A Quantum Voyage

The Picture is Crooked

We have just returned from three days in Chicago, attending the “Best of OD Summit”, a learning conference for organization development professionals. There were bout 700 attendees, both external consulting organizations and internal, corporate OD specialists. We were there as exhibitors, demonstrating GoalTrakEV as a tool for these people to use in their efforts to help their clients excel.

From our perspective as vendors the conference was a success. We had a good flow of people coming to our booth who were seriously interested in GoalTrakEV. Many asked us to follow up after the conference. As a learning venue, the attendees we spoke to said that they got what they came for; meeting with colleagues, learning new and enhanced methods of practicing their profession, and of course, eating, drinking and enjoying what the Windy City has to offer.

There was, however, a disturbing undercurrent. A high percentage, (about 50%  by our unscientific count), of these OD professionals told us that even though they are asked by upper management to improve the overall human performance of their clients' organizations, both internal and external consultants said they were stonewalled in their efforts by these same people.

These professionals are educated and trained to facilitate the enhancement of organizational collaboration, communication, recruitment, management development, interdepartmental cooperation, strategy formulation, succession planning and a host of other critical disciplines. They are paid well to implement their skills with the potential outcome of improved overall organizational efficacy, reflected in higher profits and more satisfied customers for their clients. Why then, this top level resistance?

We don't have the answers. Our experience in our OD consulting practice has been similar, though our percentage of success is higher. For the most part, when we've been engaged for an extended period, say, 18 to 24 months, the organizational changes tend to remain intact. Perhaps our somewhat off-center approach of using goal setting as the catalyst for change is the reason we get these results. We'd like to think so.

In our view, goal setting is the most powerful tool for human achievement that is available to us as a species. Everything that we do as people is to either gain a benefit or avoid a loss. We are motivated by a potential satisfying outcome to perform the simplest activity such as brushing our teeth, to the difficult process of looking for a new job. Maybe these management folks have not clarified their goals. Without a system of goals, our only motivation is survival. They apparently are not willing to “pay the price” because they don't see the rewards. If that's the case, maintaining the status quo, staying in their comfort zone, will always prevail.

-RSL

TechWeb TV Interview on YouTube

Choosing to Evolve

So, what does one write about in this esoteric domain of organizational goal setting and development? It generally doesn't provide springboards like the sub-prime situation, or our most exciting primaries in decades. As we work with our clients, however, concepts take shape. New ways of looking at things generate new ways of articulating seemingly “of course” issues. Take using our untapped potential, for instance.

Our 30 years of consulting with myriad organizations of all sizes and shapes, made up of people with untold amounts of potential, has led us to codify the process of personal and professional development into a four step, open system, supported by the art of goal setting.

• Step 1. Choose: to be aware of who you are, where you are, to grow, to change, to be more, to tap your potential. This act of positive choice leads one to conscious thought about what could be and how to make it so. Starting with dreams and wishes, those who choose to evolve will set realistic goals to bring them to fruition.
• Step 2. Learn: about yourself, about new ideas, new concepts, new skills, new ways of doing things in your world and practicing them. Thinking alone, however, won't make it happen. Here's where goal setting begins to play a crucial role in developing capabilities. Crystallizing thinking to enable focus on the desired outcomes requires a clearly defined set of personal development goals that, when achieved, will bring you to the levels of competence needed to successfully implement new capabilities.
• Step 3. Apply: new skills, new ways of thinking, new attitudes, to all domains in your life, tapping your potential and getting more satisfying results. This provides new responses and feedback on your new behaviors and performance. When this feedback is integrated into your learnings, the learnings are enhanced, becoming part of the “new” you and supporting an evolutionary process manifested in your behavior. Goals become the vehicle of choice to determine the when, how much, where and why of application.
• Step 4. Evolve: to a higher level of self awareness with all the newness that you have learned, practiced and applied and on which you have received feedback; which brings you back again to making choices based on new, intrinsic values, developed as a result of steps 1 though 3. And the cycle repeats as long as you allow it to do so.

Goal setting is the most powerful tool available for human achievement. Whether you are reaching for personal, professional or organizational growth, it is the one tool that, when used consistently, works every time.

-RSL

Changing of the Guard

What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear about a new CEO taking over the leadership of an organization? Job cuts? Restructuring? Move around the furniture?

