Have a Weekly Goal for your Team

High level goals are necessary to align an organization. Task lists are necessary for individuals to make progress each day. Weekly goals set the tone and pace for a team.

Weekly goals are milestones

Weekly goals are markers along the route the organization is following. They keep your team on track and moving in the right direction. Weekly goals are within sight, within reach. They’re close enough that they’re worth striving for. They provide the right sense of urgency. They can make work exciting, relevant, and fun. They’re something worth sprinting towards to close off each week.

Weekly goals are data points

Weekly goals set the tone and pace for each week. If you’re on an aggressive schedule, you need to set aggressive weekly goals. One of the benefits of having weekly goals is that you’ll see right away of they’re too aggressive. Every time your team misses a weekly goal badly (or even reaches it, but badly), you have a data point that tells you that this may not end well. Weekly goals give you a chance to measure how realistic your schedules are. Every missed goal should give you pause.

Weekly goals are points of clarity

As your team gets close to the end of the week, you can evaluate how close you are to that week’s goal. If you can reach it (at least partially) by simplifying it, you should. Favor progress over delay.

Weekly goals provide you and your team with regular points of clarity. They help you distinguish what’s really important from what you don’t really need.

Weekly goals are for the team

When your team reaches weekly goals, they have something concrete accomplished, something worth talking about, something worth showing to others. Weekly accomplishments improve morale. They create a culture of progress within the team. They provide opportunities for team members to work together, to demonstrate mastery, to build respect and trust.

High level goals are for the organization. Daily task lists are for individuals. Weekly goals are for the team.

Routes, Routines, and Ruts

Our last set of posts described one feature of strong leaders and healthy organizations: constant cycling between chaos and order. Strong leaders adapt their organizations to forces both within and external to them. They alternate between improving execution to radical change because they know this is the best way for an organization to realize its goals and its potential. One way of looking at this behavior is to consider three related, yet strikingly different terms: routes, routines, and ruts.

Routes

A route takes you from one place to another. It has the feeling of being planned, of being laid out intentionally. Routes avoid obstacles and respect the terrain. When a leader takes an organization from chaos to order, they’re essentially laying out routes for the organization to follow a “road map”, as it were, for the organization.

This is the grand part of leadership. This is the part where you imagine where your organization should be and how it should get there. This is where you need vision. This is where you need a broad view of your organization and its surroundings.

Routines

In an earlier post, we mentioned that routines are the frameworks of organizational culture. Routines capture the way you do things. They describe how work flows between functions and departments. A routine literally comes from following a “route”.

This is the satisfying part of leadership. When your organization has gotten to the point where it has internalized its routines by following a roadmap, you will have successfully implemented change. Now you can switch gears and focus on improving execution. This is where you work with your departments to streamline workflows. This is where you start defining cogs (in a good way) that fit together and turn smoothly. This is the new status quo (in a good way).

Ruts

Once an organization has found its stride, it takes very little effort to keep it going. At this point, leaders split into two camps. The first camp views this achievement as success and is content with how things are. This is the vision they had for their organization. This is where they wanted to be. When these types of leaders are in charge, the organization inevitably develops inertia and settles into a status quo (in a bad way). Routines become ruts that people get stuck in. As the organizational terrain shifts due to external forces such as competition and technology, the routes that were initially laid out become less and less relevant. At some point, they lead nowhere.

The second camp of leaders understands that getting their organizations into a routine is a good thing, but instead of being an opportunity to rest, it’s an opportunity to think. This is when they can look out further and survey the future. This is when they can apply their domain knowledge and insight to plan the next set of routes for the organization. This is when innovation happens.

Routes are purposeful. Routines are deliberate. Ruts are pointless.

Status Quo

It’s hard to think of any situation where “status quo” is viewed in a positive way. “Status quo” is associated with inequity and inefficiency. It’s immobile and lethargic. The status quo happens when people stop thinking, stop changing, stop adapting.

The status quo is bigger than one person — it encompasses the entire organization. It’s the sum of all the organizational inertia that’s built up over time. It’s too big for one person to change…but it’s not too big for one person to effect change. When enough individuals decide to change, change happens. When enough people are aligned in the same direction, the organization moves forward out of its status quo. Your responsibility as a leader is to align your team so this happens.

Markets are changing. Competition is changing. Technology is changing. If your company isn’t changing, it’s becoming obsolete. If your company isn’t changing, it’s becoming inefficient. If you company isn’t changing, then it’s losing its way. Leadership is not a single act. It is not a single event. Leadership is about change. Leadership is about figuring out where your organization needs to be and then heading there — and then figuring out where the organization needs to be next.

The status quo is what happens when leaders stop leading.

Real Leaders are Restless

Real leaders are restless. They can’t stand standing still. They’re always looking for ways to try new things. They are your business innovators. They can do amazing things for your organization — if you’re ready for change.

From Chaos to Order

Leaders are skilled at bringing order to chaos. They love coming into an undisciplined environment and setting up systems for doing things better and more consistently. The end result of this is a smoothly running organizational machine fitted with precision cogs (remember cogs aren’t necessarily a bad thing). When a leader does this well, the entire organization takes ownership in their new processes, routines, and workflows.

For most leaders, bringing order to chaos is pretty much all they know how (or want) to do. As soon as everything is running smoothly, they want to do the same kind of thing again in a different organization. It’s not burnout; it’s boredom. When things get calm, they need to move on. They can never be happy with the status quo, even if it’s the status quo they themselves create.

From Order to Chaos

Sometimes true leaders, however, are driven to take a group from order to chaos. They need to shake things up. They need to give the organization a kick in the pants. They know that people have become complacent and that the once smoothly running machine has descended into bureaucracy with no one really understanding why things are done anymore. People and departments have become cogs (in a bad way). These leaders know that in order to make things better, you have to tear things down. In order to get rid of the rust and the cruft, they need to take the machine apart and rebuild it.

