Employee-Led Goal Setting: Your Performance, Your Career, in Your Control
It is that time of the year where the hustle and bustle of the holidays has started and we are asked to set our personal goals for the new year. Unfortunately, most of us view this as a “check the box” activity that we are required to do but see little value in return.
This year try approaching your goal setting differently! Use the goal setting process to gain greater organizational clarity, ensure your personal alignment to achieve results, and establish a foundation for personal accountability and success. We will explore clarity in this week’s blog, and alignment and accountability in goal setting over the next 2 weeks.
Clarity:
Now is the perfect opportunity as you develop your yearly goals to seek and gain greater clarity to the vision, mission, and values of the organization and departmental direction. During your process of setting goals gather all of the information you can concerning the vision, mission and values for both your organization and the department you support. How can you effectively set a goal if you don’t know where you are going? Find out what success looks like so you can plan on how you will get there. Do your research. I think you will find the exercise itself will provide invaluable insight as you develop your 2017 goals and personal plan of development.
Want to gain even more clarity? Ask for your formal job description if you don’t already have it. How does it describe and define your role and responsibilities? Job descriptions are rarely ever used in goal setting but it should always be a starting point so you clearly understand what is expected of you in performing your role, which give you the ability to plan appropriately. As a part of this exercise you can continually update the formal role and responsibilities as they evolve and change each year.
Gaining clarity will serve as the first building block in setting meaningful and relevant goals. Next week we will take what you have discovered while gaining clarity and begin to align your actions, activities, and behaviors to your organization and department direction.
Until next week!
The Power of the ELO Model - Reap What You Sow
Last week we highlighted the 2016 World Series Champions and how the Chicago Cubs created the right culture where the organization enabled player-led, leader supported performance, creating an atmosphere where everyone takes pride, ownership, and accountability in being a leader where they are.
Today we want to highlight how important it is to ensure all three key performance components, organization, leadership, and employees, are all properly aligned to the right performance, and delivered in the right way.
Wells Fargo, one of the largest financial institutions in the world, shook the trust of its customers as well as the entire industry. The fallout, as a result, will impact the future of Wells Fargo and the financial services industry forever. To date, Wells Fargo has agreed to 185 million dollars in settlements after admissions from bank employees that they created and operated over 2 million fictitious accounts so employees could meet aggressive sales targets and earn bonuses along the way. And that 185 million is only scratching the surface. It does not account for the loss in customers and the tarnished reputation and stigma that will be attached to the organization for a very long time.
So what do the troubles of Wells Fargo have to do with an employee-led, leader supported, organization enabled performance model? Everything! While the now former CEO of Wells Fargo sat before Congress attempting to explain and blame the employees of the organization for not living the values, it was the organization that enabled those actions and behaviors to run counter to the stated values, even encouraging them with aggressive performance goals, punitive performance management practices, and reward and compensation plans established to reward results seemingly at any cost!
During a period of very rapid growth and success from 2011 until early 2016, this aggressive cross selling culture was cultivated and supported by leadership. Leaders supported this high pressure sales culture by firing over 5300 employees for not meeting their sales targets. Unfortunately, employees at all levels trying to survive in this environment were driven (doesn’t make the actions right) to open up bogus accounts to meet performance expectations and reap financial rewards or, like 5300 of their co-workers, face termination.
Once again, we have a clear and powerful example of organization enabled, leader supported, employee-led performance, but this time the outcome is much different than the Chicago Cubs.
Watch what your organization is sowing because what you reap could be a World Series Championship or destroy the faith and trust of millions of people across the globe.
The Power of the ELO Model Realized
Over the last few weeks we have explored an employee-led, leader supported, organization enabled (ELO) performance model. Now let’s explore the tale of two organizations and the power behind an ELO performance based model.
We don’t have to go any further back than last week and to an organization that for the last 108 years suffered through one losing baseball season after another. The Chicago Cubs last won the coveted World Series back in 1908. But in 2016 they were looked at in the beginning of the year as a contender for the title and unlike past years they realized a century old dream. So what changed?
The Cubs owners and organization enabled the success. They first brought in Theo Epstein, a 42-year-old baseball executive, as President of Baseball Operations. Prior to the Cubs position, Epstein was youngest General Manager in baseball at the time and led the Boston Red Sox in 2004 to their first World Series title since 1918. So what Theo Epstein brought to the Cubs organization was inspiration, energy and a long-term vision of player and organization development. He inherited a team in 2011 with a record of 71-91 and would bottom out in 2012 with a 61-101 losing record and would finish last in the following two seasons. Then in 2015 his vision started coming together and the goal was realized in 2016. But the Cubs organization enabled a feeling of hope again in the team and the city of Chicago by his hiring.
