5 Building Blocks for Effective Goal Achievement

You often find yourself juggling the dual responsibilities of guiding your teams and staying on track with your personal and professional goals.?

Is there a way to maintain consistent action toward pursuing those goals??

Today I’d like to present to you Marshall Goldsmith's five essential building blocks of discipline from his book “The Earned Life”.

1. Compliance

Compliance means adherence to external rules.

Set clear guidelines and expectations for your team. It creates a consistent and reliable environment where everyone knows what's expected.

Compliance is easy to understand, but so easily failed to follow. Usually people comply when the pain of non complying is bigger than complying.?

It’s better to implement them as “non-resistance” rules.?

• Making sure that everybody is aligned on the benefits of the process.?
• Agree on the most simple way of compliance.?
• Regularly review whether it is actually helping people.
• When not, modify it, or drop it.

2. Accountability

Accountability is all about taking responsibility for actions and decisions – both yours and your team's. It is our response to expectations we impose on ourselves.

This builds a culture where everyone feels responsible for the team's success and learns from setbacks.

Accountability can be private or public. Public works best. It’s good to use them both.

• Encourage your team to set personal and professional goals aligned with the team/company milestones.?
• Regularly review these goals and encourage a sense of personal investment in the product's success.
• Encourage team members to share both their successes and challenges in team meetings.

3. Follow-up

Regular follow-ups mean consistently checking in on team progress and addressing issues as they arise.

It keeps everyone on track and shows that you’re actively involved and supportive.

Follow-ups can be difficult because they introduces the outside coercive force upon people. The advice here is to welcome these follow-ups as supportive gestures.

• Setting up one-on-one meetings with team members to discuss progress and obstacles.

4. Measurement

Measurement involves tracking progress and success through clear, defined metrics.

It gives you and your team tangible goals to aim for and clear indicators of success.

Pay attention to what you measure. As Goldsmith’s points out, measures are the truest indicator of our priorities. What we measure drives what we don’t measure.

• KPIs are important here, but pay more attention to the
• Leading indicators. They are the ones showing the progress now, as opposed to the lagging indicators that show the past performance.

5. Community

This is the bonus ingredient. It is hard if not impossible to achieve goals in isolation. Building a sense of community means fostering a supportive, collaborative environment within your team.

It encourages teamwork, knowledge sharing, and a more enjoyable workplace. It creates reciprocity where “I can help” is a default response in the community.

If you don’t have communities, encourage the creation of them. Think:

• Communities of practice
• Mentorship?
• Sharing sessions
• Team-building activities

These principles don’t work in isolation. Each of them works better in specific circumstances. To achieve the desired results, you need them all.

Give them a try, and you might find them to be effective tools in your leadership toolkit.

Reflect on these principles and see how they can fit into your leadership style. It's about taking small steps towards a more engaged and productive team environment. Who knows? These approaches might just be what you and your team need to thrive.