Are you setting goals for goals' sake?

The answer was yes, I suppose in the case of life and death, I would find a way. So this begged the question – if it’s possible, why not do it?

I might have a goal to grow my company to a certain size, but I also have strongly held values about the way I want my company to be. These two desires may be mutually exclusive. In this case what you get, is not what you wanted, and reaching your goal can ultimately be a Pyrrhic victory. 

This all sounds like “If you build it, he will come” from the movie Field of Dreams, but I’m starting to develop a scepticism about setting goals, and a strong belief in doing the right thing instead.

While it seems intuitive to start the process of setting a goal, then working backwards to discover the actions that are required to achieve it, I’m beginning to wonder if that has a tendency to produce the wrong outcomes. Meeting the goal becomes the goal, and the things that are important become secondary. Conversely, success in what’s important, can be overshadowed by the failure to meet the big and audacious goals that are so popular to set. 

Of course you could argue that this is semantics and that for me, my goal of a sustainable, happy business is not a specific growth target. But good goal setting teaches us that goals should be SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. The goal of a happy business isn’t quantifiable in this way.

I want my life’s work experience to yield a sustainable business that’s built around working with fulfilled and happy people. People who in turn work with our highly satisfied, happy customers that appreciate what we do, because we consistently deliver outstanding value, service and quality. This is a truly wonderful experience to be part of – if you can build it. 

If I start to dissect this I don’t need to quantify it into a set of goals, I just need to build the foundations and structures that make it possible, have the values that hold it together, and just stay focused on that. 

Take for example, quality. Quality is about a relentless focus, about caring each and every day about the product we deliver. It’s about having a culture that is always looking critically at our work and learning from what we do every day. It’s about applying that knowledge to building good processes, and strong discipline to enable us produce quality outcomes on a consistent basis. You just need to run that loop over and over. 

There are quick wins, and there are intractable challenges that grow into long-term projects. Looking into the future, we don’t really know how each incremental improvement in quality will come, or when it will come. However, we do know that if we keep running that loop, our quality will always be better tomorrow than it is today. We don’t need a quality goal; we need a focus and discipline on the loop.

Quantitatively, I’m starting to think of my business more in terms of KPIs – good measurement devices as indicators of how we are doing – our canaries down the coalmine and our high-five moments. Some KPIs have obvious directions to guide us, “this should be going up” or “this needs to be less”. But it’s not a fixation, just valuable information. These KPIs don’t drive us, they keep us informed as we continuously run the loop.

As the adage reminds us: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” My goal for 2012 is to have the faith and focus on doing the right things, that are driven by the right values. Oh, and to also lose some weight...

 

Derek Brown is managing director of Pronto Marketing, and former marketing director of Microsoft (Thailand). Follow his article in the Hi! Managers column every first Friday of the month.