Whose Goals Are They, Anyway?
Should the managing partner, CEO or leader set goals for the people on his or her team? Or should team members set their own goals?
Your answer could tell me a lot about your leadership style. I could probably accurately predict how people respond to you, and even how accountable they are.
Your answer also tells me about where you work. I can tell instantly whether yours is a “knowing” organization, one that already knows the answers and is therefore not very open to new learning or possibilities. Or is yours a “learning” organization? If so, you’re open and you want to grow. I can only work with learning organizations who are ready to change.
I don’t mean to sound overconfident, and I certainly don’t mean to sound critical. It’s just that I’ve observed many leaders over the years. In general, those who set the goals belong to organizations where management perceives itself as having the answers, and instructs people what to do. It’s all top-down: “Here’s where you have to go, and here’s how you need to get there. Don’t take any detours.”
Traditionally, goal setting has been the purview of management. “Naturally,” it has fallen to them to tell people what to do. And that’s a logical approach, actually—except when you remember that you’re dealing with human beings. Humans have a stubborn need to be involved in decision making, to take ownership of their own work, to feel heard and respected, and to think, learn, and grow.
So those organizations tend to have more difficulty with ensuring accountability than the organizations where people are coached around setting their own goals.
That’s why I have a different approach. I encourage leaders to guide people to set their own goals. These goals should be within the guidelines of their job description, of course. And they must be consistent with company policy, mission and values. When you coach people to set their own goals, you’ve already taken a giant step toward holding them accountable to achieve those goals.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t have input. After all, you know that as a business leader, your performance is based on the performance of your people. So your team’s goals are of utmost importance to you.
If, for example, you’re a managing partner with a team of four partners, and you’re accountable for bringing in $200,000 of new business this year, you’ll need to make certain that the partners’ goals add up to at least $200,000.
But if you pull each person’s goal out of nowhere, without making sure you’ve matched their individual capabilities, you’re fighting a losing battle before you start. That’s why leaders should be working with their people to set the goals. It’s a “we” thing.
In my example of the $200,000 sales goal, each of those managing partners needs to choose a sales target that’s based on what’s feasible for them. One might feel like $75,000 is a stretch they can work towards. Another might feel like $130,000 will be a walk in the park. If you’ve hired and trained ambitious people, those four targets might add up to more than $200,000.
I guarantee you, when people choose their goal themselves, they’ll be more motivated to reach it, and also have more faith that they can. You’ll get bigger and better results than when people are just doing what the managing partner said they should do.
Would you like to meet me in person and get an intense blast of accountability insights, all while helping inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy? Join me on May 9th, 2012 for The Buck Starts Here: Why Leadership Accountability is The Key to Less Stress, More Time and a Better Bottom Line – Click here to find out more and to register. All proceeds raised will benefit Junior Achievement of Central Maryland. Thank you for your support.
Accountability With an Edge – Three Questions That Get People’s Attention
When you’re sitting down for a regularly scheduled accountability meeting with the people on your team, it helps to have some questions and phrases ready. Most of your questions will be open-ended, giving the other person plenty of time to express their concerns and opinions. Open-ended questions also give YOU plenty of opportunities to practice active listening. (How’s your active listening? Test yourself and validate the other person by recapping what you’ve heard.)
There will be moments in every accountability conversation where things get a little cloudy. Feelings of doubt, mistrust, hesitation or confusion may be keeping the person stuck and making it difficult for the two of you to move forward in finding a solution.
Like a laser pierces through a surface, there are certain phrases that just seem to cut through excuses, habits, blame and other things that are stopping or blocking this person from being productive and successful.
With the right words, timing and approach, you can bring the person just over the edge of their comfort zone – not too far to shut them down, but far enough that they’re jarred out of their current thought pattern.
Here are three examples of these “edge” questions:
- “Is that the best you have?” – Janet was newly hired to run the marketing department of a consulting firm. The managing partner asked to hear her plans for the department. A week later, she arrived in his office, excited to share her report. Without even looking at it, the managing partner asked Janet, “Is that the best you have?” She fumbles and stutters and asks what he means. He repeats the question. She meekly agreed to look at it again and leaves the office. She updates the plan and a week later, the exact same conversation takes place. “Is that the best you have?” Again, she goes away and re-works her plan. The third time, when the managing partner asked the question, Janet answered confidently, “Yes! This is the best I have.” The question really got Janet to push past her edge and raise her own standards of excellence.
- “Tell me again, why are we here?” – I use a version of this question with my own clients: “Tell me again, why did you hire me?” When people are feeling stuck, it’s easy for them to fall into victim mode or react to things from a distance. They’re showing up but not really doing the work. This question reminds my clients that they chose to participate in this change process with me – in fact, they’re paying me for it. Think of an equivalent question that will help your people to get more engaged, maybe something like, “Tell me again, which of your goals are you most looking forward to achieving this year?” Sometimes it’s best to abandon whatever conversation topic got you stuck, and start here with what the person is really jazzed about. Then continue with, “So what’s stopping or blocking you from making progress towards that goal right now?”
