Get goal-setting consensus
If you wait until your goals are set to start communicating, it’s too late. At least bring in your leadership team to collaboratively develop a path.
Miller gets his team together annually to set goals. JE Dunn uses a balanced scorecard focused on four areas: customer satisfaction, financial metrics, standard operating procedures, and employee growth and learning. By relying on corporate parameters, they begin the goal-setting process on common ground.
Even then, landing on the same page can be a struggle.
The first step is creating an open environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing.
“You have to prove that everybody has a say in it,” Miller says. “You have to demonstrate that, and people will eventually follow because it works.”
Do that by providing examples of other people’s ideas you’ve implemented.
“Everybody on our team has come up with ideas that we have incorporated,” Miller says.
“When we take those ideas and we turn them into reality, everybody sees it and says, ‘Gosh, it really does work. I can provide an idea and we’ll really do something about it.’ That’s what I mean by demonstrating that it works: You make sure people know where the idea came from. It’s not my idea; I was just smart enough to incorporate it.”
Once ideas start flowing, keep debate healthy. Miller has a systematic way for doing that.
“You’ve got to have a time limit,” he says. “We try to limit our meetings to an hour. If an item gets out of hand, you just have to step in and stop it and regroup later. If you see there’s progress being made, you keep it going. If you see you’re just beating up on the same issue and you’re not making any progress, then you’ve got to cut it off. You’ve got to think about it; you’ve got to come back in a smaller group or you’ve got to come back with a better idea.”
For example, because JE Dunn does diverse types of work, a common debate with Miller’s team is deciding which projects will best utilize available resources. When he realized they were going back and forth unproductively, he decided to develop a more black-and-white process of matching their strengths to a project’s needs.
“As opposed to just having one of these ferocious debates, we put that into some positive energy and made people more accountable to identify the real facts of the project so we could make an intelligent decision based on our strengths,” he says.
If you openly welcome ideas from everyone and keep debate healthy, Miller has found that the rest usually falls into place. But to assist that, he set an expectation that once most people agree, the rest will get on board.
“That’s what building a team is all about,” he says. “So even if one person may not totally agree and he may have another idea, at some point, you just have to say, ‘That’s it. Everybody [else] is on board. Let’s go.’
“Having a true team, that’s what you do … is express your opinion, we’ll debate it, we’ll (discuss) it, we’ll do our best to figure out the right solution. After going through a healthy discussion, you end up with the best idea. Once you have a general consensus in it, then you all agree to move forward.”
It may take individual meetings with resisters to ask for support, explaining that the team believes it’s the best solution for the company.
“You have one or two that are going another way, then you fall apart,” Miller says.
