Teach employees how to fish
Don’t just tell employees how to reach a goal; give them tools to figure it out themselves.
Shah’s goal-setting meetings with team leaders go beyond recaps of what the data revealed and where the targets are. He asks them to plan how they’ll achieve that goal, from breaking it into monthly targets to requesting the manpower and equipment they’ll need.
“Don’t just solve the problem; create people who can solve the problem,” Shah says. “Give them tools to solve the problem. Teach them how to use those tools and show how those tools can help solve one or two difficult problems.”
As the adage goes, it’s the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish. So, for example, Shah doesn’t break the main goal into quarterly objectives. He gives employees access to their performance measurements, empowering them to make adjustments by seeing how far off they are — and where everyone else is.
“We never give individual sales goals to a salesperson. … We set the goals by measuring and comparing with others,” Shah says. “The best solution is a tool in which they can compare with somebody else. Then it becomes a yardstick from which they can measure. Let them be judged with the data they can see.”
These performance metrics should be available to everyone on your intranet or some other accessible medium. And they should measure as many things in as many ways on as many timelines as possible.
“We measure everything by every different way, and we allow everybody to see it,” Shah says. “We measure sales and gross profit margin by individual item, by product line, by warehouse, by salesperson, by team, by branch, by customer, by channel of distribution, by region, by state, by ZIP code, by vendor, by country of import, all of that.”
Employees should be able to see these stats in context, so provide trends across the last week, month, quarter and year. It’s also important that the data is updated in real time so employees can continuously track their progress and monitor how much slack they have to pick up.
“We don’t believe in annual or quarterly goals but rather long-term goals, missions and making real-time changes to achieve those missions,” he says. “We believe that having annual or quarterly goals means we are taking too long to assess what changes need to be made. Changes should be made in real time: weekly, monthly, quarterly.”
Giving employees the power to make those adjustments increases productivity all around.
“We let people compare with other teams how much other people are shipping per employee,” Shah says. “And pretty soon, those who were ahead were feeling proud and wanted to stay ahead. Those who were behind want to see what they can do to [improve].”
That’s where you should step in, guiding employees to self-improvement while trying to dodge the jealousy this kind of comparison can foster. Shah works one-on-one with employees to reveal personal growth opportunities, but mostly, he relies on the incentive system to curb competition.
“That’s the risk we are taking,” he says regarding jealousy. “The power we get by letting people make their own decision is too powerful for the occasional bad apple we may lose.”