Perhaps. Just in the past two months this event occurred with one of our client organizations. The first thing the new CEO did was to gather his leadership group for a day to clearly define the top level corporate goals for 2008. We were fortunate to be asked to facilitate the process. Rather than do the job twice, the CEO decided that as the goals were defined, they would be entered directly into GoalTrakEV, eliminating the error prone process of transferring them from paper or word processor to GoalTrak.

It was a sobering experience for all concerned. While the CEO was familiar with our goal setting process from many years of exposure, his predecessor had shortcut the system. He had to start from square one. We even had to formulate strategy on the fly; no mean feat! At the same time, the CEO and his people were learning how to use GoalTrakEV, as the previous CEO eschewed GoaltrakEV in favor of a home grown spread sheet system which, by the way, no one understood or used.

We still have two more groups of leaders with whom we must work, cascading the corporate level goals to the divisions and departments. They too, will be learning GoalTrakEV, along with the technology of goal setting, as many of them have not been exposed to the process. Our new CEO is paying the price for the short-sighted view of his predecessor.

The salient points here are, the new CEOs understanding of the value of real world goal setting; the advantages of using GoalTrakEV for creation and easy tracking of their system of goals; and the benefits of having each leader set up their Performance Appraisal criteria directly in the system. The CEO actually negotiated expectations with his people in this same session. Senior Leaders are off and running!

-RSL

The Ubiquitous Tool

One might get the impression from our writings that goals and goal setting are a panacea. Not true! Goal setting is a tool, a tool that can be used in almost any situation or circumstance to get someone, or a group, from where they are, to where they want to be. Whether the desired outcome is an increase, decrease, improvement, modification or change of any kind, goal setting can help.

One of the most challenging issues our clients face is that of leader/follower behavior. Being the humans that we are, we take our attitudes and habits with us wherever we go. Ergo, what we learn and practice at home and in our social domain, we carry into the workplace. Frequently, this creates difficulties that impact the smooth functioning of our businesses and the workplace relationships required to lead, manage and follow appropriately. The converse is also true. Learned workplace behavior will be with us on the outside. This applies to constructive and destructive attitudes and behaviors.

This is the “soft stuff” that all too often gets short shrift in organizations of small to medium size. We're so busy with the daily activity of “running the business” that we lose site of the fact that we must also “manage the organization”. Both leaders and followers, managers/supervisors and direct reports, have responsibility in developing and maintaining productive workplace relationships. It is implicit in our agreement to show up for work every day.

If you are a leader that tends to react knee jerk style, you may be inhibiting your direct reports from bringing you what you need . . . the bad news. If you're the direct report of this leader, you may well avoid contact, even if the topic is neutral. In extreme cases, the direct report may feel abused. Allowed to continue unchecked, the consequences can be far reaching, leading to heated arguments, firings and quitting.

One of the parties must break the vicious spiral of dysfunction. At first glance, it appears that this is in the leader's court. Not so. Either party can take the first step. Keeping in mind that we cannot change someone else, we can only change ourselves, the direct report can set a personal development goal to become less sensitive to the leader's behavior; not take it personally. With commitment, a clear picture of how the goal setter wants to behave, a realistic time frame for practice and a target date, change can be made. When we change our behavior, those with whom we interact must change, as the circumstances become different than what they are accustomed to.

There is obviously much more to this process. We want to make the point that goals can be used for more than generating sales and profit. Goals can be used to help us become what we are capable of becoming. Goals can support our efforts of personal development.

-RSL

Organizational Evolution

So, what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Nothing! “What does that have to do with Organization Development consulting and GoalTrakTM,” you might ask. Everything!

After 30 years of working with CEOs of small and mid-size organizations, I liken our experiences to the above old adage. Our initial involvement focuses on helping the people of the client organization to understand that just because they change what they do, or how they do it, doesn't mean that everything they've done till then was wrong.

Apparently, the human condition is such that allowing oneself to change is perceived as a sign of weakness, of ignorance, or perhaps, foolishness; so there is resistance to change. Unfortunately, this situation seems to be the rule, rather than the exception. The people in the organization are “comfortable”. The CEO, however, senses, or knows, that things need to change. Frequently, he/she is unsure as to the specific change needed, but absolutely sure that it must occur. It's an evolutionary process. That's why we were called in.

Organizational Evolution: The process of individual Awareness on the part of the leader, organizational Planning and leadership Development at all levels, yielding the trackable, manageable Results that you want.  Evolving from what the organization is at the moment (current state), to what it can be (desired state), at some predetermined time in the future. Transformation is the label frequently applied to this outcome.

