Set goals
Every sports team has its ultimate goal — win the championship — but it has things it has to do to get there, such as win the division, improve scoring, decrease errors and so on. And every company is no different, so you must first know your strategy.
“Leave yourself plenty of time,” Carrabba says. “It takes a lot of time to build your base strategy. … I would say, use fact-based data, not emotion or 30-year ‘isms’ of a company. Challenge the facts and make sure you have them right, and then you do your competitive analysis and move your strategy based on those building blocks.”
Once you know your strategy, then you can start filling in the steps to achieve it by setting goals.
“Build the goals and objectives to align with the strategy,” Carrabba says. “Those goals and objectives come down from the departments themselves.”
He has an executive committee that reports directly to him.
“They cascade the strategy downward through their organizations, and they talk about the goals and objectives they need to achieve so that we can achieve the strategy of the company,” he says.
He has four or five iterations of getting the goals down on paper, and then the goals are published.
“Everybody, here’s the strategy, here’s the large goals and objectives, and then off of that, people h
ave a performance scorecard that has to align with that and has solid metrics, and that alignment goes right down to the front-line supervisors around the world and organization,” Carrabba says.
Supervisors share that scorecard with their employees at the beginning of the year, and each party agrees to it so there are no surprises later on. Then that person is measured on their progress in meeting those goals twice a year, and benefits and compensation are often tied back to that.
“It goes back to the basic premise of you hire smart people, you set the frameworks — the goals, the objectives, the core values of the company — and it’s up to them to perform within those frameworks by building their own scorecard to align and deliver the business goals,” he says.
By doing all of these things, Carrabba has created a strong team environment that has allowed Cliffs to succeed and position itself for the future.
“It’s just strengthened everything,” he says. “If anybody had any doubt, and there’s no reason why they should, the textbook types of things that we’re doing that I described, that you could read in any business manual, we’ve actually applied those in difficult times, and the formula works. They’ve been battle-tested, if you will. We’ve come through them very well and have a very bright future.”
How to reach: Cliffs Natural Resources Inc., (216) 694-5700 or www.cliffsnaturalresources.com
