Let employees set goals
The drive to improve a company starts with employees. So Cox’s first step is helping them set challenging, relevant goals.
Instead of jumping straight to how they’ll benefit the company, the goal-setting process must start with the employees. First, ask what they want in their personal lives. Cox even examines their motivators further by having them rate certain achievements, such as prestige, money, power, self-esteem and helping others.
If goals originate from those personal priorities and then spiral outward, commitment is automatic.
“I can’t make the goals for them or they’re artificial,” Cox says. “It starts with what they have said is important to them and questions, more importantly, why is it important?”
Only after you understand the why can you ask how they’ll meet their goals and begin tying personal aspirations to performance targets. For example, an employee might say money is important and he would like to earn $150,000 this year. First, try to uncover why that’s important and why he is setting the goal there. If you know he wants to buy a new house, for example, you can motivate him with reminders of that aspiration.
Next, you address how employees can reach that goal through their job, again posing the question to them first. They’ve already bought in to the end goal because they initiated it. Now it’s just a matter of agreeing on the path they’ll take to achieve it.
Cox takes a chain-link approach by asking employees to specify each step of the way, down to the number of calls they must make, the number of appointments they should set up from those calls, the number of sales they need to land at those appointments and the average amount they will receive from each sale.
When goals are broken down into such specific steps, you will have built-in checkpoints for the future. It will be easier to pinpoint where employees fall off track. If they’re making enough calls and setting enough appointments but still falling short, for example, you know to provide additional sales training.
When you work backward from their ultimate aspiration, they will see how those steps are necessary. If instead you handed them a list of tasks to achieve, that connection might get lost.
“People have to see that the best way for them to manifest their personal goals is for the organization to manifest it,” Cox says. “You’ve got to [say,] ‘This is what you want for your life. Now here’s the vehicle with which to do it.’”
Your job is to keep that vehicle pointed in the right direction: forward. You should provide the push employees need to set challenging goals by reminding them to consider what they want.
“They try to do the thing that’s more palatable to them as opposed to the thing that will get the job done,” Cox says. “That is where the candor comes in. It always comes back to, ‘This is what you said you wanted. Are you willing to pay the price to do that?’”
