part two
Where Teams Go Wrong

chapter 5

Misplaced Goals, Confused Objectives

The last three chapters were about valid team objectives having to duke it out with the objectives of individual team members. This chapter is about team objectives that are suspect all by themselves.

How many times have you heard colleagues say this: “The boss has given us such unrealistic objectives.”

They are really saying one of three things:

1.They don’t believe in the outcome. The boss is famous for his five-year plan. But no one has paid any real attention to it in, oh, five years.

2.They don’t believe the outcome is reachable. Maybe the boss is blowing blue smoke again, pulling figures out of a hat. Worse, maybe she read an article about “stretch goals,” and has the bright idea of stretching us to meet the goals.

3.They can’t figure out what the boss really wants as an outcome. Teams fail when their reason for being is unclear. The goal is expressed complicatedly, ambiguously—in dollars, in eliminated defects, in market share, in new customers. How do you focus simultaneously on four focal points?

If your team doesn’t know where it’s going or what it wants the outcome to be, your best remaining option is to have everyone fall to their knees and beg the stampede to step lightly over you.

Barring divine intervention, however, your next best option is to achieve clarity on the outcome you’re after, such as:

“Our desired outcome is to create a leakproof disposable diaper before the snow flies.”

“Our desired outcome is to have fewer customers make remarks about our mothers.”

“Our desired outcome is to be so good at everything we do that we drive our competitor to existential despair.”

Leaders, Visions, Goals

The three objectives above are admittedly flip. But they have the virtue of describing not just what the outcome is, but how you will know when you have achieved it, and what it will feel like. They have a human sound, which is good, because teams are made up of human beings.

To understand the length, breadth, depth, and pH of the pickle a team without clear objectives is in, you must understand the inner nature of a goal or objective. The soul of the goal, if you will. Like a cinder kept alive to kindle new fire, the soul of the goal is kindled and communicated by the leader.

A goal is not a number. Wm. Edwards Deming, who knew more about human motivation than a boatload of organizational behaviorists, was very clear, in his famous Fourteen Points, that numerical targets and quotas do more damage than they do good.

A proper goal hones in on what we have been discussing—the natural disposition of people to work together on teams. It begins with the vision of the leader that a task is desirable and performable, in human terms. The leader may be a member of the team or a core of members within the team, or may even function primarily outside the team. But he or she (or they) must have credibility within the team.

The vision is translated by credible leadership into a concrete aspiration. Concrete means real, visionable, something that, when you hear it, you can almost taste.

John F. Kennedy said, “We will put a man on the moon.” That sentence explains almost everything you need to know about leadership and goals. It is clear. It is significant. And it engages.

A leader whose goals are constantly shifting is no leader at all. A stated goal stabilizes and concentrates the vision of the leader into something that is clear and concise, and that represents a continuing vision of what the team hopes to achieve together. A good vision is an act of faith that a difficult, worthwhile goal can be achieved.

If the goal is clear enough and engages people’s hearts as well as their minds, the goal itself assumes much of the burden of leadership. It’s so good it lives on its own. It becomes a continuing corrective against distraction, confusion, and decay.

Most goals aren’t that good, though. “We will put a man in a station wagon” is clear and performable, but lacks oomph.

If you work in a big company, in the middle somewhere, a team goal is not the same as a strategic goal. Strategic goals properly call for ambitious, broad, long-range achievement. Team goals tend to have a more modest ring to them. (If they don’t, conduct the chew-check: check to see that the team isn’t biting off more than it can chew. If it isn’t performable, it’s not a good goal.)

A good team goal has several parts:

a task—what are you doing;

a promised limit of what you’re doing—unlike the enchanted brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, you know when to stop;

a promised level of performance—you’ll spare no expense; you’ll stick to a tight budget; it will be world-class work; “good enough” is good enough;

a deadline—a sunset clause, after which even the best coach reverts to the role of pumpkin; and

the definition of the customer—who all this effort is for.

As a final thought, remember that actions toward outcomes don’t happen in a vacuum. Large organizations with lots of teams have lots of objectives bobbling about. The death knell for teams in such companies is when the objectives of all the teams never fit together into a grand uber-objective.

It’s like the cartoon of the two railroad companies meeting in Utah to drive the golden spike, and discovering they have laid different gauges of track. If team objectives don’t fit together, somebody screwed up big-time.

