07/06/2016
The System to Achieve Your Goals in 2016
Jed Bickford wrote this on December 03, 2015 • 2 Comments
If you have a vision for your business and your life, the next step is making it happen. But how? It's easy to paint a rosy picture of the future, use it to inspire your team for the next two months, then let it gather dust. The challenge, and what defines successful entrepreneurs, is to live the day-by-day discipline and commitment to making that future happen.
I'll share a system I've developed over the last three years of managing our software engineering and technology projects, which makes it easier to build a plan and track your progress, so that you can keep momentum after the shine of your new vision wears off. This system is the closest thing I've found to automating goal achievement.
Review Annual Goals
If you've worked through our annual planning process, you've already extracted a clear set of goals from your vision. You've prioritized them and know what's most important to achieve next year.
Take a read over your goals for next year. Remember, good goals are S.M.A.R.T. : S pecific,
M easurable, A chievable, Realistic,
T ime-bound. Are yours? If not, work on them until they meet this definition.
Once you have S.M.A.R.T. goals, it's time to develop your system to move them into reality.
There are three major components to this system:
Quarterly Planning Document
Quarterly Roadmap
Weekly Review & Goal-Setting
As you continue reading you'll learn how to use each of these items, and there are examples included below.
Ensure Every Employee Knows Your Annual Goals
Do you struggle to share your goals with your employees? If so, this is the first area to make a change. If your team doesn't know the exact goals you want to reach, they'll never get on board to help you achieve them. I've known a few owners who said, "My team doesn't have the broader picture of the business as a whole, so I like to 'break down' my goals into something they understand. Then I share each team's goals with them individually."
This approach works against teamwork and creativity. It creates silos, questions among employees about what they can actually talk about with each other. They’ll end up not asking for help, or failing to involve the rest of the company in their successes and challenges of working toward the goal. This inefficiency silently saps the potency of well-defined goals.
So make the time to share your goals, in full, with your employees. Give them the background they need to understand why you believe these goals are both achievable and will help the company achieve your vision.
Then, listen.
Your team will have the feedback you need to either continue in this process of making your goals a reality (e.g., "Great! We want to do this too."), or they'll tell you what needs to change (e.g., "Are you sure that's possible? Do you see how we will get all this done in a year/quarter?"). Getting your team out of the vacuum created by a lack of knowledge will both improve your ability to set goals, and result in the support that you may have been missing from your team.
Here are three examples of goals we at EMyth have set for next year and shared with the team:
Grow our monthly sales qualified lead numbers by 56% by December 2016.
Release two major improvements to our Coaching Hub, turning our PDF processes into digital content and enabling deep collaboration between coaches and clients.
Build and release our internal Coach Dashboard to the entire EMyth Coach Network.
Build a Quarterly Goal Planning Document
Your annual goals might look like, "Increase leads by 20% over last year." Or, "Implement clear budgeting process and delegate budget decision making to managers so that I can free my focus to only sign off on the larger budgeting decisions."
What steps in the next three months will it actually take to get each goal done? The answer is in splitting the goal into a set of sub-goals and projects: specific areas of work, each with a single responsible individual, which must be completed to achieve the goal.
Most company-wide goals will require every department or manager to take part and accomplish departmental sub-goals and projects that contribute to its success, so you'll have each department head complete their own individual document, relative to their areas of responsibility. Keep in mind that Key Strategic Indicators or departmental metrics may be part of the sub-goals that are set.
There are three necessary components of the Quarterly Goals document:
1. A look back at last quarter. What are we doing differently this quarter based on what we learned last quarter?
2. A clear understanding of this quarter's goals, and agreement that they're achievable. How do they line up with your annual goals?
3. A set of projects that will get the goal done. These projects will be a collaboration between you and your managers.
Click image to download the template with an example for a single document.
Prepare the Quarterly Goal Planning Document for Each Manager / Department Head
First, update the document to include your annual goals. You'll find that, depending on the team/department whose goals are being set, there are vastly different areas to cover.
Second, save a version of this document for each manager or department head. For each department, add your ideas about the sub-goals (these are usually projects or specific areas of work, but may also be metrics that need to increase/decrease) that you think will help achieve the annual goal. Note that your department head will likely have better ideas about how to achieve the goals as well, so it's not your job to 'finish' this work. Just start a conversation.
