A dear friend of mine sent me a book recently simply titled Success: The Glenn Bland Method…How To Set Goals and Make Plans That Actually Work!
The book was written in the 1970s and quite frankly carried and implied genre that I don’t spend much time reading (but should probably spend more time).
On page 42, I was stopped when Glenn Bland wrote this about goal setting, “only 3 percent of all people have goals and plans and write them down. Ten percent more have goals and plans, but keep them in their heads. The rest - 87 percent - drift through life without definite goals or plans.”
Then Bland follows that shock statistic with this, “the 3 percent who have goals and plans that are written down accomplish from fifty to one hundred times more during their lives than the 10 percent who have goals and plans and merely keep them in their heads.”
Fifty to 100 times more during their lives than the 10 percent.
Brian Moran wrote a great book some years ago, The 12 Week Year. It is a must-read, and a must-implement.
Here is the jist…
Renew and update your goals every 12 weeks instead of every 12 months. Only choose 3 goals…only 3. Any more than 3 and you are at risk of not accomplishing anything. Too many goals is similar to having no goals at all.
Within each goal, write out as many tactics you will need to accomplish the specific goal.
That’s it…pretty straightforward.
Moran gives us a simple framework to follow and one that has worked well, albeit adapted to a variety of contexts, in it’s most basic form.
Many of our clients have seen success and have positioned themselves as one of the 3 percenters, and thus accomplishing more value-added things in their lifetimes than they could have imagined to this point both at work, and more importantly, at home.
That’s a big takeaway…don’t just make goals for work, prioritize goals for your personal life as well and follow up on them with the same rigor.
How have they set goals and achieved them?
Three things.
First, set 3 goals.
Each goal can be intentionally broad and should be a direct solution to a challenge you see right now, or the next mountain that you wish to climb.
Do not overthink your goals, and at this stage, they do not need to be S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).
Just create a title for a goal like, “better culture and employee engagement”.
Second, take 1 of those goals you created and then create as many steps as needed that it will take for you to look up in 12 weeks and say, “because we accomplished each one of these steps, we can confidently know that we have a better culture and employee engagement.”
For instance, you may have some of these items as tactics,
If you do not map out the details of your goals, then you will rarely achieve them.
Finally, the missing element to most goal setting is repetition. Having one place, usually the weekly team meeting, where the entire team can hold themselves accountable to the goals and tactics.
Goal-setting workshops are notorious for writing things down, and then never circling back to implement, review, or hold account to those goals.
Do this exercise with your team four times per year and watch your culture become a collection of 3 percenters!
Remember, if you don’t write it down, you don’t own it.
If you don’t write it don’t you can’t understand it.
If you don’t write it down…it doesn’t exist.
After spending two days speaking to a groups of builders and contractors, there is an unspoken question that most have and is revealed when we begin to talk about the chaos they are feeling.
What most builders and contractors want to ask, but struggle to open up about is simply, “how do I manage my small business successfully”.
They know what features the clients' desire. They know how good structures are built, and yet they quietly live with an inadequacy of building a structure of their business with the same integrity, the same stability by which they build their projects.
In the volatile market environment we are in now, material delays, pricing increases, and employee challenges, how is a business owner to manage the business so that the business doesn’t end up managing them?
A journey back into the annals of history can help us gain perspective on our current reality. Where there is no vision, people become detached, scattered, and alone. It’s proverbial…it’s a natural law.
If you have written and regularly communicate vision, then you have clarity, you have direction, you have aim = clarity and purpose.
If you DO NOT have written and regularly communicate vision, then you have confusion, chaos, and aimlessness = frustration.
You cannot manage what you do not see. You cannot see what is not laid out plainly in front of you or your team.
The first element every business owner must have written and installed in their business to have a business they manage instead of a business that manages them is a written, detailed snapshot of the future of their business. In short, this is a written vision story.
A business without a written, communicated vision, is simply an idea in an entrepreneur's head that people are forced to gamble to be true.
Lacking a vision is like a transit bus with a full load of passengers driving particularly nowhere. Where there is no vision, we run out of gas at the worst possible times and places.
In order to have a compelling vision, you must have the 3 RPMs of great leadership: repetition, predictability, and meaning.
Repetition is the mother of all learning as made evidence by Aristotle’s oft visited quote, “we are what we repeatedly do.”
Predictability seems mundane, uninteresting, and boring…but predictability is the lifeblood of scale and delegation.
Meaning is the communication of significance. Money is not meaning. The best predictor of engaged team members has more to do with highly communicated meaning (vision, mission, and values) than it does with the accumulation of more and more money.
The second awareness to managing a business that does not manage you is committing to hiring humans, and not playing chess with “human resources”.
There is a word that is being suggested in the public discussion of psychology right now that is worth taking a look at…the word LANGUISH.
To languish is to “lose or lack vitality… being forced to remain in an unpleasant place or situation”
Author and Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant says it’s not burnout, because we still have physical fuel, and it’s not depression because we still have hope.
What is causing us to feel weak and withered, to feel LANGUISHED?
DISTRACTION
Translation of distraction? We are willfully allowing ourselves to be pulled apart… pulled away.
William Danforth, former Chairman of Purina, wrote in 1953 of the power of a good, distraction-free walk…
"(Walking) is the best medicine! This is not only the best but cheap and pleasant to take. It suits all ages and constitutions. It is patented by infinite wisdom, sealed with a signet divine. It cures cold feet, hot heads, pale faces, feeble lungs, and bad tempers. If two or three take it together, it has still more striking effects. It has often been known to reconcile enemies, settle matrimonial quarrels, and bring reluctant parties to a state of double blessedness. This medicine never fails...and you have it in perfection as prepared in the great laboratory of Nature."