Goal Wars

Harvey recalls an experience from a few years back, at one of the larger and more prestigious bomb factories in our nation, back when we knew who the enemy was. Trouble was brewing because of a lack of linked goals. The company had just won a contract for an advanced weapons system. This weapon was so complicated, so sophisticated, so cutting-edge, that making it required seven separate teams—each team working on a different part of this multi-tank-killing minirocket, code-named Fluffy.

In theory, Fluffy had enough punch to cause a twelve-story building to disintegrate. The potential of the system out on the battlefield was mindblowing. Equally mindblowing, however, were the conniption fits the seven teams experienced trying to design and assemble a prototype.

The problems began at the goal stage. Thrilled with the technological opportunity at hand, the seven teams huddled separately and worked on their end of the problem. Management endorsed this idea, likening it to the skunkworks model used to great success elsewhere. Like a scavenger hunt, each team was instructed to pool its best ideas and meet at the end of a two-month period in an idea-sharing progress meeting. As the date drew near there was a sense of excitement in the air. That morning the room was atingle with engineerial delight.

Each team got to report on its part of the project to date. The first team got up to speak and with great pride explained their innovative approach to opening the flaps covering the launch tube. As they spoke, there was a rumble from some of the other teams. One person stood up and yelled at the speaker, “You idiot, if you do that, your flaps will cover up our sights and we can’t see what we’re shooting at.” Another team chair chimed in, “Our electronics array hasn’t been designed to do that!” Etc., etc., etc.

Remarkably, the meeting went downhill from there. Recriminations, reprisals, faces slapped, duels arranged at dawn in the marshy area down by the bullet casings shed. Months of product development time and many millions of dollars were lost because of unlinked goals. It took an additional two months for respective team members to overcome their anger and multidirectional finger pointing.

Lack of goal integration caused their project to… disintegrate.

Goal Sadism

Another team excess to guard against is goal sadism. There are various degrees of rigor you can expose your team to. On one end of the spectrum you can make life too cozy for your team. Peel their grapes, talcum their bottoms, etc. But pampering’s no good—teams thrive on a certain degree of anxiety.

The opposite extreme of pummeling teams to perform, however, can be horrific. We have known managers and team leaders who were psychopathic in their willingness to cause team pain.

Take the phrase “stretch goal.” It is a perfectly legitimate idea, simply an ambitious goal you set for organizational performance. Motorola’s goal of Six Sigma errorlessness (limiting quality defects to 2 or 3 per million outputs) was a stretch goal. Difficult, but as Motorola has proven, achievable in some areas without massive bloodshed.

But there are individuals out there who focus not on what is achievable but on how much it stretches the team. In their minds a stretch goal would be a fivefold increase in team productivity. It was painless for them to utter the goal at a team meeting, but oh, the pain it caused team members in the year that followed.

We knew a manager in Minnesota who joked about his motivational methodology. “I chase ‘em up a ladder, then I kick it out from under ‘em.” Nice guy.

Larry Bossidy of Allied Signal created a famous metaphor of the “burning platform.” Until people are informed there is a crisis (like, your oil platform is on fire) you cannot get them to do the difficult thing (jump overboard and swim to safety). It is a great metaphor for understanding motivation. But some managers take it to the next stage, and are setting their platforms on fire in order to chase teams over the edge.

It should be every organization’s goal, in as long a term as possible, to survive. But manufacturing short-term crises that kill today’s teams in order to achieve a long-term goal—well, it isn’t very nice.

The Road to Nowhere

Teams seeking to create trust and instill a sense of strong leadership must clearly define and then link their objectives. This isn’t a maybe, it’s a you have to. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

No two roads are alike, of course. When a team is assigned a task, it feels lucky to be placed in an orderly environment. It’s more pleasant cruising down a four-lane highway than warily hacking a footpath through the jungle. But many assignments put teams squarely in the jungle—creating something from nothing; creating (and this is often worse) something from something; building bridges between different ideas, cultures, products, teams; cleaning up the messes previous teams made.

Work is often confusing, cluttered, and inconvenient. And people are always people, with all the variation and inconsistency that humanity implies.

Given the inherent disorder of most team tasks, teams must insist on diamond-like clarity at the onset of a mission, with a hard-edged understanding of the impending task.

Goal-setting by the Spoonful

Goal-setting often fails because people get hung up on the long-term aspect of the primary goal. “Retake Granada,” was an overarching goal that took Spain 500 years. It might have been achieved quicker had El Objecto Mejor been broken down into component minigoals from the start.

That is what proper goal-setting is—you start with a grand supergoal, that the entire team is striving for, and then you chart a path toward achieving it, with team members assigned to a series of linked, doable, short-term steps.

