Episode 5 - Goal Setting for Leaders

In this episode, the hosts discuss the importance of goal setting and targets in organizations. They explain that goals should align with the organization's objectives and be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based (SMART). They also emphasize the role of leaders in setting goals for their teams and ensuring alignment with organizational goals. The hosts discuss the fear of failure and the importance of creating a culture where failure is seen as a learning opportunity. They highlight the accountability of both individuals and leaders in achieving goals. Finally, they mention the importance of setting small, achievable goals as building blocks towards larger objectives. Hello and welcome to another episode of Leave, Follow or Get Out of the Way. Johnny what are we going to be talking today? Today we're talking about goal settings and targets. That's right. Chris, tell us about these goal settings and targets that you want to talk about. It's extremely important and we'll discuss why and you see this in a lot of organizations. It's quite the baseline and I suppose to those new to leadership or even to those who are stepping up into a leadership role, there may be a lack of appreciation for goals and goal setting and we want to explain what the value is and why for an organization and for outcomes of an organization why it's really important. And Johnny, to kind of really seed where we're going with this, a line that resonates with me about goal setting is if you're not going somewhere, you're not going anywhere. So that somewhere being your goal is what we're talking about today. So as what a lot of listeners know, I'm in the Air Force and part of the Air Force and the wider Defence Force for that matter, we do have a routine goal setting activity and I don't know about yourself Johnny but now we have an annual cycle with mid-cycle reviews as a minimum and these are mandated. With your company as Ops Manager, what do you have? Oh, normally we have, after the financial year, so in probably July, we have our yearly goal setting objectives and we also come back with goal setting with our budgets as well because with that direction you need financing to reach the goal. So your targets and objectives have to be met with either growth normally with revenue and how much is that going to cost the business as well. So is it really worth doing that goal if it's not going to grow the revenue? So how much is it going to cost you? Is it going to cost you 100 grand but only grow the revenue by 10%? Is it really worth it? Or is there better goals to achieve? Maybe a cost a bit less but perhaps a bit more. So that's very important stuff of course. You've got to have those, I don't want to use the word ambitions, but aims and perhaps even stretch to ambitions. And the goals you're talking about are organisation goals. Goals of the organisation, the ones that I was referring to and didn't explain, they're personal goals and both equally important. Most organisational goals is how do we grow profit for the shareholders. It's very simple. How do we achieve that? How do we grow the top line, the sales and reduce the bottom line as well? It's very simple. And what strategies do we get around because every day the shareholders need to get rewarded for the amount of capital they've put into the business. Absolutely. And the CEO is the first employee of the business. So his job is to do what the directors and the shareholders want and generate more revenue, more capital. It's kind of a simple thing to do, right? So how do they do that? They've got to look at the market, what's happening in the market, look at what the market is changing and whether it's changing note, changing technology, changing temperament, changing industry, changing the financial environment they're in. So have a look at all that kind of stuff and then go and make some assumptions and try to see if we can get it started. Then obviously from there, break it down into the smart costs. Everybody's got to be accountable, even from a CEO's perspective. Whether the company's reached the target. And then those smart goals get broken down into individual goals for the team leaders and then all the narrative is individual. We were talking before about organizational targets. That's one thing. It's making sure that your team, you're a first line leader, goals are matching the top line and the people below you is also matching that at the top. Everybody's going in the same direction. If there's a misalignment between what the guy is doing and what the organization is doing, you are in trouble because the guy above you is going to say what's happening below you. You've got to follow the path of the big chief because the big chief is controlling all of us. So everyone's individual personal goals are set by their leader has to be in alignment to the overarching organization goal, right? That's right, yes. You've got to be beating the drum at the same beat. Yes, so if you have no organizational goal, then your people are going to go in and do nothing. They're going to wonder why and make assumptions and either leave or go to another organization or start making good or bad assumptions and start fighting for themselves and some chaos starts happening. There's a hierarchy of goals and that's what you've highlighted. Yes. As a leader, it is your job not only to work with your staff and even yourself for that matter, leading yourself in setting up goals that both grow your individuals, stretch their skills, hone their skills, master their skills so that they can better contribute to the overarching organization goal and that alignment is important. Now, you did mention SMART and SMART, a lot of people would have heard it, but for those that are new, it's an acronym, right? So, S, Smart, Specific. S, Specific. M, for