Goal setting: Cascading versus avalanching

Many leaders use goals to create line of sight between an individual’s work and the broader success of the business.

A problem that I see in many organizations is that while goals are passed from one leader to his or her direct reports, they tend to be “avalanched”.

An avalanched goal is one that doesn’t change as it moves through the organization. For example, a regional vice-president might have a goal of increasing profitability by 13%. He gives his director of sales and director of operations that same goal. Those two people in turn pass the goal along to their various managers who then pass it on to their front line employees.

In the end, the final person with the goal is the one who has no one else to which to pass it. That person is also in the least likely position to fulfill the goal due to his or her scope of responsibility and influence.

Avalanched goals aren’t helpful. They reduce clarity and make it difficult for people to know where to focus. After all, if everyone in the organization has the same goal, despite having different jobs, what are they supposed to do? They are also unfair and demotivating. If a person only controls 1/10th of an outcome, how can he or she be held accountable for that entire outcome? More importantly, they can actually reduce accountability. Each person in the chain holds the person below him or her accountable for meeting the one goal while not attending to it themself. The only person who winds up actively working toward it is that poor low-level employee stuck at the bottom of the avalanche.

An alternative to avalanching is to use cascading goals. Cascading goals are also passed down through the organization. At each level the goal is adapted to reflect the unique contribution that supports the higher-level goal.

The idea of cascading goals isn’t new. What’s happened is that leaders have latched on to the first part (passing the goal down through the organization) while abandoning the second part (modifying the goal to reflect a unique contribution). The result is the avalanche.

The key to creating cascading goals is having a clear understanding of how each successive layer in an organization contributes to the one above it.

Here is a simple example of how the profitability goal mentioned earlier might be cascaded.

Each individual has a specific goal for which they have full control. Their individual area of focus and contribution are clearly laid out.  Most importantly, there is clarity around who specifically is accountable for each outcome.

Of course, it is also important to show each person how his or her goal contributes to the broader goals of the organization. This creates line of sight as well as engagement.

This example showed how to cascade just one goal. Leaders should go through this same process for each of his or her goals.

The people who report to you should not have the same goals as you. They should each make contributions that, when taken together, help you achieve your goal(s). Take time to provide each of your people with a clear, focused, and specific goal.

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Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.

Best laid plans

In April, 2002 Yo Yo Ma and Condolezza Rice performed a duet during a ceremony in which Ma was awarded the National Medal of the Arts.

It’s no surprise that one of them was a Humanities major in college and the other a Music major.

What might surprise you though is that Condolezza Rice was the music major (she eventually switched) at Standford and Yo Yo Ma was the Humanities major (he received his degree from Harvard)

Often when I talk with college students I try to get them to worry less about their major and more about their passion. I try to convince them that in all likelihood the job they will have when they turn 30 or 40 is probably one that they didn’t even know existed during their college years (except of course for professions such as medicine or law).

Yet I don’t blame them. When I look at job descriptions for entry level or even senior level positions, I often see the same thing – deep expertise and experience in a given field.

Ironically, I rarely find a high performing, high-level leader whose college major would have landed him or her the job or who has deep and long term experience in the technical or functional requirements of their role. Most are just good leaders with a passion for the work they are doing. That’s pretty much what happened with Condolezza Rice and Yo Yo Ma. Despite their educations, they both followed their passions (and had natural talents within them).

Of course, a leader must be competent. However, the leader doesn’t have to be the smartest person in the room or the most technically or functionally competent person in the room. The leader does need to be the most passionate and persistent one.

Who do you look for when filling a position? The person with passion and talent or the one with the right pedigree?

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Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.

The modern day Sisyphus - are your people stuck in an endless loop with no meaning?

Employee engagement continues to be an elusive outcome in many organizations. A recent Blessing-White study on employee engagement shows that only about 31% of employees in organizations are considered “engaged”.

Organizations have poured considerable time, effort, and money into solving the engagement problem. Yet, there has been little to show for the effort.

In The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely might have found a key to increasing engagement – avoid what he calls the “Sisyphean” condition. Sisyphus was a king from Greek mythology. His punishment in the afterlife was perpetually rolling a stone up a hill. Each time he neared the top, the stone rolled back to the bottom. In other words, Sisyphus’ curse was never to see his work produce any results.

Ariely explored this idea with a simple experiment. He paid two groups of people to build objects (“bionicles”) out of Legos. Each time an individual would finish building, he or she would be offered the chance to build another object for slightly less money than the prior one. The participants could choose to stop whenever they wanted. There was one difference, however. In one group (called the “meaningful” group), once the object was created, it was taken away and a new set of parts was provided. In the other group (the “Sisyphean” group) once the object was completed, it was immediately disassembled in front of the participant (while the participant was working on his or her next object).

So, what was the difference between those people who saw their work undone and those who didn’t?

“Joe and the other participants in the ‘meaningful’ condition built an average of 10.6 Bionicles and received and average of $14.40 for their time. Even after they reached the point where their earnings for each Bionicle were less than a dollar (half of the initial payment), 65 percent of those in the meaningful condition kept on working. In contrast, those in the Sisyphean condition stopped working much sooner. On average, that group built 7.2 Bionicles and earned an average of $11.52. Only 20 percent of the participants in the Sisyphean condition constructed Bionicles when the payment was less than a dollar per robot.”

