Samuel Mosley

07/15/2020

Driving your company means ensuring that the team has a clear goal at every level.

The teams within a company generally follow these lines:

• Executive, the team that drives clarity throughout the rest
• The company as a whole entity
• Departmental teams
• Small cross-functional teams / Individuals

Executive Team

As described in The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni, organizational health and clarity are some of the most important factors of this idea. To create clarity, the executive team needs complete alignment on the following questions:

• Why do we exist?
• How do we behave?
• What do we do?
• How will we succeed?
• What is most important, right now?
• Who must do what?

If the answers between executives are not aligned for the team deciding the direction, there will be no direction picked. You will have people who are getting off the bus and getting tickets elsewhere, people complaining about where the bus is going, along with an endless array of other cracks in clarity that originate at the top. What your executive team does and the habits that they build, end up being infectious throughout your company whether they are positive or negative.

The Company

Once the executive team has answered and debated over the 6 questions to the point there is nothing left unsaid and they are all committed to the answers (not necessarily in agreement) then the company goal is already defined. Now you have to communicate it, which is done best by showing the value that accomplishing it will bring.

What is most important right now?

This is your 3-12 month near term goal.

By having a single direction you know exactly where you are headed. Most importantly, you know where you are not headed. The ability to say no to ideas that are usually beneficial in some way is a powerful one. When saying yes to every idea the company loses the ability to do the most impactful work that reaches toward the goal that has been set by the executive team.

For example, a new product idea might add value for customers. If that new product isn't directly linked to the companies current goal then you should say no to working on the product. Despite the slight value, the effort will be more effective if targeted somewhere else.

At this company level, after communicating the goal it is important that everyone walks away with a deep understanding of the same goal and begins to move in the same direction.

Then we tumble down to the next level of departmental teams.

Departmental teams

As we get down to this level the executive team has split up and headed toward their own departments. Only by laying out how to communicate the ideas and writing them down can you be sure that everyone is still on the same bus.

Who must do what?

At this point, we will create a singular goal for each department. With their written down answers the executive team can guide their departments in creating a single goal that is highly correlated to the overall company goal.

This singular goal does not mean that you cannot do things that do not directly move the goal forward. Some things need to be done to keep an organization running or indirectly impact a goal. Having the goals and referring to them regularly lets you know you are spending the majority of your time on the most impactful work (which is almost never checking your email).

Small cross-functional teams / Individuals

Arriving at the last step, we begin to start seeing more tactical ideas and even some large tasks showing up as our goals. That is totally fine, the key is that you can use the 3 goals to evaluate all your tasks for the next 3-12 month period. Though if you narrow the scope of your goal too much then evaluating tasks for fit may become impossible, it may seem like many aspects of your job fall outside of your main goal. In the opposite direction if you broaden the goal too much there may be little difference between the departmental goal and your individual one which will create dissonance and lack of clarity since they end up being on the same level.

Something to avoid is choosing goals the individual is 100% confident they can achieve and won't stretch them in any way. This is both about delivering on an audacious goal for the company and becoming a better person. A person who can hit their goals at 100% every time is not growing or trying to improve, they are coasting.

As we continue to break down goals in this way, we get to a point where the skills and roles of individuals may not directly translate to the company goal at hand. Here we have to be okay with moving them to the correct role for the company that both supports their skillset and translates to the 3 goals (Company, Departmental, Cross-functional/Individual) that they are focused on in some way. Often reassignment will not be necessary.

Wrapping up goals

If the executive team has properly debated issues and decided the goals for the company and communicated them well the process of goal creation at other levels should take about a day, maybe less.

The Process:

• Executives return from Quarterly offsite having answered the 6 questions and written them down.

• 30 Minutes - All Hands meeting to communicate the singular company goal.

  Hearing from the Leader of the company is a powerful way to communicate the passion of moving toward the goal and the thought that went into the direction.

• 2 Hour - Strategic Meeting with the heads of the department (Keep this meeting under 10 people)

  If your department is < 10 people, include the entire team.

• 30 Minutes - 1 hour - Department Heads communicate the departmental goals and how they relate to the company goal.

  In a small company or department with < 10 people this meeting can be skipped since everyone was in the previous meeting.

• Break for lunch, encourage small teams to eat together.

• 2 Hours - Create the goals for the Small Team level

  If you are on a team of one, create individual goals for your "team".

• 30 Minutes - All hands meeting with a couple of examples from volunteers (best if from different departments) who are willing to share and communicate how all their goals are related.

At this point, everyone should have all but their individual goals. This timeline is very formal because it does involve work from all the employees. In communicating ideas that will not involve as much work for each employee we can have a less formal communication structure, even still it is helpful that important information flows through the entire company in 24 hours from the executives making the decision. This quick communication will help maintain alignment overall.

Evaluating Tasks

In the end, when we ask any person, they will have a total of 3-4 goals to worry about. Since the human brain can keep 7 plus or minus 2 things active at any point in time having 3-4 goals allows any person to understand and more clearly visualize what they need to do next and where they need to go. They can create an in-depth understanding of their goals that will then affect everything they do. Using an example where a person has the ability to keep 5 things in mind, they can "load in" all the goals from each level and their current task. This allows you to evaluate each task against your goals and make the right decision on whether it will be impactful and move you toward those goals. After deciding that the task in mind has a direct or indirect (but highly correlated) impact on your goals you can "unload" the goals and focus completely on the task.

This is in contrast to having 10-20 goals for a single person during a 6-12 month period. With this many goals when you go to evaluate tasks against them it becomes impossible to understand all the goals at once and properly evaluate whether a task is worth doing. So as you go to think about all of the goals you have to prioritize them and will likely prioritize the same ones over and over again letting some fall to the wayside and never get done.

Moving toward goals

In your day to day actions you need to occasionally take a step back and ask yourself "Does this action move me toward my goals?". By asking this you move from working in the business to working on the business. It helps you be sure that you are using your time effectively and having the highest impact. Without regularly returning to your own goals to see your progress there will be little progress.

• Patrick Lencioni's "The Advantage" presents a framework for organizational health that is further described through his leadership fables Four obsessions of an Executive, Five dysfunctions of a team, and Death by Meeting. I recommend you read the advantage as it dives deeper into the question of organizational health.