Measurable. A, for Achievable. R, for Relevant. And T, for Tireless. So, SMART, your goals should be following this SMART principle. They need to do that in order to be goals that are, in fact, value-adding. Otherwise, if you have a goal that isn't following these SMART principles, right, if they're not achievable, not measurable, not specific, and they're not time-based, I want you to do X, Y, Z by... So, as an example of a SMART goal, for this podcast, we achieved 10 podcast episodes before Christmas, which is measurable, actionable, achievable, relevant, and has a time frame, which is Christmas. And it's specific to what we're doing. Yeah. So, sometimes it's keeping the goal simple and break it down, make it easy for everybody else to put yourself to achieve, right? Yeah. And... And not be afraid of the goal too tight, too. Because a lot of people are scared of it, because it's too big and too hairy. Well... Pardon me. The goals have to be agreed. The person having the goal has to be comfortable that they can give it a go. It can't be too big. That's right. There's always risk of failure of the goal and people receiving, right? Because they know they're not going to meet their bonus or their target, so they're not going to get paid. So, especially when it comes up to deadline day, right? You know, the pressure, the anxiety and everything else. So, some examples, for example, of SMART goals, where I currently am at the moment as a project manager in Air Force, we have a project that is in the process of determining how we transition from what we call a project stage to business as usual. So, our introduction of technology on an aircraft will no longer be us about acquiring and buying and having all these milestone deliverables. It will become the bread and butter every day of running this aircraft. And so, my goals are about a transition, supporting transition planning, which involves working towards having a stack of arrangements with different stakeholders in a document with dates and times. And I can do that. I can capture that arrangement. It's measurable in that, A, you've got these many transition activities. How many have you got left? Tracking that progress. There's a deadline. I need to have it done, you know, in three months' time. It's very specific. Transition to project, to business as usual, with success defined as XYZ. And it's extremely relevant to achieving the organisation's overarching goal of successfully integrating this new technology on this aircraft. And you can kind of see how my personal goal contributes to that higher-order goal through the hierarchy. Now, goal setting, people can be resistant to it as well. There can be arguments to some individuals that don't want to stretch. They love their job, Johnny. They just want to do what they do day in, day out. Have you witnessed that? Yes, I've witnessed that because the risk of stretching is failure. And they don't want to – they're scared that the failure means that they get fined. And if you take away that fear of failure, you get fined. And it's rewarding the attempt more than, you know, getting the booty. Because actually, as a culture, it's the thing that we learn to put in those conditions. That failure is okay, and trying is better than not doing anything at all. And actually doing nothing at all is more of a higher indicator of leaving. Because you're being a resistance to change. That's a good point in that failure to achieve a goal is not – and this has to do with ownership, right? It is not the failure of that individual. It is the failure of both the individual and their leader. And that kind of perspective makes it the leader's responsibility to do whatever they can do to assist them to grow and develop and become successful in that goal. Facilitate success, right? We won't talk about servant leadership principles here yet today. But if your subordinates fail to achieve a goal, and you let that happen without trying to remediate or intervene, then you ought to be accountable for that too. It's your job. Now, one thing I want to really hone in, Johnny, about the importance of goal setting comes down to – I want to say cavemen. Do cavemen do goal setting? I don't know. I don't know. I haven't got an answer to that. However, you were – I do. I live in a cave. You know. I live in a cave. I want to live in a cave. That's the goal. We have. We've evolved from that. Yeah, that's right. There's a video we saw. The first goal of the day is to be making a living. As a routine. As a routine. Yes? You achieve success if you make your bed. Okay? It's simple stuff. And to achieve that, you're going forward. That's simple stuff. Make a routine of winning a million dollars every day. The first goal is to make your bed. Then you have a ritual of being successful because you are always trying to achieve that one thing. And your mindset is gold. Do you think a caveman has gold? I would think so. Because there's animals that have to eat. My goal of the day would be to eat. Kill something. Either pass or fail. It's all about eating, right? If anyone is wondering, the making of the bed goal routine, the important bit is not so much the making of the bed. It's the achieving of the goal. That's right. Our poor listeners are probably wondering, where the hell am I going with this? Caveman? Well, I'm going to go to some interesting texts from a Harvard professor, Daniel Lieberman. Now, he wrote a paper in 2015, which was quite interesting. It talks about humans and laziness, right? This paper is called, Is Exercise Really Medicine? An Evolutionary Perspective. Now, it doesn't sound relevant, but hear me out. He determined through his studies and theorized that it is natural and normal to be physically lazy. And this premise, or the basis of this, is that our ancestors exerted so much energy