It should be easy for her to break down how she expects that 20% to materialise.  Will it be incremental?  Will certain behaviours (training, for example) drive demand for kiosks?  She plots her desired usage per week and creates a simple report comparing desired to actual usage, which can be distributed to each participating store.  Stores meeting their goal can share stories of success.  Stores not meeting their goals can make adjustments.  Julie can easily see where she needs to focus her attention.

Joe’s action plan is more subjective, but it can still be monitored.  He has already identified the content elements for the report he is writing.  Joe needs to publish a schedule for writing and researching the report –   Where will he get the data?  By when?  You get the idea.

It is easy in theory, but rarely done well in organisations.   It takes patience and a bit of time.  It also takes attention to detail.  Let’s face it…monitoring isn’t sexy.  Goals are sexy.  They are full of dreams and possibilities.  Success is sexy…it’s about celebration and recognition and accomplishment.  Monitoring plans are the stuff in between.  They are about execution.    Or, as a friend recently said to me ‘goal setting is like falling in love, execution is like caring for a baby’.

But, imagine if every person in your organisation successfully pursued and accomplished 1 big thing this year.  An organisation of 50 people would accomplish 50 big things.  How many did you accomplish last year?

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