Facing the Organization’s To-Do List

In the face of trying to tackle our organization’s to-do list and our hyper-focus on multitasking in today’s world, we often attempt to do everything at one time. We focus on “how much” vs. “how well.” We think that more is better. We believe that we “should” be able to accomplish many things at one time.

The problem isn’t that we can’t do more, but that the focus on “more” ironically keeps us from accomplishing more. In Franklin-Covey’s The Four Disciplines of Execution (4DX), they state that the more goals a person or team has to achieve, the less focus they have and that many organizations simply have too many competing priorities or initiatives to be truly effective. Consider this from your own experience. How many times have you tried to accomplish a list of things and succeeded in all or most of them? Chances are that you were less focused, spread too thin, froze, lost track, became overwhelmed, or didn’t achieve the results that you were after.

Now consider the depth and complexity of a typical organization’s to-do list and all of the people, resources, time, and energy that are needed to even complete one item successfully. Yet, when we consider only focusing on one or two things, we dwell on what else we won’t get done or that we’re somehow failing. Then, in hindsight, we don’t recognize how our approach to tackle everything ultimately did lead to failure.

By contrast, if we focus on one or two things at a time, we’re more likely to both do them well and see them to completion. Then, as we come away with a greater sense of accomplishment, motivation, and focus, we can fully dive into the next thing on our list.

Fixing the Weakest Link

Given the many items on our to-do list, how do we decide where to focus? Ultimately, we’ll get the greatest leverage by identifying the weakest link.

The weakest link is typically the item that is causing the greatest negative impact. In an organization, areas of significant impact generally connect to key business areas such as quality, productivity, finances, safety, and infrastructure. In our personal lives, they connect to whatever we most value. Once we identify these areas, often through data and metrics, we can focus on the initiative, process, cultural element, or behavior that most impacts the business area.

One organization I worked with struggled with trying to do too many things at one time. Prior to our work together, they tried to implement numerous processes and goals with no success in any one of them. Leadership was focused on so many things that they had no time for accountability and follow-through. Employees were confused and overwhelmed. The organization didn’t stick with anything long enough to get buy-in, traction, or comprehension. In the face of ambiguity, no one really knew what or how to change to achieve the goals (which weren’t even clearly defined, another symptom of being spread too thin). As a result, almost nothing changed except for higher frustration, lower morale, and increased cynicism.

In our work together, I had them pick one approach with two goals around safety and quality and only focus on that for at least six months. This forced them to become clear and focused. They not only defined the goals with measurable outcomes but also created plans with timelines to achieve them. We incorporated change management approaches that included more hands-on engagement from leadership, training, and quality control checks. Previously, when trying to do too much, they didn’t have time to be strategic, thorough, and intentional. Now they did, and the results showed. Within six months, they achieved an increase of over 33% towards their goals.

Even though fixing the weakest link involves focusing on one or two things at a time, we’re much more likely to solve for what’s most important. With those big rocks taken care of, we can then move on to what’s next on our list. Ironically, in the time it takes to fully complete the initial one or two goals and then complete the next one or two goals, we’ll almost certainly achieve more than if we’d tried to focus on four goals at one time.

For an additional tool to help identify the weakest links, check out Lewin’s Force Field Analysis.

Key Questions to Tackle Your Organization’s To-Do List

• What keeps you caught in the trap of trying to do too many things instead of just one or two at a time?
• What are your top values, and where might the biggest gap be in living in alignment with those values?
• In your organization, what data and metrics can help you identify the weakest links?
• What would it look like to focus on depth vs. breadth as you work towards your goals?
• What helps you maintain focus?

Why You’re Not Getting the Results You Want

Before getting to what you can do to get results, let’s look at what many leaders typically do when they’re not getting results. Some of the more common leader behaviors include:

• Micromanaging and telling the person how to get the result and/or do their job
• Making the same points over and over again, thinking that if they say them enough times (or using different variations), that the person will eventually understand
• Giving poor instructions
• Being too vague about what they want
• Not being available for support or follow-through
• Blaming, shaming, or punishing

I’ve yet to see any of these approaches work, especially in the long-term. Ironically, however, it doesn’t seem to stop leaders from continuing to use some variation or combination of them. Do any of them sound or feel familiar to you? Before continuing, ask yourself which ones you are likely doing when you’re not getting the results you want.

What these approaches mostly boil down to is this: leaders confuse the “what” with the “how” when going after a result.

The “What” vs. the “How”

The “what” is the outcome or result you’re looking for. It could be a finished product, plan, report, or idea. There is typically only one clear “what.”

The “how” is the means for achieving the “what.” It could be anything from research to a series of actions to having conversations. For any given “what,” there are countless “hows.”

The mistake leaders make is that they focus a lot on the “how” with their people and very little on the “what” for themselves. Sometimes, they’re off to the races before they even really know what the “what” is, or if it’s even the right “what.”

The secret lies in reversing the two: focusing a lot on the “what” and very little on the “how.”

Let’s explore.