hunting and gathering. Hunting and gathering that they sought rest whenever they could, right? So it makes sense. Your predispositions to want to conserve energy. If you don't need to work harder, why would you, right? Now, to that end, if you don't set goals that allow people to work harder, not hard, but work harder, or at least achieve milestones or baselines that are good for the organization and stretch the capacities of the staff without breaking them and making them fearful of failure, then they can help combat this human predisposition to be lazy. If we're in an organization where we don't have goals and means to stretch ourselves, then we will do the minimum that is accepted to satisfy immediate management. And I feel it's really important knowing that predisposition to be lazy. It's not harsh. It's a human truth. But we need to work against that because, Johnny, that is contrary to a constructive position for an organization. You can't make money in an organization with a team full of lazy people that are allowed to be lazy, right? Or for us, the warfighter in the defense force, right? If you're lazy, you're not going to be able to win the war. It's just it. It doesn't come down to the strategy, right? If the strategy is wrong, then people will work hard, but not that much, right? And that comes down to good organizational goal-setting. That's right. Or in our case, we love our mission statements, right? Yes, that's right. And just filling them down with smaller mission statements. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's... But, say, you personally, you had a million dollars, or 10 million, 100 million dollars in your bank. Yep. You're not going to work tomorrow, are you? No. What I'll be doing, and this will come down to individuals' mindsets, right? Yep. I'll have my own personal goals outside of work that I will achieve and pursue. There you go. And... Personal dreams, yep. That's right. Yep. So, the best employee, right, is one whose personal goals align perfectly with the purpose of an organization. For example, someone might want to be... Oh, heck, a kid wants to be an astronaut, right? Yep. And he's an astronaut, so he's going to the park to be an astronaut. They're going to support an organizational goal of that? Yes. But you, yourself, you have your own goal and dream. If you had the money in the bank, so you wouldn't become lazy, you would do your thing, right? You wouldn't be against the criteria and stuff. You would be, all right, no, I'm perfect. Where am I going? I'm rather well. I want to tick that box. Let's do that. Let's make a list of 100 things for me to do, and me and Megan, too, and that's what's going to go through. We'll do them one by one. That's what you'd be doing, setting yourself a goal list. All right. Cool. I want to do the opposite and go, I want to go to the pub and drink. And then, you know, yeah. Now. You know, and I get overweight, and I get suicidal, and I get lonely, and then they, yeah. Well, which is an interesting point, Tony, and this comes back, like, people need purpose. Humans need purpose. And if they are too comfortable, like if I had $100 million, I wouldn't be too comfortable because I reckon I've got a stack. I love the challenge of having an attempt to beat the stack of to-dos I have outside of work with $100 million. But if humans are generally not tested or stretched or exert themselves and they are too comfortable, that can lead to a melancholy mindset as well. So in an organisation of staff who aren't stretched, they may or may not, and you might see a trend, they will not necessarily have good morale or good feelings about themselves if they aren't hitting goals because goals don't exist. Right. They don't feel a sense of achievement. Yeah. This is waiting time, killing time. Killing time. And that's, yeah. And no sense of purpose there, right? That's right, yeah. So you just leave because that's the point. Or they may just leave. Or they're trapped in a debt housing, in the ways of prison. They need the money. They need the money to live. So goals not only support the organisation, they help achieve staff to have better morale as long as they've got goals. Yeah. And as long as they can achieve them, right, they can have a sense of fulfilment whilst contributing to the overall organisation. So you as a leader are really taking advantage, and that's probably not a nice way to say it, but you're really leveraging the maximum capability of your staff by setting this. And if an organisation that you're going to be small, big or you're establishing one, you'd be crazy not to. I'd really suggest people look into it with some seriousness. So we've covered up a lot, Jonny, a lot of concepts and, pardon me, smart goals, the natural predisposition for humans to be lazy, and thus why we need goals of a personal level to then satisfy the superior organisational requirements and goals. There's quite a lot to unpack. But you're particularly adamant about this next week's one, which I think will be really interesting. You're talking about... Yeah, pain and happiness as a leader. And you've got to have pain or you're going to have happiness. I guarantee you that. It's like ripping off the band-aid. And it comes down to fear and the courage of leadership, pretty much. Even the sense of the courage you can take for a leader at times. And, again, similar, I guess, to what we said, if you're not setting goals and you're not stretching yourself, there's a lack of fulfilment or a potential lack of fulfilment that could occur and poor morale. Pain and happiness as a leader, the pain in general, can result in that sense of fulfilment once you get out of the hard times because of what you achieve. But we'll look at that next week. For another episode of... Leave, Fight and Get Out of the Way! Thanks for listening, guys.