By Ty Kiisel, Contributor
I am a gadget nerd.
Earlier this year I purchased a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit for my wife. It’s a great gadget. When traveling by car, we just don’t get lost anymore and I don’t need to stop and ask for directions.
In a strange city? No worries, our little GPS unit will get us where we want to go. I think my wife has even named it (although I can’t recall the name).
The trick to getting value out of our little GPS unit is to know where we’re headed before we get started. We simply input our desired destination and we get step-by-step directions on how to get where it is we want to go.
I think the same can be said for leading a team or even an organization.
Where Are We Going?
Baseball great Yogi Berra once said, “You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going ’cause you might not get there.”
Early in my career I worked in an organization where the company’s goals for each month were made public at the beginning of every month. As a result, we all knew what we needed to do to contribute to those goals. We didn’t receive any extra compensation, be we all worked hard to make sure we were doing everything we could to ensure we met our monthly objectives. Of course I can’t speak for all of my colleagues, but I took a lot of personal pride in my efforts to successfully achieve our goals.
The French political thinking and historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.”
In other words, being lucky cannot replace being prepared.
As we start the fourth quarter of 2011, I can’t help but think about my team’s objectives for the coming three months. Like my team, at the beginning of every quarter, teams around the world set goals. These goals are designed to be a reflection of individual contributions to the greater efforts of departments and organizations (or at least they should be). If the workforce understands the major objectives and goals of their organization, individual and team contributions can roll up into those objectives—increasing the odds of success.
A little over thirty years ago, before I began my career, I lived in Japan for a while. Earlier this summer, I had the opportunity to visit Japan again to speak at the PMIJ (Project Management Institute of Japan) Conference held in Tokyo. Needless to say, I was worried that the years would have taken their toll on my ability to speak and read the language. The first couple of times I went to the train station were a little intimidating to say the least. The system has changed a lot since I was there last and I had to find my way around. Of course I’d done it before, so I was confident that I would be OK, but the first couple of times I asked for directions, in the best Japanese I could muster, I was a little concerned about whether or not I would be able to accurately communicate.
Fortunately, it didn’t take long before my confidence in the language began to improve and I was able to get needed directions on what train to take, where to board and the train stop to listen for (it doesn’t hurt that much of the automated directions in Japan are now in English too—although it does take a lot of the fun out of it). However, I still can’t read Kanji very well and by necessity, map in hand, would make a regular visit to the information counter if I got turned around. I’d much rather speak to a real person anyway.
How Does this Relate to Managing Work and Leading People?
When setting goals, it’s important to talk about where we want to go and identify together those things that will contribute to getting there. As my team plans for the coming quarter, we’ll look into our backlog, give a weighting and value to the list and discuss those items we think are most pressing and what we think we can accomplish over the course of the last three months of the year. I make it a point not to micro-manage this process because I believe that those closest to the work really understand it the best—and if given the opportunity, will surprise me with what they are willing to commit to doing if they know why they are doing it, have some control over how they’re going to do it and some influence over who they are going to do it with.
Sometimes, because most of us have worked as team members before we started leading teams and organizations, it’s easy to assume that we know what everyone should be doing, how they should be doing it and who they should be doing it with. It isn’t always as obvious as a belated trip to Japan to realize that our skills are a little rusty and those who know more about the work might be able to help us navigate to where we want to go a little better than we can on our own.
Well-Meaning Leaders Still Make Mistakes
Over the years I’ve experienced many times how well-meaning leaders forget that those closest to the work have the best understanding of what’s needed to be successful. It’s easy to forget the nuances of doing the work, when you’re a step or two removed.
While I was in Japan I was able to connect with some old friends, which was a lot of fun. That being said, I was a little embarrassed about how my Japanese has deteriorated over the last thirty or so years. When I expressed this to one of my friends he said, “You sound just like you did when you lived here.”
I told him that I was disappointed to hear that because I thought I had done much better when I lived in Japan. He smiled and said, “No, you were just as unskilled in the language then as you are now.”
Although he was giving me a hard time, I know the memory of my former language ability is probably a little more generous than reality. Sometimes, when assigning projects to the teams that must work on them, it’s easy to forget what’s really involved in pushing the work to a successful completion, and we make assumptions about what we would do (or have done in the past). What’s more, we often forget to clearly explain why the project is important in the first place.
Where is Your Organization Going?
I remember sitting in a meeting one November listening to a CEO discuss the goals for the year, how they were tracking, and how he thought his company would perform against the goals. Someone in the room spoke up and mentioned that with the exception of those on the executive team, no one else in the room even knew what the goals were. It goes without saying that learning of the goals in November made it difficult for that organization to achieve them all by the end of the year.
My grandmother used to say, “A goal not written down is only a wish.”
Organizationally speaking, goals not shared within the organization are not simply a basket full of wishes—they are a fantasy. Yogi Berra really hit the nail on the head, “You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going ’cause you might not get there.”
Source-1 and Source-2
Ty Kiisel
As a work management evangelist; "accidental" project manager and marketing veteran with over 25 years of experience, I write about project management, leading teams and basically getting work done for AtTask (http://www.attask.com/). I try to make the concepts and best practices of work management accessible to both the expert and novice business leader by weaving personal experiences, historical references and other anecdotes into a regular discussion around effective leadership approaches that maximize the effectiveness of teams.
As a work management evangelist; "accidental" project manager and marketing veteran with over 25 years of experience, I write about project management, leading teams and basically getting work done for AtTask (http://www.attask.com/). I try to make the concepts and best practices of work management accessible to both the expert and novice business leader by weaving personal experiences, historical references and other anecdotes into a regular discussion around effective leadership approaches that maximize the effectiveness of teams.
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