It’s hard to pull the trigger on this type of change. If the organization is still meeting its goals, then people may be willing to tolerate the inefficiency of the status quo. However, if there are new goals that the organization is incapable of reaching, it’s probably time to smash the machine to pieces in order to reinvent it. Real leaders can do this. Real leaders love doing this.

When a highly capable leader is in charge of an organization for a long period of time, the organization will be constantly changing. Sometimes going from disorder to order; sometimes going from order to chaos. The one constant is that the organization keeps getting better, keeps increasing its abilities, keeps moving forward.

If you have a smoothly running organization, don’t put a real leader in charge — unless you’re ready for a shot of healthy chaos en route to something remarkable.

Authenticity

Authenticity means being yourself. It’s surprising how difficult this is to do in the workplace. Long before we become managers or leaders, we construct ideas of what these roles mean. We think of people we know or characters we’ve read about or watched in movies and television. When we step up to these positions, we model ourselves after what we think a manager or leader should be. We mask who we are when we — literally — take on these roles. After we’ve played these roles long enough, it’s easy to start confusing who we are with what we do. When this happens, it’s almost impossible to be authentic.

In order to be authentic we must connect with others as people not roles. This human connection is very powerful. It appeals to something deep within us independent of any organization. It conveys earnestness and engenders trust. It’s what enables us to build powerful teams, lead turnarounds or simply lead. Ironically, connecting with people outside of a hierarchy is what enables the hierarchy to work — and in some sense — renders the hierarchy irrelevant (this is why you can find true leaders anywhere within an organization).

Of course, in order for any of this to work, you have to be well-intentioned. You can’t have a personal agenda for selfish gain. You can’t be trying to manipulate others. If you have something to hide, then being authentic isn’t for you.

Authenticity is rooted in integrity and transparency. When you have nothing to hide and when what you say and do is unmistakably consistent with what you think and believe, being authentic will come naturally to you.

Ownership

If your team feels ownership of an initiative, and idea, or even an ideal, you have something special. Ownership is a natural motivator. It gives people the feeling that they can make a difference, that the work they are doing is meaningful and important. When people feel ownership of an issue, they actually care about it. If you’ve done a good job communicating organizational goals to your team and how their work supports that, then having your team own an issue makes your job a lot easier.

Ownership is a key part of having self-directed teams and individuals. When people really own an issue, they have the latitude to pursue it in ways that make sense for them. If they feel they can apply their unique talents and experience to an issue they own, they will. If your people start doing this, they’ll start to shine. When you get enough of your team doing this, everyone will see everyone else operating from positions of strength and mastery. Mutual respect forms naturally. This nurtures trust within the team. In fact, because you have entrusted your team with an issue, you have already made the first move to accelerate a cycle of trust.

Note that there’s a fine line between “ownership” and and “onerousness”. You are not dumping a bunch of tasks on people. You are not asking people to do things that are tedious. You are not asking people to “own” something that no one else wants. To be sure, there are tasks like this that must be done, but never try to frame these in terms of ownership.

One way to tell if something is worth “owning” is if you’d like to take credit for it. If there’s something that’s important enough for you to call out on your performance review, it’s something worth owning for your team. Of course, it’s best if you don’t take credit for something like this. Let your team own it. Sing their praises. Be happy for your part in making work meaningful for them. The credit you get is not in what your team does; it’s in what your team becomes.

What worked once may not work again: Part 2

Last time we talked about things that only work once because they’re associated with things that only happen once. There are also things that only work once (or a few times) for other reasons…

Crying wolf

Crying wolf can work when your team is young and inexperienced. You can get away with saying things like “The company is riding on whether we can get this out the door on time”, or “If we can’t get this done by the end of the month, we’ll all be looking for jobs”. For a young team, this can be an effective rallying cry. It can get people to step up their effort and find creative ways to pull together. If you keep saying things like this, however, people will stop taking you seriously.

For an experienced team, it’s probably best to not even try this. If you’re a young manager with an experienced team, then you should definitely avoid this — it practically shouts inexperience.

Going to the well once too often

Sometimes we stumble across something that worked really well. Maybe under pressure we were able to come up with a way to get past a particularly thorny problem. Maybe we found a way of doing things that worked great for a team we once managed. It’s tempting to “go back to the well” and take what worked at one point in time and apply it directly to a different situation with a different team.

Be careful when you do this — sometimes the well runs out of water. Often a technique that worked extremely well in one situation may fail miserably in another. It’s hard to know why anything works. Often the fact that the team was involved in the act of discovering a technique is why it works. When a team feels ownership in a new way of working, they are more likely to support it. You can’t rely on this happening all the time. You can’t hope to have the same conditions in place for each new team.

Schticks get old

Some people have a schtick that they’re really good at. Some are folksy; some wear cowboy hats; some are combative. This can definitely be effective in shaking things up. When someone uses a shtick that a team hasn’t seen before, they may be able to disarm people long enough to introduce change.

While this may work initially, every schtick — no matter how entertaining — gets old. The problem is that you don’t have a new audience each week — it’s the same people day in and day out. If you keep relying on an act to get things done, it will eventually lose its effectiveness. People will tune you out. At some point, it won’t work anymore.

Note that there’s a difference between a schtick and who you are. A schtick is an artifice. It’s something you’ve concocted. It’s something you use to get people to react in a certain way. This is not the same as your personality or style. Your personality shines through when you have authenticity — when what you say and how you say it are rooted in who you are and what you truly believe. Authenticity is related to integrity and transparency, powerful traits that enable leaders to create change time after time. More on this in an upcoming post.