If you don’t know where you’re going, well, you’re lost.
It’s true. The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Lots of startups plan to do one thing and end up doing something else. And that’s ok. However, what often leads to failure, is when a team does not have a well understood, small set of very important goals. Goals that are so important that “failure is not an option.”
Sounds easy and pretty obvious. But it’s actually pretty hard. It’s hard to get a group to generally agree on “Wildly Important Goals” (as named by FranklinCovey); it’s hard to get larger groups to know and understand goals; it’s hard to figure out what to do day to day to achieve the goals; and on and on. President Kennedy did it well in setting a wildly important goal of landing a man on the moon.
It’s hard, but a leader is defined as “someone with followers”. And to have followers you should know where you are going. And more importantly, the team had better know where they are going with you.
Here are some thoughts for what makes good goal setting.
- Focus on what’s “wildly important”
- Build out the strategies, objectives and tactics
- Communicate, communicate, and communicate again
- Review the plan frequently and adjust as needed
Wildly Important
A great plan should only be a few key goals that if you don’t achieve, lead to failure. A wildly important goal should be aspirational and big picture so as to differentiate from the often urgent, yet less important things which bombard us everyday. Ideally, your wildly important goals become a rallying cry for the team.
And they should be simple and short. 3-5 bulleted sentences. That’s it. No long 20 page business plan document. 3-5 bullets that can be written in an email or on the back of a napkin.
Strategies, objectives and tactics
Often during a goal setting effort, there are lots of questions about what’s a goal versus a strategy, objective or a tactic. Someone once gave me this as way to keep them straight.
- Wildly Important Goal -- A simple declarative statement of something you want to do or achieve. It’s aspirational. A goal most of us can understand might be “I want to lose weight.”
- Strategy -- this is the “how” you are going to achieve it, not the tactics, but the big picture “how”. For example to support the goal of Losing Weight, a strategy might be ”Exercise regularly or Go on a Low Carb diet.”
- Objective -- an objective is how to measure your success. It should be quantifiable and time bound. For example, “Lose 5 pounds in 2 weeks. Lose 15 pounds in 2 months.” And for each, make sure people know who is responsible for achievement of the objective. Accountability is a key ingredient as its how you manage the team as well as an individual and their performance.
- Tactic -- this is the day to day actions you take such as “Eat 2 hard boiled eggs for breakfast or Ride my bike today for 2 hours”. Too often tactics get mixed up as strategy and objectives. For example publishing a white paper or doing a press release are tactics and not objectives.
Even with the strategies and objectives, a great plan should fit on one single 8.5x11 inch sheet of paper. You don’t need to include all the tactics as each person should have their own list. If it is more than a page it’s too much because then it’s nearly impossible to communicate, impossible to remember, and too complicated to manage.
Communicate, communicate, communicate
The reason to do a plan is to lead a team to achieve great things. The key is to communicate the wildly important goals and explain the strategy (how) and objectives (scorecard) for everyone. And once you have communicated the plan, communicate it again, and again, and again. And then email it out and post in on a bulletin board or a intranet site. And refer back to it when dealing with the day to day tactics.
Getting a team to understand, buy in, and own the plan is key to success. If great teams know what it’s important, they will figure out how to make it happen.
Review and Adjust
Planning also means reviewing and adjusting as needed. In success you should celebrate, and in failure, you should reflect and adjust to get better. By honestly talking about failure (which starts with the leader) you may even engender a greater loyalty than in celebrating success.
Whatever the outcome, a set of goals should be a living document that is reviewed regularly. I suggest a regular 90 day review and adjustment of a set of rolling 18 month objectives -- especially for a startup. Most organizations create a calendar year based plan if not an even longer multi year plan. I argue that those are obsolete in the world in which we now live. Markets change, competitors adjust, and you learn new things. A series of smaller course corrections over a shorter period are easier to manage, less disruptive and more effective than a massive change once a year or worse.
In summary, keep it simple, build out the objectives, strategies and tactics, communicate and review the plan frequently.
This little clip from Apollo 13 is a great example of wildly important goal setting along with some objectives, strategies and tactics. A wildly important goal should mean “Failure is not an option.”
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