Set goals
You’ll never be able to get a group of people going in the same direction if you don’t set the direction for them, so the first thing that is crucial to keeping people aligned is to set goals.
“The key is just set a real clear set of goals and objectives and keep them focused on that, and you continue to say, ‘This is what we do, and this is what we will not do, and this is how we’ll engage with our people, and this is how we’re going to engage with the marketplace,’” Bentsen says.
When it comes to setting clear goals and objectives, it’s often more difficult than we’d like to think.
“We’ve all heard it for years — keep it simple,” Bentsen says. “That’s what we have to do because professional services, we can make it sound awfully complex, but it’s really fairly simple. If we understand our clients’ business issues and help them solve those, it’s not a whole lot more complicated than that. … We just have to keep in front of us a clear understanding of who we are and what we’re not, what we’ll do and what we won’t and how to engage with our clients in accomplishing that.”
Bentsen has to take a look at KPMG as a whole and then break it down from there. For example, as an international organization, the company has goals and objectives it wants to accomplish. From there, the U.S. entity also has goals that it’s looking to achieve. From those goals, Bentsen needs to look at how his regional area can fit into that puzzle of achievement. He then uses those tasks to create goals for his people.
“It starts at the very top with the firm’s priorities and strategies, and it transcends down into the businesses, be it geographic or functional, which then goes down to specific teams and individuals — what is my role, what are the things that I’m expected to do to help the firm accomplish its overall goals?” he says.
A lot of times it may seem overwhelming when you’re determining what goals to set for yourself or your people, but Bentsen says you have to choose the most important tasks to focus on.
“Don’t overdo it,” he says. “One of the real challenges is to keep it fairly clear. … Our leadership team might say, ‘Tim, here’s 47 things we need you to do.’ I cannot focus on 47 things, so it really needs to break down to, ‘Tim or Sue or George, what are the three to five things that you do that will move the business forward?’
“So I would say to keep it really clear, keep it somewhat of an ability to focus on priorities. What are the three to four things that will really make a difference?”
He says there are some ways to know how to choose top priorities.
“One, you have to use your own knowledge and intuition about what’s really important, but I’ll also play that back to my boss, and I would encourage people to play that back to their leaders,” he says.
For example, when you or your people are part of multiple projects, everyone thinks that the project he or she heads is most important, so how do you prioritize when different people think different things are most important? He says that’s when you have to go through those 47 — or whatever your number is — things and look at which items will most affect the business. Then communicate to everyone involved that these are your 47 things, but these are the four that are most important to focus on.
“I’m going to get to the other 47, but I’m going to address these four things first or keep them sort of the No. 1 priority as I work through the overall list,” he says. “Play it back to the people that you work with to get them to agree and understand what some of those competing priorities are.”