Defining the “What”

To give yourself and your people the best chance of success, you first have to know and communicate the “what.” This starts with defining a result in the form of a SMART goal, then adding more detail as appropriate.

This is harder than most people think. Often, leaders will present their “what” in ways like:

• “I need you to prepare a briefing on the status of the project.”
• “We are looking for ways to increase revenue over the next quarter.”
• “You need to come up with a goal for your team that aligns with the company’s mission.”

All of the above “what’s” are vague and open-ended. They don’t paint a picture of the actual result you’re looking for. This makes the target very hard to reach. It’s no wonder that your people would keep missing the mark because there is no real mark.

Unfortunately, the deeper problem isn’t that leaders can’t articulate the “what,” often because they aren’t clear themselves on what the “what” actually is. So, before even starting to engage your people in going after a result, it’s crucial for you to get very clear on the “what,” make it into a SMART goal, and then add as much detail as possible to that anyone could easily understand the result. Even better, write it down and ask people to state the “what” in their own words to confirm understanding, or adjust as needed.

Creating the “How”

After you have put it in the effort to come up with a clear “what,” the next step is sharing it with your people. Unfortunately, what happens next is that leaders botch the “how.” They either micromanage, aren’t available for support, or critique the person or their actions. Ultimately, they don’t give the other person ownership of the “how.”

This is where the rest of the secret comes into play: After you communicate the “what,” let your people own the “how.”

Giving ownership doesn’t mean that you go away and let them sink or swim. It means that you engage appropriately based on your people’s needs using situational leadership. From there, use these critical elements to let your people own the “how”:

1. Accountability: create a rhythm of accountability to check-in, gauge and review progress, and course-correct. Don’t wait until it’s too late to check-in and discover the team is way off base. Again, course-correcting doesn’t mean getting into the “how” – it means restating the “what” and pointing out discrepancies between where they’re at and where you want them to be. Then, let them own the process for making the necessary adjustments
2. Coaching: ask questions and provide feedback to help your people develop their “how.” Simple questions like, “What are your next steps?”, “Where are you stuck?”, and “What approaches do you think are best?” get them thinking about critical elements without you needing to give them your own solutions.
3. Support: find out what they need from you along the way. Be as available and accessible as they need you to be (when in doubt, ask them).

I once coached a leader who actually had a good “what.” His team, however, wasn’t getting the right result. The leader’s approach was to keep restating the “what,” which, after several weeks, wasn’t making any difference except that everyone was becoming frustrated.

In this case, the “what” wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they needed more help around owning the “how.” This is especially true in organizational cultures with a very top-down approach because people are used to being told what to do instead of owning the solutions. In this case, they needed more help with learning how to own the “how” in the form of more open dialogue, mentoring, and bouncing around ideas. Unfortunately, the leader wasn’t skilled in these approaches, which is why he kept resorting to the only tool he knew.

With coaching, the leader began to learn these skills and use them with his team. He made time for more in-depth conversations to find out why they were struggling, provide more detail around the result, and ask some questions to help bridge the gap. Almost instantly, things began to click for the team and they quickly discovered the way forward.

Mastering the “What” and the “How”

Letting go of the “how” can be hard, especially when others take a different approach than you. Again, ultimately it’s the result that matters, not how you get there. If you want your people to succeed, if you want them engaged, and if you want them bought-in, letting them own the “how” while you own the “what” will give you the best chance of getting the results you want.

A Look Inside a Typical Goal-Setting Conversation

From the coaching sessions I’ve observed in the workplace, goal conversations typically go something like this:

Supervisor: “What’s something you’d like to work on as a goal?”

Direct Report: “I’d like to get better at managing my time.”

Supervisor: “OK, that sounds like a great goal! I do think you could do better at completing your work on time. I think you should aim to get all your paperwork turned in by Friday.”

Direct Report: “OK, I can do that.”

Supervisor: “Perfect! Nice job.”

All right, so it’s better than nothing – at least there was a conversation in the first place, which is all too rare. However, let’s look at a few missing elements:

• The supervisor didn’t ask any questions to clarify why this goal was important to the direct report
• The supervisor didn’t ask the direct report to be more specific about what managing their time would look like, or what the end result would be
• The supervisor jumped quickly to a solution, without digging deeper and letting the direct report come up with their own solution
• There was no way to measure the goal
• There was no plan to follow up

Setting Your Own SMART Goals

As I mentioned in another post, setting SMART goals is a lot harder than many people think. Before attempting to coach someone to set a goal, it’s crucial to know how to set SMART goals for yourself. In addition to my previous article, here is another article by Mindtools on the basics of SMART goals. Identify several goals and practice making them SMART. Then, ask trusted colleagues or supervisors for feedback.

It Takes Time to Create SMART Goals

You’ll have conquered a significant part of the battle by getting good at setting your own SMART goals. It will be easier to coach and lead your direct reports to create their own because you’ll know what the end result should look like.