- “When are you going to stop tolerating xxxxx?” – When a person keeps coming back, over and over, with the same issue, “That Johnny, he’s just so….” or, “I can’t believe I still haven’t…” suggest that if they really felt strongly about the problem, they’d be doing something about it. Again, this is edgy stuff – you’re pushing someone over the edge of their comfort zone and they probably won’t like it. But it’s not your job to solve this problem for them, even if they want you to.
Holding people accountable includes getting them back on track when they stray from their goals, and jolting them into action when they get stuck.
Would you like to meet me in person and get an intense blast of accountability insights, all while helping inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy? Join me on May 9th, 2012 for The Buck Starts Here: Why Leadership Accountability is The Key to Less Stress, More Time and a Better Bottom Line – Click here to find out more and to register. All proceeds raised will benefit Junior Achievement of Central Maryland. Thank you for your support.
The $750,000 Accountability Story
Keith was in his mid-50s, and was a managing partner in a large CPA firm. He’d gotten to that level because he was very good at business development – specifically, bringing in brand new clients.
His partner group, on the other hand, were mainly in their 40s. They were all highly competent in their technical abilities, but not very good at bringing in new business. Up until then, they hadn’t needed to concern themselves with that – it was raining clients. And they also saw plenty of growth just from adding on new services to existing client accounts.
All of that changed with the economic landscape in 2008 when the firm began losing clients. And that’s when Keith hired me.
Keith had the skills – they were natural to him. He just couldn’t figure out how to transfer those skills to the people around him. “How do I get people to go to market (when they’ve never had to) and bring in new business??”
The first thing Keith had to understand to become a more accountable leader was that just because something came easily to him, doesn’t mean it came easily to others. “They’re not you,” I often reminded him in our early sessions.
Instead, Keith needed to apply all the components of my accountability system – recapping, meeting his people on a regular basis, asking open-ended questions, developing his people, etc.
Instead of riding the bike for them by micro-managing, managing all the new client meetings himself and exhausting his own network and database to make introductions, he began to use my three core skills of leveraging, collaborating and strategizing.
Leverage: When people told him excuses about how their databases weren’t big enough to bring in any new business, Keith showed them how to mine the gold from even the smallest database. For example, an old college fraternity chum whose brother-in-law happened to be the CFO at one of the firm’s target companies.
Collaboration: As I worked with Keith to show him these strategies, I was also modeling a collaborative approach to putting our heads together to come up with solutions. Keith learned that there was a lot of middle ground between doing everything himself and trying to get people to carry out tasks they weren’t yet equipped to handle.
Strategy: As I taught Keith the accountability system and he started putting it into place, he and his people discovered that those same practices can apply to meetings with new prospective clients. For example, they started slowing down the process and preparing a strategy long before they actually got in front of the potential new client. That way, they weren’t just reacting in the moment and then catching up to the conversation (an approach that certainly hadn’t been working).
Keith wanted to create a legacy at his firm, and his own talent for bringing in new business had brought him a lot of success and the title of managing partner. As a leader, though, I helped Keith see that the real legacy he was creating was empowering his people to land their own new business successes.
The accountability system that I helped Keith put into place resulted in $750,000 in absolutely new client business.
If you want to keep learning about accountability strategies that can bring you results like this, sign up for my email updates. Simply visit this page to download my free special report, and then you’ll hear from me each week with my latest article.
Accountability Transformation Story
Josh was standing in the middle of a group of people at a networking function, when all of a sudden a light bulb of awareness went off. He saw how he always had to get a word in – his ego was out of control. He knew this was how he was behaving at work, also, where he was a managing partner. He knew that he’d gotten complacent as a leader, and was dropping the ball on developing his people and keeping them accountable to him, themselves and the firm.
Luckily, he remembered hearing me deliver a talk about accountability, and he gave me a call to see if I could help him improve his leadership effectiveness.
“Even after hiring Alan, I couldn’t quite buy into the program,” Josh remembers. “I was willing to support the effort up to a point, but didn’t want it to take up too much of my time. Looking back, I think I hoped that Alan would somehow magically turn my employees into an accountable team.
And I’m happy to report that Alan did transform my people into accountable employees. He just didn’t do it the way I thought he would, with me on the sidelines. He did it by coaching me to be more accountable to myself. By helping me model accountability, and by learning to hold my people accountable to themselves. He did it by giving me tools we could all use to create accountability in our workplace.”
After a bit of a rocky start, Josh jumped fully on board. He totally embraced the accountability system and was meeting with his people every single week. In fact, he’s the one who first taught me the analogy of the airline pilot. He said he wouldn’t want to get on a plane with a pilot who’s become complacent about completing the pre-flight checklist.