Successful teams live and breathe in the short term. That is where the action is, and that is where intelligence is put to work. They may plan longer term, but they act for the present.

They also concentrate on a few goals at a time. New teams are famous for declaring 30 goals or outcomes when they first come together. Some organizations require the creation of a list of every action a person is to perform during the next performance cycle—maybe a year, maybe longer. This is what passes for long-term vision in many organizations.

The problem is that when confronted with a list of 20 to 30 objectives, the tendency of most sentient beings is to go into shock and do nothing for a period of recovery. The human brain is a dazzling organ, but not even people with brains in good working order can work on more than two objectives at the same time.

Goals that are not being worked on at present tend to gnaw at one’s mental innards. This decreases productivity. We may state this as a rule: the more goals and objectives a team is handed, the worse its performance will be.

Despite master plans to the contrary, things have a way of changing. Allow for flexibility as time passes, for the list of goals and objectives to be amended as new knowledge leads to new understanding. One of the horrors of organizations is seeing an individual confronted by a manager for the noncompletion of goals that anyone who has been paying attention knows are no longer relevant.

Goal Sludge

The short term is where it’s at. Not “Retake Granada,” but “Start with that blue row-house on Seville Street, the one with white shutters.” Focusing on the doable allows a team to achieve instant, perfect understanding, and to strike quickly, like commandos.

So what constitutes short?

We begin by proposing task durations much shorter than you may currently use as benchmarks. We sort all goals and objectives into short-, mid-, and long-term timeframes. Short means less than one month (like next week); mid means one to three months; long means three to six months.

So much for the vaunted 100-year plan. But that is just the point—anything beyond six months takes you into the realm of pipe dreaming and strategic planning. Too many things can go wrong, or change. One little bend in the river can wipe out months of work, and devastate morale.

If you have a goal pushing beyond the six-month limit, break it down into shorter-term tasks that fit into these three timeframes. That way the team is continuously knocking down fresh goals and objectives, experiencing successes, staying on track, moving quickly, and raising team motivation.

Commando teams are small, single goal, and short term. When their goal is accomplished, they disband back into the larger organization, only to be regrouped again into other short-term action teams.

Once a team lists its goals and objectives and sorts them into the appropriate timeframes, the team must then prioritize the short list. If a task doesn’t appear on the high-priority, short-term goals/objectives list, the hell with it. Leave all the rest behind.

As time passes and midterm goals/objectives move into the short period, reprioritize the new short list. If the goals/objectives at the bottom of the priority list are still there when the team reprioritizes, then repeat what you did before—ignore them. Under no circumstances are you to complete these tasks. You are hereby forbidden even to worry about them—which you might well do without our strict instructions.

There is an obscure phrase in psychology for the tension caused by unresolved, uncompleted tasks—the Zygarnic Effect, after Bluma Zygarnic, the Brooklyn psychologist who first described the phenomenon. Uncompleted tasks slowly paralyze individuals and teams—until the simple act of getting together to discuss progress looms insurmountably.

The result of uncompleted tasks is: goal sludge. Goal sludge is not bad or evil, but it engenders anxiety and lassitude. It must be dealt with, and quickly. An unfulfilled goal can be given a higher, more emphatic priority. It can be allotted a longer time horizon for completion, or a shorter one, if that helps. It can be “shared” with people who have more expertise or energy or freshness for the task. It can be delegated to someone else—fresh horses! It can be outsourced completely—“Handle it!”

But the sludge must be disposed of somehow. Or else it lies there, in everyone’s sight and nostrils, stinking in the desert sun, with tomato plants sprouting out of it.

Extricate yourself from its sludgy power, however, and the difference is day and night. It’s like freeing up a gigabyte of disk space, or like taking a two-week vacation at home. Thank God almighty, you’re free at last.

The Final Element

One final element is critical to good goal-setting—passion.

The world is full of boring visions. Whole organizations drag themselves from quarterly report to quarterly report pursuing them. It is as if the leadership has read all the right books, and made up its mind not to make any obvious mistakes, but neglected to make the goal interesting in any way.

A dull goal lacks originality, personality, sizzle. A good goal goes beyond setting a numerical target or quota, and beyond some lame mission-statement language about becoming world-class, or best-in-breed, or worm-free, or whatever the fad phrase in the planning community is this week.

People want to be turned on by their work. A good goal gives them something to respond to. Something to buy into and claim ownership over. When a goal is really good, it doesn’t just belong to you. A transformation occurs, and you belong to it. It makes you proud and humble, both at the same time.