What does it mean to “win”?
You’ve got goals! Now what?
If you’ve been following along, you've set at least one goal for this year or quarter. You've engaged your team in developing those goals, and they’re fired up and ready to tackle them. But what's next? Let’s hope it’s not just “business as usual, but with some added stress on top”.
To bring a challenge to life through the daily work, start by answering these two questions:
1. What does winning look like, today?
2. How will we know if we're doing it?
In this post, we'll focus on the first question. If you've crafted a compelling challenge, you likely have a clear picture of what you're aiming for. Being able to imagine and depict that future state with specificity is crucial. For example, on a recent Kata Girl Geeks call, a woman shared a goal that meets my challenge criteria (and then some): To run a marathon within 1 year of giving birth.[1] Wow, it doesn’t get much more aspirational, daunting, and meaningful than that! But, she hasn’t even had her baby yet. Will she be able to tell whether she’s succeeding in this challenge before the big race day? I sure hope so, because that’s a long time to live in suspense.
Businesses often set goals measured by lagging results:
"Run a profitable business"
"A 5-star customer review on every house"
"A new cafe open and thriving by year-end"
These are all fantastic year-end goals. But here in January, do you have to wait until your taxes are filed next April to know whether you made money? Does the house need to be built, sold, and lived in to know whether your customer is going to be satisfied? I sure hope not, because that’s a heck of a wait, and a lot of pressure riding on a single outcome.
Back to our marathon-runner: Maybe it’s not even about running that one race, on that particular day. Would it “count” if she just showed up and ran 26 miles on December 31st? Or is this really about a gradual pattern of recovery and building back fitness and reclaiming ownership of her body? Lace up the running shoes every day, and start to move. Put feet to pavement, feel the runner’s high, stretch afterwards. Repeat tomorrow. Get into the practice of training like a marathon-runner, and you’ll know whether you’re succeeding before the starting gun goes off.
How could we take that big picture question, “what does it mean to win?”, and break it down into the daily pattern of work that we believe will produce the ultimate result? Or, “what does it mean to win, today?”
For anyone tempted to take their profit goal and divide it by 365, stop right now. Don’t use a dollar figure to measure daily performance. If you’re an owner, sure, you want to keep track of cash flow. But for everyone else on your team, it’s demoralizing to be “held accountable” for so many variables outside of their control.
Instead, do the translation from dollars to patterns. What does the work itself need to perform like? What would the team be doing on a “winning” day? How could you align those top-level, lagging company-wide goals with each team’s daily activities? Here are a few examples:
What percentage of planned tasks were completed today?
How many quality units did we produce today?
How many injuries did we prevent today?
How many potential mistakes did we catch today?
Did the whole crew show up to work today?
You shouldn’t need extensive surveys, the Board’s approval, or months of hindsight to know whether you had a winning day, today. If the challenge were true, what would be happening on the ground, right now?
In the next installment, we'll explore easy ways to determine if you're "winning" or not on a daily basis, to keep your team engaged without going into metrics overload.
[1] She’s a runner and has completed marathons already. If you’re pregnant or post-partum, please don’t set yourself overly aggressive fitness challenges that are going to be dangerous for your body.