Are you waiting for business to get back to normal?
How long are you prepared to wait?
What will happen if business never gets back to normal?
If any of these questions are the question(s) you are asking yourself then the future of your business is not in your hands.
Maybe you may need to start addressing the market you serve as it is, rather than how you hope it will be.
If you wish to address the market as it is you will have to make changes. You must navigate the financial and operational challenges of coronavirus while rapidly addressing the needs of your people, customers and suppliers. You need to set a Wildly Important Goal.
You need to rapidly turn your attention to the immediate future, a period of unpredictable and possibly muted economic recovery with new competitive threats and opportunities, and quite possibly a decade of never returning to the historic version of what was normal. We will be entering a new era defined by fast-changing shifts in cultural norms, societal values and behaviours, such as increased demand for responsible business practices and renewed brand purpose.
Are you ready?
If you are ready, we can help.
Are you ready to learn, adapt and change?
We will help by sharing our 5 shortcuts to growth. If you apply our shortcuts you can expect to learn, adapt and grow.
The 5 Shortcuts
Shortcut Number 1 – Become the Leader Who Thinks Differently
The world is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history.
The tools of our modern existence are getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, transforming every aspect of society, from business to culture and from the public sphere to our most private moments.
The old methods no longer cut through.
The people who succeed will be the ones who learn to think differently.
Shortcut Number ONE is “Be the LEADER who thinks differently.”
Shortcut Number 2 – Achieving your Wildly Important Goals
Almost every business leader says the thing that causes the most trouble is execution.
They have clarity of the objective.
Their Team lacks:
Clarity – They do not know what the goal is.
Commitment – They are not committed to the goal.
Collaboration – They do not know what to do to achieve the goal.
Accountability – And they aren’t being held accountable.
The enemy of Execution is not the Wildly Important Goal, it is the day job, the Whitewater. The Whitewater is the energy that is required just to keep the operation, your business, going on a day-to-day basis.
This makes it so hard to undertake anything new.
You need to be able to differentiate between the Whitewater of business-as-usual and the strategic goals.
Shortcut Number 3 – Act on the Lead Measures
This shortcut is about providing great energy to the activities that drive your lead measures. The objective is the lag measure, and that is the Wildly Important Goal. The lead measures drive the lag measures by leverage.
The lag measure tells you if you have achieved your goal.
The lead measure tells you if you are likely to achieve your goal.
Long-term objectives, as described in business plans, do not adapt to changing conditions or circumstances.
Lead measures are measures of short-term activities. Activities that are designed to be enacted in the coming week. These activities are responsive to changing conditions and circumstances. They become a just in time process to focus on the activities required to achieve your Wildly Important Goal.
Lead measures are predictive. If a lead measure is undertaken, the lag measure will be impacted. The lead measure is influenceable, the team can make a lead measure happen.
Understanding lead measures will be one of the most important learnings that you take from this article.
Shortcut Number 4 – Keep a compelling scoreboard
We will cover how to involve the team in creating a compelling scoreboard. Different scoreboard designs drive different behaviours. Having the team involved in the design results in their commitment to making the Wildly Important Goal succeed.
Choose a theme
Choose a theme for your scoreboard that clearly displays the measures you are tracking.
The objective is to communicate we are going X to Y by when.
Theme examples are:
Trendlines
Speedometer
Traffic lights
Design the scoreboard
Once you’ve selected your theme, and type of scoreboard you want, the team should design the scoreboard with the following questions in mind:
Is it simple?
Can the team see it easily?
Does it contain both lead and lag measures?
Can we see at a glance if we’re winning?
Build the scoreboard
Keep it updated
The design of the scoreboard should make it easy to update at least weekly. If the scoreboard is hard to update you will be tempted to put it off when the whitewater strikes – and your wildly important goal will disappear in the noise and confusion.
Shortcut Number 5 – The Rhythm of Accountability
Shortcut number 5 asks teams to meet frequently and regularly, in Wildly Important Goal sessions, at which each team member makes personal commitments to drive the lead measures.
What is the session?
What is a wildly important goal session?
It has one purpose – to refocus the team on the wildly important goal despite the daily Whitewater.
It takes place Weekly, it has a fixed agenda, as per the following:
Account: Report on last week’s commitments.
Each team member reports on The Commitments to move the lead measures that he or she made the prior week.
Review the scoreboard: Learn from successes and failures. The team assesses whether their commitments are moving the lead measure and whether the lead measure is moving the lag measure.
They discuss what they’ve learned about what works, and what doesn’t, and how to adapt.
Clear the Path
Plan: Clear the path and make new commitments.
Based on this assessment, each member of the team makes commitments for the coming week that will raise the lead measures to the required level of performance.
Because the members create the commitments themselves, and because they are publicly accountable for them to each other, they go away determined to follow through – it becomes personally important.
Shortcut number 5 keeps your team in the game every week, as the members connect their personal contributions to the most important priorities of the organisation. With this outcome, you have not only the awareness that they are winning on a key goal, but your team has become a winning team.
Which is the ultimate return on the investment that you made in this Wildly Important Goal.
Are you ready to Learn, Adapt & Change?