Transformation calls for a process that looks something like this:

                  1- Leader's Personal acknowledgement that he/she must make some changes (prerequisite for success!).

This leads to → 2- Vision building which then requires →

                            3- Strategy Formulation supported by →

                                4- executable Goal Systems requiring →

                                    5- Leader/Manager Development that produces →

                                        6- Overall organizational effectiveness enhancement.

Slow and steady. The only way to ensure a successful transformation is to take evolutionary steps. Helping people to assimilate new information, systems, methods, and concepts takes time and persistence. Knowing how you're doing each step of the way and what progress you are making, is a necessity. Otherwise, how will you know what to continue or what to modify? Not knowing how you're doing is tantamount to suicide. Don't even start if you're not going to track your progress in tangible metrics. That's where GoalTrakTM comes in. It's a tool to let you know how you're doing at every moment.

-RSL

Happy New Year – 2008

Hello? Hello?? Is anybody there? I see a few lights on, but I wonder if anyone's at home. People say that one must have a blog. Really? Why do the pundits say that? With about 98% of all blogs never getting a single look, why must one have a blog? Who is going to read it?

We've had a few visits - about 200 in 3 months. Considering the statistics, that's pretty good. Perhaps very few people are interested in goals. Not a surprise. Only about 3% of the population has written goals. Funny how that correlates with the degree of success that people enjoy.

A major university conducted a research project a number of years ago in which it took a graduating class and followed them for 20 years. It found that only 3 percent of the class had set goals, put them in writing and adjusted them over that 20 year-period. It was also found that same 3 percent had accomplished more materially than the other 97 percent of the graduates combined. This was originally done in the late 1950s. It's been repeated many times since with the same outcomes.

Oh, well; on to more important things. On January 3, 2008, the state of Iowa. . . and our country, made history – Barak Obama won the Democratic Caucuses, whomping Hillary and John. A Black, Freshman Senator, little known till he made a short speech at the 2004 Democratic Presidential convention, won the support of a 97% white state!

Do you think its possible that Huckabee and Obama had written goals? Hmmm.

Let us know what you think.

-RSL

The Beige Paper on Organizational Goals in Three Acts 12/19/07

Act III

There are a gazillion (that's a very high number with lots of zeros) web sites that purport to be the “be all end all” of goals and goal setting. From a consumer perspective, we believe that anything that gets someone to begin setting goals is helpful. The mere act of writing something down will change the possible outcomes.

When it comes to organizational goals and goal setting, there are many fewer sites that promise the world. A handful are well done and, if implemented according to the provided guidelines, will probably contribute to improved results, that is, of course, if the issues we talked about earlier in this article are addressed.

Our assessment, however, based on a non-scientific research project, is that these professionally developed sites don't really do the job as it needs to be done.

1. ONLY GoalTrakTMEV and GoalTrakTM CV include the complete 9 step goal setting process.
2. ONLY GoalTrakTMEV requires the absolute linking of goals to organizational Strategy and/or top level organizational executable goals.
3. ONLY GoalTrakTMEV provides a complete discussion of the technology and art of goal setting; and provides context sensitive links to the appropriate information as a guide during the goal setting process.
4. ONLY GoalTrakTMEV seamlessly integrates the specific measurable criteria of an individual's goals with his/her performance appraisal without additional data entry.
5. ONLY GoalTrakTMEV requires individual performers to create their own goals, rather than have someone else decide what the person should achieve and how, and push it down without collaboration.
6. ONLY GoalTrakTMEV has GoalMail^TM as the collaborative communication conduit between and among all goal setters and their direct reports, up and down and across the organization.
7. ONLY GoalTrakTMEV was conceived and designed by a practicing organizational development consultant. It is based on 30 years of working with and listening to real clients.

The expected bells and whistles are also present in GoalTrakTMEV: Dashboards, drill downs, goal relationships, privacy, etc.

If you are serious about supporting the continuing evolution and transformation of your organization, then take a test drive of GoalTrakTMEV. Or if you are a mentor, consultant or coach, GoalTrakTM CV.

If you want to Manage Results instead of reacting to them, visit goaltrak.com and learn about the GoalTrakTM family.

If you want to conduct objective, effective performance appraisals, and be able to review actual, real time performance against targets with 3 mouse clicks, then the GoalTrakTM family of Goal and Performance Management SaaS applications is for you!

GoalTrak.com

Because a goal is what you want, not what you think you'll get!!

