How I'm setting goals for my team

The other day, I was researching the criteria a trade organization uses to rank the best-managed publicly-traded companies in the U.S., and some of the metrics caught me by surprise. For example, the ranking assigned higher scores to businesses that were:

• Hiring workers in specific fields like drone development and autonomous vehicle production. Those who were not developing drones received a lower score.
• Demonstrating a higher number of patent applications. This category didn’t consider if these patents ultimately yielded profitable products; instead, it looked at innovation from a strictly quantitative point-of-view.

Given this narrow focus, what is a leader to do? Should every manager start looking for reasons to start developing drones, even if there isn’t a clear business need for your business, today or tomorrow? Of course not.

While I think rankings and other third-party recommendations can be helpful to review, I want to underline one key point: leaders should set the right goals for their organizations. It’s easy to get caught up in rankings like these. After all, what leader wouldn’t want his or her company to be one of the so-called best managed companies? But each of us is blessed with the mind, spirit and free will to blaze a different trail if that’s the right thing to do. It’s incumbent on us to guide and empower our team members to use good judgment – informed but not overcome by external accolades – and set goals that deliver the best-possible outcomes for our stakeholders.

As the Chief Operations Officer at Northwestern Mutual, here is where I am focusing:

Investing in strategic clarity and evaluation. Most managers are probably familiar with the “laundry list.” When a manager asks a team or individual about performance, the “laundry list” is the litany of tactics and projects under way – typically shared to prove that hard work is being done. I always chuckle when I hear this list because in my professional experience, almost everyone I’ve encountered works hard. That’s why my performance conversations are nearly never about effort or activities. I focus on outcomes and alignment: did we see a sufficient return for our investment in time and talent?

Here’s the bottom line: Every leader must meticulously define a team’s “why,” before assessing “what” they do.

As a leader at Northwestern Mutual, I believe my mission is to eliminate uncertainty within our teams, reframe people’s roles, and deliver stronger, more strategic and tangible results to our clients and financial advisors. Outcomes are my paramount priority, and finding the competitive advantages that are too often nested in ambiguity is key.

Today, our results are directly driving value to our policyowners. For example, in 2020, we set a goal to streamline processes and reduce cycle times so our financial advisors could process prospective client applications faster. Those efforts enabled us to process an unprecedented number of insurance and investments applications. We helped our company have its best, most-productive year in its 164-year history. Because of our focus, Northwestern Mutual welcomed more new clients than ever before, sold a record level of life insurance policies, and processed unparalleled volume in our Investment Products and Services business.

We delivered these results by partnering across the company on one set of goals. Our guiding principles are to help Americans achieve financial security and deliver an experience that was as efficient and relevant as possible. Strategic clarity will continue to be our differentiator in 2021 and beyond.

Investing in capabilities without changing our core. Implementing organizational change is something that leaders are called upon to do. But more often than you’d think, leaders are not able to drive long-lasting cultural and organizational change because they lose focus or fail to build the structures necessary to drive outcomes over the long-term.

That’s why our team is doubling down, with an even greater focus on operational discipline, digitization, and automation in the months ahead. Northwestern Mutual is known in our industry for having the lowest operating expenses as a percentage of life insurance premium. Since our early days, we’ve believed we can win in the marketplace if our highest priority is delivering maximum benefits to policyowners. Keeping expenses low enables us to pay out more to participating policyowners in dividends – and those savings really add up. This year, we expect to pay $6.2 billion in dividends to our policyowners, a new record, and more than twice the amount our nearest competitor will provide. With most of 2021 still ahead, I’m convinced that we can operate even more effectively and drive increasingly exceptional outcomes for our clients and advisors.

Investing in people. After goals and strategies are set, a leader’s job is to get out of their team’s way – and help clear the road of any obstacles. 

The way many companies responded to the pandemic was a great example of this mentality. At our company, we prioritized people’s health and safety, helped them transition to remote work, and regularly checked in with our teams to ensure that everyone felt supported and engaged. That kind of leadership must continue post-COVID. We need to keep setting and meeting goals for employee engagement and organizational health.

For my team, that means focusing less on the inputs and more on the outcomes, and continuing to provide our people with the flexibility they need to balance work and life.

The pandemic has also helped advance a culture of transparency and openness. We must continue help our teams understand the full picture and encourage questions. For example, when we talk about efficiency, it means automating low value work and shifting our people towards more value-added work that will be more engaging and impactful. It also means investing in strategies that will simplify how we carry out our responsibilities so that we can continue to serve our customers.

If any of these outcomes and strategies enable us to win third-party accolades, that’s wonderful. But if we end up losing an award to a company that spent more time building drones and less time delivering results to customers, I can still sleep easy, and our clients will, too.

How do you go about setting goals? How do you avoid assigning too much prominence to “expert” third-party advice, and instead develop the goals and objectives that best suit your organization? Let me know.