Develop clear goals
Connecting people helps them understand each other and
the business, but employees also need tangible goals they can
work toward achieving.
“If everyone knows where you’re headed, then they can help
you get there,” Jones says. “If they don’t know that, then you’re
going to have a lot of people running where they think they
need to go.”
Jones works with his leadership team at an annual meeting to develop the goals. They spend time
talking about what’s working and what’s
not, what competitors are doing and
where they want to head in the future.
Jones also presents a history of the company’s numbers from 10 years back and
a five-year forecast.
Each department head presents their
own ideas and vision for the department
and business as a whole. These are discussed before a group of common
themes are decided upon to serve as the
goals for the year.
By including the management team in
the process, you get better buy-in.
“If I develop them jointly with our leadership team, value their input, use it and
develop the goals based on what they’re
telling me, because they have expertise in
parts of the business that I don’t, then
there’s much more buy-in and passion
about delivering those goals,” Jones says.
“It’s easy to hand down numbers and say,
‘Meet these.’ That will be a fear-led motivation, but it doesn’t necessarily create
buy-in.”
Jones says it’s important for you to put
your goals into action and discuss them
often, not create them and then ignore
them. The goals at Turner become a template for all communication during the
year, from the round-table discussions to
senior staff meetings.
The goals are also used as a guide to
make the best decisions for the organization and employees.
“It’s so easy, and particularly with my
brain — I run off in a lot of different directions sometimes, and I get excited about a
lot of different things — when I see them
and I want to run down a path,” he says.
“You need a guidepost to say, ‘You know
what, this isn’t fitting in with what we
said we’re going to do this year, so
maybe we need to put it off.’ That’s probably the most helpful thing about them.”
If a goal isn’t met, you need to revisit it
to see why you didn’t meet it. Jones says
not meeting a goal doesn’t mean that it
wasn’t worthy or important, you just didn’t meet it. It probably was important,
you just went the wrong way in trying to
meet it.
“Ideally, your goals don’t want to
change often until you feel like you’ve
got one under control, but you do have
to revisit how we did do, and sometimes
that requires some changes and tweaks,”
Jones says.
