In our 30 years as organization development (OD) consultants, working with organizations of all sizes and across industry lines, we have found challenges common to all. From CEOs to building maintenance people. Plant managers to sales folks. People consistently lament the same missing ingredients from the effective organizational performance pie. Here are a few of the most prevalent:
1- The organization's Vision and Strategy are invisible.
2- People are told to set goals, but they never learned how to set meaningful, achievable goals.
3- Consistent execution, or rather the lack thereof, is the main cause of poor individual and organizational performance.
4- There is no easy way to update actual performance against goal targets and communicate it so that those who need or want to know can, in fact, get the data in a timely fashion.
5- Most planning documents lie in a drawer or in a 3 ring binder on a shelf and are reviewed once a year, when it's too late.
6- Individual performance appraisals are a joke, or are an exercise in mutual destruction of leader and appraisee, usually the appraisee alone; and they are rarely tied to desired organizational outcomes.
7- The efficacy of the goal achievement tracking and reporting system is poor, so people don't know how the organization is doing, or how others are doing without having another meeting.
8- Most goals are set in a vacuum by individuals, rather than collaboratively with peers and/or leaders.
9- Results Management is an unknown concept.
10- Being given goals over which you have no control.
There may be other missing elements. There is no magic number; however, these will do for our purposes here. When any one is missing, individual and organizational performance will suffer. Consultants of all stripes, OD, Performance Management, quality, business process, etc., all face the outcomes produced by these issues when they get down to the nitty-gritty inside an organization.
We concluded that one of the primary reasons this stuff continues to pervade the business world's infrastructure is because people had no framework within which they could build a cohesive methodology, a system that would address and resolve the issues. There are exceptions, of course. Many of the world's larger organizations have developed systems to handle these requirements. But, for the most part, organizations continue to function with the handcuffs of disparate systems and incomplete information tightly binding their wrists.
Enter GoalTrakTM. It is the natural evolution of our work, combining the power of an organization's people with the technology/art of goal setting and the "always available" capabilities of the World Wide Web. In it reside the Vision, Mission and Strategy of the organization to be used as guides in the creation of executable, operational goals at all levels; integrated with an objective Performance Appraisal system that is driven by the goals of the organization. Because you asked for it!
We don't know precisely why circumstances in organizations are as they are. There are those that say it's because people are lazy. We don't believe that's the case. Others say that people don't want to be held accountable. Perhaps, but we believe that's only a symptom, because when people are provided clear direction, are involved in the decisions and given support, they perform magnificently!
As we develop this blog, and finish creating the foundation for its existence, there will be more discussion of the context within which we operate . . . we, meaning all of us in the business world. For now, we leave you with this thought: paraphrasing John Kotter of Harvard, "Leadership is about Vision and Change; Management is about dealing with Complexity."
-RSL