Having worked with hundreds of people to create SMART goals, setting a really strong SMART goal can take between 30-45 minutes. And that’s just for your own goals. Given that you’ll be helping someone else come up with one, plan on 45 minutes to an hour. So, be patient. As Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about it and five minutes thinking about solutions.” This also applies to goal-setting: creating the right goal makes achieving it that much easier.

Coaching Others to Create SMART Goals

Now that you understand how to set goals and are prepared to take the time to get it right with your direct reports, let’s look at three key coaching principles that will help:

Let Your Direct Report Own the Goal: This isn’t your goal – it’s theirs. Help them come up with something that’s meaningful for them to achieve. This will increase both their buy-in and ownership of the goal. In turn, this increases the likelihood of them reaching it and wanting to go further.

Ask Powerful Questions: Help the direct report go deeper by asking questions. Why this goal? How can they be more specific? What would it mean to them to achieve the goal? What is under their control? Here are some questions I frequently use when coaching people to set goals:

• What’s an area of improvement that, if changed, would have the most impact on your success?
• What would I observe you doing when you’ve reached the goal?
• If your goal involves impacting something outside of yourself (other people, production, process improvement, etc.), what would change? What would we observe? Most importantly, what would YOU have to do to create that impact?

Plan for Follow Up: After the direct report comes up with a SMART goal, create a follow-up plan. How often will you check in with each other? What metrics will you use to track progress? How will you support the direct report? Accountability is key. However, remember that it’s their goal, not yours. Your job is to support, encourage, and help course-correct as needed.

Keys for Success When Setting Goals

Remember to take as much time as you need to get to the right goal. If you’ve mastered setting SMART goals for yourself, you’ll know the feeling when you nail it. Look for that same light to go on in your direct report. It will take some time, but the right goal goes a long way. The best part is that once both of you get the hang of it, creating future goals will be a snap.

Yet, after years of receiving countless eye rolls, brush offs, and scorned looks, what I’ve found is that, when asked, very few people are actually able to create a SMART goal. Sure, they’ll say they can. They’ll act as though they’re so simple a first-grader could do it. They’ll roll their eyes. But, when I ask them to create one on their own? Let’s just say that actions speak louder than words (or eye rolls).

The SMARTer the goal is, the better the chance of reaching it. Unfortunately, many people don’t set themselves up for success because they aren’t clear enough about what they want, don’t know how to recognize if (or when) they achieve it, or treat the goal like a chore instead of something that matters to them.

Here are three common ways that people fail to make goals SMART and how to turn them into SMART goals (we’ll use the example of an un-SMART goal, “Improve meetings by having a clear agenda,” to illustrate):

Not being specific enough

This doesn’t just apply to the “S” – it applies to all five elements of SMART. Creating a proper SMART goal requires laser-sharp details such as numbers, dates, who, when, where, and what. If someone else can’t identify at least three of these details when reading your goal, then it’s probably not SMART.

Notice the difference if we apply specificity to the goal for our meeting: “By September 7, 2019, I will lead five consecutive meetings with an agenda that contains items to review, allotted times for each item, meeting roles and responsibilities, and distributed at least 48 hours before the meeting.”

Being process-oriented instead of outcome-oriented

Many people focus on how to achieve the goal instead of defining the goal. The goal is the outcome, not the process of getting there. If you fast-forward to your “Timely” (which, if you’ve been specific enough, will be an exact date down to the day), ask yourself:

• What will have changed?
• What will the outcome look like when you have arrived?
• What differences would someone else observe compared to when you started?

Going back to our goal for meetings, guess what? Even after being specific, the goal isn’t yet SMART because it focused on the “how” (agenda) instead of the “what” (improve meetings). Let’s assume your real goal was to end meetings on time, and the agenda was a “how.” A more direct SMART goal could be “I will have five consecutive meetings start and end on time by September 7, 2019.” Notice how this already sounds clearer and more powerful than the previous version.

Choosing an uninspiring goal

People often view setting goals as a box to check or something they “should” do. Yet, when I ask people about something they truly want or desire, they start to get excited. Instead of thinking of a goal to pick, simply think of something you really want. Consider:

• What change would make my organization (or life) better?
• What’s an area of my organization (or life) I’d like to improve?
• What’s something I truly want?

Returning to the goal for our meeting, it is only truly “Relevant” if it’s something we desire. If starting and ending meetings on time is ultimately what you desire, then great – you’re all set. However, if what you really desire is more engagement, timeliness could just be another “how” that supports that greater goal. Instead, consider aiming for something like: “By September 7, 2019, I will have five consecutive meetings in which we identify two ideas on how we can increase productivity.”

Notice how the goal is still clear and powerful, but also feels more energizing and likely “Relevant.” You’ll know your goal is SMART because you, and other people, will literally feel the difference when it’s read aloud. Again, it’s not as easy as many people think. Coming up with a SMART goal often takes time and experimentation. Be patient – the results will be worth the effort.

One last note: the previous examples don’t imply that we can only have one goal or that we should shun strategies. In fact, after you nail the SMART goal comes the fun of strategizing how to get achieve it, which I’ll cover in other posts.

Want feedback on your SMART goal? Put it in the comments below to get some feedback!