When was the last time you went on a walk, with no distractions? Give it a try and see if you don’t begin to gain a clarity that you are finding it hard to discover of late.
Human resources is the discipline of managing distracted people so that the company comes out on top.
Hiring humans in contrast means understanding the thing that most hinders us from living out our skillsets, and providing the best possible environment, the best “stage” by which each person can thrive, leading to the thriving of the organization.
When hiring humans, in a humane way, we invite them into a collective that breeds culture.
Culture is a biology term!
Culture is not lunch on Fridays, soda fountains in the break room, bean bag chairs, and unicorn rides for the kids
The ingredients you put into your culture are the ingredients you grow out for all to enjoy… or not.
The culture you have is a DIRECT result of the ingredients you have planted. If you like it, keep planting. If you don’t like it, plant something different. Either way, YOU MUST GET IN THE FIELD AND PLANT WITH Repetition, Predictability, and Meaning.
To create a business you manage instead of a business that manages you, it is crucial to commit to a written vision, a process for hiring humans, and planting the seeds of desired culture; all with repetition, predictability, and meaning.
You are not your business. I own The On Purpose Group, the entity that holds Business On Purpose, but that is not who I am.
I heard a late-middle-aged woman recently say something that made me sad, “I wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t own this business… this has been my identity for so long.”
It is ironic that amount of time and focus that we spend trying to protect our digital identity (identification, credit cards, passwords, etc.) and yet spend very little time trying to maintain a distance between ourselves and the identity that is created from our work.
You are not your work. Today you can serve ice cream, tomorrow lead a class on pottery, and the next day lead a congressional hearing. Of course acumen in any trade or profession is, in part, gained through right repetition over long periods of time. So if you wish to have impact through your work, then it will likely require longevity and focus.
Where we must be careful is when longevity and focus begin turning into obsession and idolatry along with a healthy dose of “what else would I do if I didn’t do this.”
Anything valuable thing taken to an extreme is at risk of becoming a liability.
Hence the woman who has allowed her business to become her identity. Her community might look at her and say, “Wow, what an impact”. While her family and friends might look at the same person and think, “Wow, what a missed opportunity.”
How do you ensure that you and your business remain two separate organisms working in tandem for the health of your surroundings and avoiding becoming one in the same?
Build your business with an opened hand realizing that you not owning the business is always an option on the table.
Although I own The On Purpose Group, I want to operate with a mindset that I manage the business as a General Manager or Steward who is always looking out for the best interest of all stakeholders, and to build the backend of the business in such a way that someone else could come in and manage if and when that time were to come.
Recently, Gerrick Taylor, owner of Taylor’s Landscape Supply and Nursery left his five location business for two weeks to go serve as an employee at similar business about five hours away. He wanted to go see how a similar business is managed day to day.
While Gerrick is gone Taylor’s will continue to operate because it has been built in such a way where multiple team members can operate or steward the business in the owner’s absence.
Derrick is not Taylor’s, Taylor’s is an organism running, operating, and growing even while he is away because the team is empowered to grow the business.
It is always better to have a sellable business, even if you choose not to sell.
How do you build a sellable business that can run without you and free you from the prison of being tied to your business…whether you wish to sell or not?
First, you must decide that you will not be synonymous with your business. It is more of a mindset than a checklist of tasks to be accomplished. Ask yourself right now, do people know me for anything other than my business? If you have a hard time answering that, you must take action.
What are the things that makes your sense light up? What are the things you dream about doing if you didn’t “have to work all of the time”? Brennan Manning once asked, “what makes you cry?”
What is it? What makes you tear up at the mere sight of a thing? A child jumping into a father’s arms? A homeless woman on the street begging for money at the stoplight? A legislative policy? Ensuring that couples are well equipped before getting married?
For some, we must begin radically separating your identity from your business. Imagine this, we are all standing at your funeral, and on your headstone it reads, “He owned a great company”.
Of course, that great company can do great things for people like providing great jobs, great products that serve needs, and the rest. But I would dare say that your life is of more value than the jobs you created or the products you served. Even without the company, you are important.
Wouldn’t you rather have your headstone read, “He loved well”, or “His family was crazy about him”?
Second, you must commit to building purpose and systems that build people that build the business. One of the reasons that you are synonymous with your business is because most of the systems of the business are in your head. What happens to the business if something happens to you?
That was the question TJ Anderson asked driving down a four-lane road in 2015. TJ owns Atlantic Spray Foam and had that sobering thought when thinking about his future.
He began radically committing to building systems, process, and purpose into his business. He went from being the dominant business developer in his business, to rarely selling, servicing, or scheduling any jobs and instead investing in a team that invests in the customer.
Finally, you need to surround yourself with third-party wisdom mentors who are not going to blindly cheerlead. You need truth-tellers and advisors who can help you properly forecast what is coming, and thoughtfully plan how to equip yourself, the business, the people around you.
A Jewish proverb tells us that “without counsel. plans fail, but with many advisors, they succeed.” (Proverbs 15:22)
I might go a step further and say, “without (objective) counsel plans fail, but with many (wise) advisors they succeed.”
You are not your business. Your business is a valuable asset, and you are of even greater value.