Incidentally, Ariely also found that in the meaningful group, there was a high correlation between how much someone liked playing with Legos and their output. Yet, in the Sisyphean group, there was no correlation. His experiment effectively sucked passion out of the participants.

In a follow on experiment using a different task, Ariely went one step further. He divided his subjects into three categories:

• Those who would get a positive acknowledgment for doing their task
• Those who would get no acknowledgment
• Those who would get no acknowledgment and, as with the Sisyphean Lego group, would see their work destroyed.

Not surprisingly, the acknowledged group was the most productive (competing the task 9.03 time on average). The Sisyphean group was the least productive at 6.34. However, those in the ignored condition didn’t perform much differently than those in the Sisyphean condition (6.77),. Ariely concluded:

“This experiment taught us that sucking the meaning out of work is surprisingly easy. If you’re a manger who really wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts.”

You might be thinking that you don’t literally destroy people’s work in front of them. However, you might be destroying more than you think. As a leader are you guilty of creating Sisyphean conditions for your team?

• Does the way you deliver feedback “destroy” their work? Do you overly reshuffle, revise, re-edit, and rethink what they did?
• In your desire to add value, do you take out their thoughts and replace them with your own?
• Do you allow their work to go unacknowledged so that they never know what came of it?
• When assigning a task on a contentious issue, are you mindful of people who have been burned in the past putting in long hours on projects that wound up getting cancelled or deferred by people higher up?
• Are your people so far removed from the end user or end customer that they never actually see the impact they have? (creating a ‘line of sight” diagram on a Powerpoint slide doesn’t count)
• Do you (or does your organization) require a lot of non-value added administrative work, HR or compliance processes, committees, and other work that takes people away from the work that stirred their passion and attracted them to the job in the first place?

While you might not literally put someone’s work through the shredder, your actions and inactions might be having the same effect.

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Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.

Dogmatic expertise

In his book, Educating the Reflective Practioner, Donald Schon recalls the story of how Bernard Greenhouse, a famous cellist, learned to play while studying under Pablo Casals.

Greenhouse would spend three hours per lesson with Casals. For about an hour of each lesson, Casals would play a phrase and have Greenhouse repeat it. If Greenhouse didn’t repeat it perfectly, Casals would stop him and say, “No, no. Do it this way.” Greenhouse was concerned that this process of mimicry would only turn him into a poor copy of Pablo Casals. Yet, once Greenhouse became an expert at mimicking Casals, Casals did something that surprised him:

“And at that point, when I had been able to accomplish this, he said to me, ‘Fine. Now just sit. Put your cello down and listen to the D-Minor Suite.’ And he played through the piece and changed every bowing and every fingering and every phrasing and all the emphasis within the phrase. I sat there, absolutely with my mouth open, listening to a performance which was heavenly, absolutely beautiful. And when he finished, he turned to me with a broad grin on his face, and he said, ‘Now you’ve learned how to improvise in Bach.’”

Somewhere on the continuum between novice and true expert (i.e., the person who can ‘improvise in Bach’) lies the dogmatic expert.

The dogmatic expert has internalized the rules and processes in his or her area of specialty. He or she can apply those rule better, faster, and deeper than anyone around. Yet, instead of having the freedom that Casals showed when ‘improvising in Bach’, the dogmatic expert becomes trapped in his or her own expertise. He or she lacks the flexibility to adapt to situations where the rules don’t work out perfectly. Instead of using expertise to move people forward, the dogmatic expert often shuts other people down when they don’t follow the process perfectly.

I first encountered dogmatic experts early in my career. I was part of a training and development group. We had people who were “experts” in instructional design processes. They were very good at what they did when they were able to execute their process from start to finish. However, when the client needed something done fast or suggested that they skip a step, the experts often became flustered. They’d dig-in and insist that the process couldn’t be done that way and that the final result wouldn’t be good. The more they dug in, the more the client worked around them. While the experts were explaining why the client’s process wouldn’t work and why their product would fail, the client produced their own training. Then while the experts were compiling their critiques of the course and explaining why it wasn’t very good, the people taking it were learning from it, improving their skills, and giving it high marks.

The real expert was the one who was able to adapt the important design principles to the client’s context. This involved following the spirit of the process and principles without following each step exactly. He improvised within the design process.

Expertise is highly valued in organizations. However, true expertise is the ability to combine what you know with the context around you. The people who are able to improvise within the rules and processes of their discipline are the ones who create value for their companies.

Too often, we try to demonstrate our expertise by showing how other people’s actions aren’t “right”. That’s not what expertise is about. Expertise isn’t about shutting others down. Expertise is helping other’s succeed within their context. It’s about knowing which rules can bend and which must be reinforced.

Where do you sit on the expertise continuum? Do you find yourself stifled when people don’t follow your process to the letter? Are you able to take a less than ideal situation and get the most from it? Or, are you the one who is shutting people down for not doing things the right way?

Dogmatic experts look good on paper but often compromise as much value as they create. Don’t fall into that trap.

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Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.