A Quantum Voyage

Do you know?

Here we are, knee deep in a recession which is leading many to depression. Many of us don't know for sure how we got to this place. We're unsure which of our many decisions contributed to where we are right now. Maybe it doesn't matter, except as lessons learned. Our possible futures are really more important, as we can use our past to help us create a different kind of future. What we do with our possibilities depends on how much we believe in ourselves; how high our self-image is; and how willing we are to embrace some change.

“Without a system of goals, our only motivation is survival”. When I coined this phrase back in 1977, I didn't realize just how powerful is was. It was just something that came to me, a realization based on the transition that I was going through at the time. Its impact was brought home to me a few years later when a job candidate told me that the only reason she walked in the door of our somewhat tacky office was because she saw that phrase on a sign in our storefront window. That candidate went on to become a partner and very successful in her own right.

Several of our clients were able to exit their businesses by selling them to outsiders. They tell us that having a system of goals, both personal and business made this possible. Our clients who continue using our goal setting technology long after we've finished our consulting gig tell us that it is the difference between just accepting what they think will happen, and getting what they want. “A goal is what you want, not what you think you'll get”. Another of my epiphany type realizations. Instead of being a victim of your results, you become the beneficiary of your efforts to achieve your desired results.

Creating a system of goals, personal and/or business is no mean feat. It takes commitment, time, effort, thought, risk, and patience. Patience with yourself and with the process.

Now is the time to think about your possible futures. While you're in line at the unemployment office, or waiting for the person who will be interviewing you for a position. While you're watching a sporting event or catching a missed episode of your favorite soap. During your lunch break at your job, or while you're reading a book. Carry pen/pencil and paper with you and when an idea hits you, write it down! More good ideas have been lost on the way from the brain to paper than make the trip. From ideas and dreams come goals. From goals come successes, no matter how they're measured.

I'd be glad to share the entire goal setting process right here, however, you probably wouldn't take the time to read all 50 or so pages. There are many resources available that can help us get the job done and the Internet has made them easily accessible. Effective goal setting isn't taught in our schools and universities. Rather, we're told to set goals, but not how. The how is critically important.

When you experience and understand the value of this goal setting technology and what it can do for you, you “won't leave home without it”!

Richard S. Lewine is President of Quantum Voyage, Inc.; creator of GoalTrak^TM; principal at RSL Consulting Group; and co-founder of Pinnacle Power. He is based in Montgomeryville, PA and may be contacted at rslewine@rslgo.com

Don't Waste Your Money on Training!

So said the MD of a 100 plus company in the south east.

His view was that he employed people with relevant supporting skills and with the exception of meeting the legal niceties the rest was down to the line manager and learning on the job. He had previously spent money on training, but had not noticed any real difference in the performance of his staff, with or without off the job training.

The company survived, but not without an injection of new blood and a root and branch review of the way the company operated. There was not just a lack of people development, all the company’s initiatives were top down, change was always prescriptive and employees were expected to cope come what may. Not only were employees unhappy but they were a vastly underused resource, they never volunteered and their potential for creativity was lost.
 
Of course training and development is never an optional extra, well directed, they serve both, the on-going effectiveness and wellbeing of organisations; and they help future managers to arrive in post oven ready.

The key phrase is well directed, sadly a lot of training is not well directed, the expected results are not clearly specified and post training impact is not objectively measured.

The Benefit of Training is to make a gain or, to avoid a loss and the company and the employee should both benefit.

A few sad facts:

• 22% of skills are below standard.
• Typically, this costs a business of 50 employees, £165,000 per year
• UK productivity is 13% below that of other major economies
• In Britain £4.5b is spent on training each year by employers, but this may not be used effectively
• In 2001 50% of the $56.8b training budget in the USA had not been used one year later and was unlikely to ever be used!

To make training pay, there are a few questions that it is well worth having the answers to.

• What is the need?
• When will the need arise?
• If the need is met will it serve the strategic needs of the organisation?
• Will there be an adequate return on investment?

How can you be sure that you have genuine and timely answers to these questions? All too often training and development requirements are generated as a reaction to perceived bad performance and locking the door after the horse has bolted is bad news. Training requirements are also often generated as a response to a trend or a fad; there have been more reincarnations of fundamental training ideas than there are grains of sand. Some training is sold like clothes, fashions are created each year to generate products that superficially look different, but serve the same basic needs.

Some things stay the same; organisations still need a vision, a mission and a strategy to generate the strategic objectives from which managers derive their goals.

A lot of organisations don’t have a goal setting culture and even in those organisations that do have one; goals are not systematically tracked so that feedback is regular, and not ad-hoc.

On average:

• People who have written goals are 25% more effective that those who don’t.
• People who track goals are 25% more effective that those who don’t.
• People who have written goals and track them are 65% more effective.

Collaborative goal setting, in which goals through the organisation are aligned to its strategic goals and tracked, does not just deliver great results, it systematically identifies any resource shortcomings and needs. It objectively determines training and development needs and provides the basis on which the return on investment can be calculated.                                                        -DKL

David Knowles-Leak runs a performance management company. He works with www.goaltrak.co.uk who provide an organisation wide strategic goals and management system for generating and managing results. He can be contacted on 01628 400 665 and at davidkl@linkmanagementgroup.com

It's Not Too Late.

It's not to late to. . .

            •Set goals for 2009

            •Commit to helping other people

            •Find a new job

            •Open a new business

            •Satisfy your customers/clients

            •Show your family that you love them

            •Enjoy each day as it comes

            •Take a walk in the woods

            •Read a good book

            •Learn to play the piano

            •Take art lessons

            •Enroll in college

            •Join a networking group

            •Clean out your garage and have a garage sale

            •Listen to your favorite music

            •Contribute to a charity

            •Volunteer your time

            •Invent something new

            •Write down your dreams

           

Despite the state of our economy, and the strife that exists in the world, it's not too late to enjoy life.

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

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