Example of Goal-Setting for the Product Development Department at EMyth
When I planned Q4 of 2015, there were two company-wide goals for the year that governed the projects I focused on:
Increase monthly Sales Qualified Leads by 100% by year-end
Improve Client Retention through an improved user experience
For my team, which is technology focused and therefore has a supporting role in Sales and Marketing, we split Increase Sales Qualified leads by 100% by year-end into the following goals, which also happen to be projects:
Assist Marketing team in releasing updated website that improves lead conversion rate
Release updated Coaching Client Agreements so that client payment and setup is simplified
Update CRM to simplify lead follow-up, so that coaches can focus more on outreach to aging leads
Third, share the document with your managers or department heads and ask them to complete it. On the left is the email I used to share the document with my team members. Do this at least two weeks before the beginning of your quarter so that they can complete it and review it with you by the beginning of the quarter for which it applies.
Fourth, agree upon a date when they need to send you the completed document. I aim for this to happen a minimum of one week prior to the start of the next quarter so we have time to review and finalize the sub-goals and projects.
Fifth, schedule review meetings with each manager who is completing a Quarterly Goals document.
Review Quarterly Goals Documents with Managers
Review the documents as you receive them, and make notes for your individual review with your department heads or managers. When I review these documents, I get a look at how they're thinking about the projects that they bit off for last quarter, and whether they feel they'll be successful this quarter. Further, my managers often bring up projects or ideas that are better, faster or more effective ways to achieve the goal than I would have come up with.
Specific Questions to Ask in the Review Meeting:
1. What was the hardest question to answer? Why?
2. What did you learn as you worked on your quarterly goals?
3. Which projects are you the most excited about? Least excited about?
4. Do you feel the sub-goals and projects we're setting for this quarter are the best way to achieve our goals? Why? If not, why?
Next, an incredibly important step happens: Finalizing the sub-goals and projects for the quarter. Do you feel that the sub-goals set by your department head, and the projects designed to achieve your company-wide goals, are the right path to take? And is your department head/manager
committed to achieving them? If so, keep moving forward. If not, work on the Quarterly Goals document together until you reach agreement. If you are at a stalemate, bring in your Leadership Team or an EMyth Coach to work through the questions.
Once you've reached agreement with your managers, and you've approved the sub-goals and projects, you'll share them with the rest of the company.
Build Quarterly Roadmap
Next, I'll show you how to roll up and share the entire set of goals and projects for this quarter with all of your employees. We call this a Quarterly Roadmap, and it's quite simple and powerful.
First, start the document by listing every annual goal you've set.
Second, add each departmental sub-goal or project underneath the annual goal that it contributes to. Only add it if you're convinced it's the most important thing that can be done to achieve the goal. If not, go back to the Quarterly Goals Document and keep working on it with your department head. Take a look at the example:
Quarterly Roadmap Template
First Annual Company-Wide Goal, e.g., "Increase leads by 20% over last year."
Supporting project / goal from Marketing Team
Supporting project / goal from Sales Team
Supporting project / goal from Finance Team
etc.
Second Annual Company-Wide Goal
Supporting project / goal from Marketing Team
Supporting project / goal from Sales Team
Supporting project / goal from Finance Team
etc.
Note that for larger teams, there will likely be two to five sub-goals or projects per department. That's fine.
Third, share it with your team. At minimum, this should be updated and shared on a monthly basis. At EMyth, we update the Quarterly Roadmap every Monday. It's got the latest status of each project, the expected completion date, and any hiccups noted on it—and once updated, it's emailed to all employees.
Conduct Weekly Goal-Setting Meetings
Based on the sub-goals and projects you've defined, delegate weekly goal-setting and retrospective meetings to your employees. These are simple meetings that your managers should lead with their reports. If you have a small enough team (less than eight employees), hold them as a company.
Format for Weekly Goal-Setting Meeting
Hold the meeting on Monday morning. Each employee answers three questions, centered around their goals and projects:
1. What were your notable achievements last week?
2. Was there anything that didn't go smoothly last week?
3. What are your goals for this week?
4. (Optional) Is there anything we should exclude this week?
These meetings will generate conversations that help each employee refine their work. Your managers will know as soon as a project or goal is off-track and make corrections. Most importantly, your team will be able to make decisions to exclude areas of work that don't line up with your annual and quarterly goals.
Review Goals Daily
Finally, as a manager and a leader, what do you do on a daily basis to move toward your goals? I've written about spending a minimum of thirty minutes every day doing strategic work, so I'll offer a brief list of daily rituals:
1. Review your quarterly goals. Ask questions if something seems off track.
2. Review your Project Roadmap. I keep mine in a list that sits above my daily tasks so I am focused on the larger 'arc' of the quarter before I think about what needs to get done in a day.
3. Set one 'Most Important Task' that only you can accomplish that day, and moves you toward your goals. Then get to work on it.
If you put this system in place, a surprising change will happen. Your employees will start talking to you about what they're doing to achieve your goals. Because these goals aren't just yours anymore–you've made them everyone's, adding tangible meaning and efficiency to the way your whole team works.