“My staff started to come prepared every week with lots to talk about. It began to feel more comfortable for me and the people I was coaching. I began to see how effective accountability meetings really can be.
At that point, things shifted in my mind and I made a commitment to making it work. I began preparing for the one-on-one sessions, too. I reviewed the previous meeting notes and looped back on things my team members had brought up in the past.
To my amazement, using open-ended questions helped me see that my people often come up with better answers than I could have thought of on my own. I’ve worked hard at staying more on the “asking” side of the equation, and seeing the benefits, I’ve gotten a lot better at it.
One result of the trust that’s developed between me and my team is that people are coming to our accountability meetings with more sensitive issues, things they previously would not have discussed with me. Some of my managers have even started admitting when they don’t know what to do about a particular situation. We’ve created an environment that makes that okay.
Something else that surprised me: at the end of some coaching sessions, I hear ‘thank you.’ My employees sincerely appreciate my efforts, attention and guidance. I think they’re surprised, too. They didn’t expect to enjoy our time together so much. But they do, and I do. It’s working, and that’s obvious to all of us.”
Josh’s improved relationships and communication led to some other huge wins: He experienced double-digit increases in revenues and profits, took an early retirement to pursue his hobbies and passions, and left the company on a high note. And it was all thanks to accountability.
If you want to put these winning accountability strategies to work in your organization, start with the free tips in my special report, “Stepping Up to the Plate: 7 Accountability Strategies That Will Actually Make a Difference to Your Bottom Line.” You’ll also get my latest articles delivered right to your Inbox.
How to Effectively Lead People Through Change
When an organization is going through change, its people must be supported, developed and coached through the process. When my client Dan contacted me, big changes were on the way for his company, including his department of 250 people and nine direct reports.
There were going to be two big differences for Dan’s team: First, many people would be in a managerial role that had never been managers before. Second, many of the current managers’ roles and responsibilities would be changing considerably.
Dan was completely on board with the initiative, but many on his team were not. He saw the resistance building up and wondered, how could he lead them through this experience in a positive way? How could he keep things simple through a time when they had so much to deal with?
I introduced Dan to the following key accountability leadership principles for leading people through times of change:
1. Empathize (don’t sympathize) – Your people may be experiencing a lot of anxiety. In my client’s situation, for example, his new managers were worried about their capability for their new roles, so he assured them that there would be extra training to get them up to speed. That really showed them that he cared. While sympathy just enables people to stay stuck, empathy puts them at ease so they can move forward.
2. Be patient (don’t tap your toes) – As a leader, you may have already embraced this change. If you expect your people to have the same mindset, it will be like you’re speaking two different languages. Show patience for where they’re at. Watch your body language for these signals of impatience you may not realize you’re sending: rolling your eyes, not looking someone in the eye, swinging your leg or tapping your foot.
3. Ask, ask, ask (don’t tell, tell, tell) – While you’re giving people time to catch up with you and your vision, ask them to tell you more about their concerns. You’ll get clues for how to present the benefits of the change in a way that addresses exactly what they’re thinking about. My client could have said to his new managers, “Here’s what I want you to do – just suck it up and do it!” Instead, he asked them, “How are you feeling about your new role?” and “What concerns do you have?” If you try to guess what people are thinking, it’s going to result in confusion and chaos – the direct opposite of the clarity and calm that you want. That’s why it’s so important to ask, ask, ask.
4. Enroll (don’t sell) - It doesn’t matter how convinced you are that this change will benefit the company and your people. Right now, they may only be able to see the negativity of the change itself. Instead of pushing your viewpoint onto them and trying to sell them on it, you must attract people to the opportunities that are here.
5. Keep (or don’t keep) – People may consider leaving the organization if they don’t want to embrace the change. In some cases, this may be the right thing for someone who wasn’t a good fit for your team. On the other hand, if there are people you sincerely want to keep, make that clear. Follow the above suggestions to practice empathy, patience, questioning and enrollment to ensure they remain a part of your team.
6. Do all that you can and then let go (don’t force it) – The final and most important principle of effective leadership is that once you’ve applied all the other suggestions, you’ve done the best you could and you’ve got to let go of the results. You have no control over what people choose to do with what you’ve given them.
By developing a higher level of conscious awareness of these thoughts, habits and techniques, you can not only lead people effectively through change, you can also:
● Support and develop your people, leading to improved productivity and job satisfaction
● Decrease stress in the workplace, leading to a calmer atmosphere and less turnover
● Increase accountability and follow through, leading to a better bottom line
For more accountability tips and resources, download the special report, “Stepping Up to the Plate: 7 Accountability Strategies That Will Actually Make a Difference to Your Bottom Line.”