Theo began a massive rebuild of the organization bringing in a mix of experienced talent with young prospects and a new manager in Joe Maddon with the leadership style and experience required to support a turnaround and a team built like this. Joe Maddon doesn’t manage his players, he supports them. He creates an environment where players stay loose and feel empowered. If something had to be said, he would say it, but as he has been quoted “I’d much rather the peers carry my message” and that leadership style and confidence in his team paid off in game seven when everything was on the line and seemed to be falling apart and the game getting away from them. With only four outs standing between them and winning the World Series, the Cubs let a three-run lead disappear. A miscalculation by Maddon on the capability of the relief pitchers to throw so many pitches the night before and come back in the final game as strong was catching up to him.
After the ninth inning ended and heading into extra innings the skies opened up and the tarps came out on the field and the teams retreated to their clubhouses. Maddon said he walked into the clubhouse and saw his team having a meeting. He went upstairs to check on the weather. The meeting was led by a veteran player, Jason Heyward. That meeting, according to many of the players, is what changed Cubs history. Management didn’t need to call the meeting; it was player (employee) led. In fact, as a manager that supports and doesn’t manage often, Maddon said “I hate meetings, I am not a meetings guy. I love when players have meetings, I hate when I do. So they had their meeting and the big part of it was, we don’t quit. We don’t quit.”
You can attribute what you want to that meeting, but the Cubs came out of the rain delay and put up two runs in the 10th to give them what turned out to be their margin of victory to claim the 2016 World Series trophy.
Now with an organization that enables success by providing clarity, alignment and the resources to win, a manager that supports and develops the leader in every player, and with players embracing and thriving as leaders, the Chicago Cubs have an opportunity to be good for a very long time.
The Chicago Cubs, 2016 World Series Champions, the power of the ELO model.
Next week the power of the ELO but with a completely different outcome.
Reimagining the Performance Model pt. 4
What Does Your Organization and Culture Enable?
Organizational culture and norms become key enablers to performance (both positive and negative).
Look no further than past and current headlines from any news source and see how culture drives performance. Wells Fargo, ENRON, AIG, sports teams and associations like Penn State, Baylor, FIFA and unfortunately thousands of other organizations like these can claim they have cultures of value and can even point to well-worded values and vision statements. But somewhere along the path to success each organization veered and took a different direction that enabled lies, deceit and ultimately failure in so many ways to occur. (More on this in upcoming blogs)
But no legal, well-intentioned organization starts with a culture like these. Most evolve slowly over time, letting certain actions and behaviors that don’t seem too bad in the beginning to become the norm, permeating the entire organization and ending up with people saying “How did this ever happen?”.
In our work with clients we see organizations every day with consistently low to mediocre organizational performance and asking for help to improve it. We then look at the collective past performance reviews of individuals at all levels of the organization we often find that over 90% of the reviews reflect outstanding to exceptional performance. So how can that be? As one client put it, “We don’t pull weeds around here we just replant them!”.
If you have an organization that is often defined by blame, justification and excuses, then look no further than a few well placed, influential individuals in the organization that often lead by fear and intimidation and go looking for blame instead of solutions. You know it only takes one or two individuals with the right influence behaving in the wrong way to poison an entire organization.
However, if an organization truly C.A.R.E’s about delivering the right results in the right way and focuses daily on doing so, the once unimaginable and impossible becomes reality. Organizations need to C.A.R.E more! Providing more Clarity, Alignment, Resources and Enablement are how successful cultures that do it the right way achieve long term, sustainable success.
Look to the U.S Space Agency, N.A.S.A, in the 1960’s. Given a clear vision and mission to reach the moon, with an entire organization and country aligned to achieving that success, and provided with the best and brightest people, resources and technology available to accomplish the unthinkable, John F. Kennedy enabled the impossible to become possible when Neil Armstrong took those first steps on the moon, July 21, 1969.
So we challenge you to look at your culture and the norms that you and the organization are cultivating. Does your organization have the courage to C.A.R.E enough to not just replant weeds but enable success by expecting and developing the leader in everyone, and shifting your leadership model from planning, directly, controlling and managing to inspiring, energizing, facilitating and developing? Culture by design, not default!
To enable employee-led, leader supported performance, an organization must C.A.R.E. Achieve the right results in the right way.
Start today!
Employee-Led Learning and Performance
Employee-led learning is crucial to improving organizational performance. In addition to the information on the importance of employee-led learning you can find on our website at www.cornerstonelearning.com, please take a look at these two documents by Deloitte University Press and Jane Hart from the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies.
Deloitte University Press - Learning - Employees Take Charge