Creating and Achieving goals

For leaders to achieve meaningful impact over a long period of time, it is essential to define clear goals, have a structure to prioritize and measure and invest in their team to scale up the impact. This is article 6 in the leadership series (summarized from The Manager's handbook). You can find the article 5 on distributed teams and remote work here.

Clarity

• A lot of organizational churn emanates from lack of clarity and/or prioritization thereof. It leads to confusion, duplicate efforts, negative morale and inefficiency.
• Clearly defining, capturing and sharing the goals will set up the team/org/company for success and will also be a bedrock for accountability.
• It helps everyone understand what is important, who is doing what and are they getting it done.
• If this is not done well, leaders/managers often have to keep sharing the same information over and over which takes time away from doing more meaningful things.

How can leaders/managers help provide clarity?

They must help their team answer following questions -

• Does the team know how to prioritize and ensure what is being worked on is the most important thing. Ideally, you want your team to figure that out own their own and you lean in as needed.
• Does the team understand dependencies and what is waiting on their work to be done?
• Do they have the right support and resources to get their work done?
• Do they understand how their work enables the overarching goal?
• Do you know why the work and what they are building matters for the users and the company?

Pyramid of Clarity

There are several ways an org or company can work to define clarity and share that with the team. Pyramid of clarity is wonderful framework that helps define and clarify long term aspirations built on top of short to medium term goals. Teams can choose whatever framework best serves their need and org size, but having some sort of system is necessary. It helps team stay on the same page, and do not pay the price to constantly do back and forth communication.

Mission

Great missions are simple, aspirational, usually one liners without using the word "and", something that you live and breathe and can get the whole company behind. Each org or team can derive their own mission statements from their company's. Some great examples of company missions -

• Stripe: Increase the GDP of the internet
• Airbnb: Belong anywhere
• Google: Organize the world's information
• LinkedIn - Connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful

Strategies

Strategy is the "how" of achieving your mission. Strategy captures the broad strokes of how you are going to achieve something. It is directional. It is not too specific or detailed to list tasks. Examples -

• Build the best and friction free payments product for SMBs
• Attract the best talent and nurture them
• Create the best ecosystem for content creators and provide tools for their growth

Objectives

Objectives are more tactical and can be thought of as milestones along the way of achieving the strategy and ultimately the mission. Each objective should ladder up to one of the strategy. If that is not happening, take a pause and tweak as needed.

Clear separation between objectives helps team not forget some sub-bullets, helps the team create accountability. Objectives should be realistically achievable 4-6 quarters, otherwise break them down and everyone's work on the team should be to fulfill one of the objectives. Lastly, we should also have clear ownership (usually executives or Director+) of objectives and define key results to measure against them. Examples -

• Create a predictable process to develop and deploy code
• Create tools to help our sales team be effective
• Create a highly collaborative, inclusive, and remote-friendly culture

Key Results

Key results helps the team quantify and see how you are doing against your objectives. They should be clearly defined, have an owner, should be quantifiable and objective, be a number rather than a YES/NO. Examples -

• Grow active users to 50 Million by September
• Reduce the churn rate from onboarding flow to 10%
• Achieve SMB sales of $100M for current financial year
• Increase retention by 15%

If there are a lot of cross functional teams owning the outcome of an objective, the key results should be owned by the sponsoring executive and teams co-own the work to make it happen.

Also, teams should invest in creating dashboards and automating them as much as possible. The teams should be reviewing the dashboards at least a week, sharing insights and derive energy from it.

Bringing everything together

Once you have the clarity pyramid or a similar framework ready, use a tool like notion, asana or any other tracking tool to make sure that all initiatives are following the pyramid and are tagged appropriately. This will help you and the team to keep the eye on the prize and motivated.

Performance

Managers are responsible for team's impact and hence their overall performance. However, performance can't be forced or controlled. Leaders create performance conducive culture and environment to realize goals, objectives and key results. They need to foster and nurture creativity.

• To help your team perform well, hire people smarter and diverse than you. Don't fall into like me bias.
• Create buy-in and do not dictate. You shouldn’t have to supervise too much.
• Goal setting - should be inspiring, achievable, aligned to team's mission and individual growth, clear and concrete.

Ownership

• Ownership is probably best known tool to great performance. When people know you own something and the team/company depends on you, it takes performance to the next level. A great manager can help the individual/team see this and it makes all the difference. A great manager also creates right incentives and celebrates ownership.

Managing poor performance

As Andy Grove famously quoted, an employee's performance depends on either their motivation or capability. As yourself where does the individual held back and coach them accordingly. Letting poor performance linger on is actually a dis-service to that employee and to your team. It does not serve anyone. Be observant and act swiftly to provide feedback and set goals to improve.

Delegation

Delegation is the art of thoughtfully distributing the work so you can scale and your teammates can grow. In the short term it will create inefficiency but here is where the thoughtfulness comes in. It is worth investing in the for the long term growth and impact.

• Task relevant maturity - Great managers set goals for their team and not define tasks and micromanage. However, everyone is at a different level in the spectrum, so managers need a framework of how much to lean in

How often you monitor should not be based on what you believe your subordinate can do in general, but on his experience with a specific task and his prior performance with it – his task relevant maturity…as the subordinate’s work improves over time, you should respond with a corresponding reduction in the intensity of the monitoring.

Andy Grove, High Output Management

Task relevant maturity (TRM) is very task AND person dependent. A great manager sees this and works to improves it. If someone's TRM is low, the manager helps them by being very structured and manages closely and on the other hand if the TRM is high, manager can set goals and observe from a distance.

• Delegated decision making - Obviously it is very tempting for managers to make the decision, but again this is a missed opportunity for the team to grow in decision making and for the manager to scale. Your objective should be to find the balance of consequences of decision and your level of conviction. In the short term it will be some trial and error, but the below framework applied with awareness will help you make the decision.

(Image credits - The Managers Handbook)