Set aggressive goals
Once you achieve alignment with your executive team, you can turn your focus to employees further down the ladder by helping them set goals that are aggressive, yet attainable.
McDonald says it is a delicate balance. On one hand, you want to challenge your employees to work harder and achieve more. On the other hand, if you set goals that are unrealistic or altogether unattainable, you’ll discourage your employees and they might actually achieve less.
You can find that line without crossing it by asking some common-sense questions of yourself and your leadership team.
“A big part of being successful is you have to put goals through a kind of filter, first off, to see if you accomplish a given goal, what is the return going to be,” he says. “What is the cost in terms of effort, financial commitment and human resources? Are there other things you can measure up against that would be more beneficial and would be a better use of resources?
“It’s good to be aggressive and pick goals
that are going to be hard to achieve. It’s not good to pick goals that are so aggressive that your chances of attaining them are low. If you do that, you’re going to demotivate your team, and you’re virtually wasting the resources you’ve marked for the goal. We’ve gone through that, and we’ve had several great ideas that, when you put it through this analysis, just didn’t work for us in this time and place.”
Deciding what resources to commit to a given goal can be a difficult part of any strategic plan, especially if the economy has limited your resources to begin with. Though your company’s balance sheet might say that money should be a major factor in deciding how goals are set, it shouldn’t be the only factor.
In fact, McDonald says you should go out of your way to take the focus of your employees away from money. You should instead keep the realization of goals front of mind. In a down economy, financial talk can make employees tentative and uneasy. Goal-oriented thinking keeps employees motivated.
“Staying aggressive in an economy like this helps keep a team unified,” McDonald says. “People like to be a part of a winning team, and if you try to rally your team around aggressive but realistic goals, it’s amazing what you can accomplish, even in a bad economy.
“If all we did was focus on the numbers, it would be pretty depressing, even though our numbers aren’t that bad. But if that was all we did, we could very easily develop a ‘woe is us’ complex, and we’d probably start paying even more attention to the negative economic news we hear each day. Numbers are an important measurement in business, certainly for us and our franchisees. But it’s only one of the measurements.”
Financials are one obvious factor in goal setting for most businesses, but your employees, and the skills and desire for achievement they bring with them, represent another factor in goal setting. Getting a feel for what people can accomplish goes back to the basics of good communication. McDonald works with other managers in the company to create a dialogue with employees, gaining insight as to their competencies and their personal development goals.
When it comes to goal setting, finding out what employees are driven to accomplish can be as critical as learning about what skills they can bring to the table.
“It’s making sure that we listen to them, make sure that we understand what their competencies are, where they want to develop and help them get there,” McDonald says. “You want to challenge our people, but challenge them in a way that is going to be helpful to both to the organization and to their personal development. Again, if you continue to challenge people in the right way, even in a bad economy, you’re going to go a long way toward keeping them satisfied in the workplace. And that might be the biggest thing, to keep everyone satisfied and focused in a time of uncertainty.”
How to reach: Service Brands International LLC, (888) 700-6177 or www.servicebrands.com
