Establishing Long-Term Goals

Establishing Long- Term Goals

In the first 90 days, a key goal is to build personal credibility and create organizational momentum. You do this by securing some early wins. Early wins leverage your energy and expand the potential scope of your subsequent actions.

As you look for ways to create momentum, keep in mind that the actions you take to get early wins should do double duty. Plan your early wins so they help you build credibility in the short run and lay a foundation for your longer-term goals. Specifically, your efforts to secure early wins should (1) be consistent with your A-item business priorities, and (2) introduce the new patterns of behavior you want to instill in the organization. In other words, the process of pinpointing the early wins you want to go after begins with thinking about the longer-term changes you want to realize by the end of your era.

Focusing on Business Priorities and Behavioral Changes

Your long-term goals should consist of A-item business priorities and desired changes in the behavior of people in your organization. A-item priorities constitute the destination you are striving to reach in terms of measurable business objectives. This destination could be double-digit profit growth or a dramatic cut in defects and rework . For Elena Lee, one A-item priority was significant improvements in customer satisfaction. The point is to define your goals so you can lead with a distinct endpoint in mind.

Think about your legacy here. What do you want it to be? What do you want the letter announcing your promotion to your next job to say about what you did in this one? (It is a useful exercise to write this letter. What would you want people to say about your achievements in this job at the end of two to three years ?)

Defining Your A-Item Priorities

How do you select your A-item priorities? You may have no choice ”your boss may simply hand them to you. But if you are able to shape your own agenda, or if think you need to negotiate goals with your boss, these guidelines may prove useful:

• A-item priorities should follow naturally from core problems. Establishing A-item priorities calls for pinpointing the critical areas in your organization that demand attention, as well as those that offer the greatest opportunities to contribute to dramatic improvement in performance. Elena Lee did this when she identified service quality as both a critical driver of performance and a goal that she could rally employees around. She might establish an A-item priority to increase customer satisfaction by 60 percent in one year.

• A-item priorities should be neither too general nor too specific. They should address several levels of specificity so you can establish measures and milestones along the way. For example, if your A-item priority is to condense the time it takes to get a new product from concept to customer, you should develop more specific, measurable short-term steps to mark your progress toward that goal. At the same time, it probably isn t helpful to define daily goals for improving time to market.

• A-item priorities should offer clear direction yet allow for flexibility while you learn more about your situation. The process of defining your A-item priorities is iterative. You need to have a clear set of goals early on, but you must often test, refine, and restate those goals. You have to remain open to adjusting your objectives as you move along. For example, if you decide the distribution system is a key target for improvement, you might make it an A-item priority to get products to customers 50 percent faster than before by the end of eighteen months. This goal is ambitious, so success would have a big impact. But it also is broad enough that you have some flexibility to figure out how and where you will achieve it, as you learn more.

Targeting Behavioral Changes

If A-item goals are the destination, then the behavior of people in your organization is a key part of how you do (or don t) get there. Put another way, if you are to achieve your A-item priorities by the end of your era, you may have to address dysfunctional patterns of behavior.

Start by identifying the unwanted behaviors. For example, Elena Lee wanted to reduce the fear and disempowerment in her organization. Then work out, as Elena did, a clear vision of how you would like people to behave by the end of your tenure in the job, and plan how your actions in pursuit of early wins will advance the process of behavior change. What behaviors do people in your organization consistently display that undermine the potential for high performance? Take a look at table 4-1, which lists some common but problematic behavior patterns, and then summarize your thoughts about the behaviors you would like to change.

Table 4-1: Problematic Behavior Patterns

Lack of . . .	Symptoms
Focus	The group can t clearly define its priorities, or it has too many priorities. Resources are spread too thin, leading to frequent crises and firefighting. People are rewarded for their ability to put out fires, not for devising enduring solutions.
Discipline	People exhibit great variation in their levels of performance. Employees don t understand the negative consequences of inconsistency. People make excuses when they fail to meet commitments.
Innovation	The group uses internal benchmarks to measure performance. Improvements in products and processes unfold slowly and incrementally. Employees are rewarded for maintaining stable performance, not for pushing the envelope.
Teamwork	Team members compete with one another and protect turf rather than working together to achieve collective goals. People are rewarded for creating fiefdoms.
Sense of urgency	Team members ignore the needs of external and internal customers. Complacency reigns, revealed in beliefs such as We re the best and always have been and It doesn t matter if we respond immediately; it won t make any difference.