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Goals, Priorities and Resources; where does it all go wrong?

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Spending time developing and clarifying goals is rarely time wasted. Although some of us spend time clarifying our work goals few of us spend time developing goals for other important aspects of our lives – family, community and self. This is one of the reasons why we find work-life balance so hard to achieve. Goals that have been set in our professional lives are not balanced by goals in other areas. The goals that we have set start to demand creativity and resources and before we know it…

Sometimes we set goals that do not provide clear priorities. Or they provide us with so many priorities that we may as well have no priorities at all. Priorities are immediate next steps that will move us closer to our goals. Good priorities are ones that we cannot fail to address. They are so simple and appealing that they cry out for us to get on with them.

But often we forget to allocate time and other resources to our priorities. Without resources to go with them our priorities are worthless. Without doubt time is the most precious resource that we can commit to a priority. I often find myself working with senior managers to clarify goals and priorities (no more than three or four at a time) and then schedule time in busy diaries to spend on them.

By scheduling two 90 minute blocks of time every week to work on priorities many managers ‘magically’ start to make tangible progress towards goals that had previously frustrated them.

Building a High Performing Team – Part 2 – Anticipate Conflicts

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Organisation divides people. It sets up conflict:

  • Who does what? – task conflicts
  • How do we get this done? – process conflicts
  • Who gets what? – resource conflicts

Failure to anticipate, recognise and resolve these conflicts leads to the most dangerous conflicts of all – personal conflicts.

Two people in conflict can usually both make a plausible case for their position. You can of course handle these conflicts just by issuing a decree. However the value of a high performing team, and the measure of your ability to manage it is in getting a decision that has allowed everyone to have their say, for pros and cons to be fully explored and for commitment to making the decision work to be built.

Handled like this, conflicts become powerful team building tools as people start to recognise that the group can make better decisions than any one individual and that no one person has all the information required to make the best decision.

Engaging in Enterprise

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“If you want to reach people no one is reaching you’ll have to do things that no one else is doing. In order to do things that no one else is doing you can’t do what everyone else is doing.”

Craig Groeschel

Craig is a preacher in the US and this quote was in the context of taking the church into the community. However I think it is relevant to the challenge of engaging individuals in enterprise – especially those from the poorest communities.

What are you doing – that no-one else is – that gives you a chance of connecting with potential clients that no-one else is engaging?

Building a High Performing Team – Part 1 – The Same Page

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The first stage in building a high performing team is to get everyone on the same page.

Every team member must master the basics of organisational performance:

  • What are we here to achieve and how do we recognise success?
  • What are our markets and how do we segment them?
  • Who are our customers and what are their buying patterns?
  • Who would we like our customers to be – and why aren’t they buying from us now?
  • Who is our competition and what are they doing?
  • What drives or inhibits our ability to deliver on the mission?

In high performing teams each team member is able to answer these questions – not just from their own perspective but from a collective team perspective. There is a shared analysis that provides a platform for coherent action.

In mediocre teams the members can usually answer these questions from their own siloed perspective. However there is little or no shared analysis and the actions that flow from each silo at best lack coherence and at worst compete with each other for resources and prestige.

Getting everyone on the same page is best done through a group session that has sufficient openness, candour and respect to ensure that the all of the ‘elephants in the room’ are recognised and addressed.