-RSL

The Beige Paper on Organizational Goals in Three Acts 12/17/07

Act II

Consider this: An organization is comprised of groups of disparate individuals with diverse talents and skills (know-how), brought together for the common purpose of generating a coherent outcome which yields excess revenue, (in our capitalist system), called profit. Most of these people didn't know that the others within the organization even existed, let alone understand their motivations, before they came on board. Without a system of goals that leads in a common direction, how in the world could they be expected to perform up to expectations? Yet this is how most of our small to mid-size businesses operate.

Here is one of our un-glitzy graphics, a conceptual representation of an organization's functional structure from a strategic perspective.

This is the way it works, whether or not we intentionally make it this way. If the Vision and Strategy are absent, then the Organization Goals, if they exist, determine the work that needs to be done. If they don't exist, and by that I mean if there isn't a written system of goals addressing important operational Key Result Areas (KRAs) for a specific time frame and cascaded throughout the organization, then everything else “just happens”. That is, people implement their know-how as they perceive it should be done, or as their supervisor/manager told them to do it. Now, without goals, how does the supervisor/manager know what's the right thing to do?

If you've read this far, by this time you've gotten our message. If you haven't, we'll make it abundantly clear; as far as we're concerned, “without a system of goals, our only motivation is survival!” If that's OK with you, then it's fine with us. If you want more than just survival, have we got a product for you! (or, read on. . .)

Here's a goal setting flow chart depicting the nine steps required to create a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Tangible, Realistic and Controllable (SMTRC). 

Notice that we didn't say SMART goal. The reason is simple: SMART goals are not . . . very smart! Some well meaning (we hope) individual came up with an acronym and made goal requirements fit. This is a case of form before function, as far as we're concerned. It is the sum total of the qualities of a goal that make it achievable. To include Achievable (the “A” in SMART) as one of the qualities is an oxymoron. The Controllable element is missing in a SMART goal. It is the final piece of a SMTRC goal. Check back on Wednesday, December 19, 2007 for Act III.

-RSL

The Beige Paper on Organizational Goals in Three Acts

Act I

            

This is not a white paper! “. . . Several versions of Webster's indicate that the term arose within the past few decades in England to distinguish short government reports from longer, more detailed ones that were bound in blue covers and referred to as "blue books" (not to be confused with the blue books used when taking college exams). A shorter government publication providing a report or position about something was bound in the same white paper as the text - hence, "a white paper".

We're not going to dazzle you with glitzy graphics and tons of tough-to-validate statistics. We are going to explain our position, our rationale, in creating GoalTrakTM.  Succinct and concise are our guiding principles. A few facts and our experience make up the bulk of this document. Onward!

Let's start with a basic fact: The education system in the US does not teach students the technology of goal setting, at least as we understand it. Oh sure, there are a few places where lucky students have a teacher/professor who has been exposed to the fundamentals of goal setting and is wise enough to pass it on to those in his/her classes. In general, however, this doesn't happen. So we end up with a general population that is told, (by the uninformed) to set goals; but not how to set goals.

Why then, are we surprised to discover that most people in organizations are poor goal setters? Further, the leaders in most organizations are products of the same educational system and they don't have the required goal setting expertise either. Result: no goals, few goals, or poorly structured goals; and performance that is much less effective than it could be.

Here's another fact:  A study by Robert Rodgers of the University of Kentucky and John E. Hunter of Michigan State University, showed that goal setting, in combination with participation in decision making and objective feedback, yields average productivity gains of 56%.  These gains occur when top-management commitment and participation are high.  (Journal of Applied Psychology, 1991, Vol.76, No.2)

OK, so the study is almost 20 years old. Does that invalidate the findings? We don't think so, because our sister consulting company, Achievement Alliance Corporation, whose founder created GoalTrakTM, has found this to be true in their work with small and mid-size clients for over 30 years! When organizational populations are introduced to the fundamentals of the technology and art of goal setting, outcome expectations are higher and actual performance is enhanced, producing improved results.

In addition to the need for clearly defined goals, overall organizational performance is dependent on leadership that has articulated a Vision and supporting strategy that are disseminated throughout the organization, top to bottom and sideways. Everyone needs to know where they are headed or they can't make a meaningful contribution to the journey.

Making the task of sustaining an effectively functioning organization even more daunting, is the challenge of ensuring that the behavior of leaders and followers is highly functional; a little discussed but critical factor in our society and business environment that has far reaching ramifications. We won't deal with that issue in this paper; however, you'll find some interesting and enlightening information on the subject here.  Check back on Monday, December 17, 2007 for Act II.

-RSL