Tag: #goals

Recently my wife and I were struggling with the kids, which I hear is a common sentiment a year into the pandemic. Trying to teach and maintain healthy habits, we limit their screen time to an hour a day and 2.5 hours a day on the weekend, ask them to do chores around the apartment, and we try to limit their sugar intake. This has been, to put it mildly, a challenge.

They don’t want to do any of it, and will bend, break, or skirt the rules whenever they think they can get away with it. We’re trying to team them habits that are good for them now, and will be valuable skills later, but with the stress of eternal social distancing and a soft-lockdown, they’re waging a constant, low-grade rebellion… and winning. My daughter’s room is a hazardous waste site, our son needs constant supervision to turn in any school assignments on-time, and neither of them want to have anything to do with doing the dishes or taking out the trash.

This has led to a destructive cycle where we take away more and more screen time and privileges for misbehavior, and they then have fewer and fewer things that we can threaten them with, giving them little incentive to behave. This has led to a household where the kids are miserable and bored, the parents feel taken advantage of and frustrated, and the chores are still not getting done! We had reached the bottom.

It’s not a good system when literally no one is winning, so the other day I sat down to think about what we were doing wrong and I was reminded about another broken system that I inherited in the first few days of my current job.

Cherry-picking

Taking over the SaaS Support organization a year ago, one of my teams offered L1 support. It was a small team, that executed simple requests made by coworkers through a Service Desk portal. Ideally, the work was supposed to be frictionless, with requests getting done in under a day, no required clarification or follow-up from the requestor, and a first time delivery with quality.

It wasn’t working. The queue constantly had tickets in it that had failed SLA (our 24-hour delivery commitment), languishing for most of a week, and tickets were being rejected by the requestors at an unacceptable rate. Not much was working.

After talking to the members of the team individually they seemed intelligent, motivated, and competent. Mistakes were being made due to carelessness, not inability, and the tickets that were failing SLA were long-running tasks that took a lot longer than other tasks to execute. The problem didn’t appear to lie with the people, so the manager and I took a look at the system. Why wasn’t it working?

The team was graded by how many tickets they delivered within the 24-hour SLA that were accepted the first time. Sounds like a good definition of success, right? This is what we wanted, however it wasn’t achieving our goals. Digging deeper into the numbers we found a few causes of the problem:

• the team was rushing through execution, and not taking care to validate the result before delivering it to the customer in a quest for numbers.
• no one wanted to pick up the long-running tasks, because they could do fewer of them, and if they failed SLA they wouldn’t get any credit anyway.

The behaviors we were encouraging with our grading system was not aligned with the outcome we wanted. Aligning goals and incentives is easy to say, but very difficult to do. It has been poorly done by business and governments, large and small, everywhere, throughout all of time, and classically illustrated by the cobra effect.

Tasty Carrots and Sharp Sticks

First, we decided that allowing a team who is supposed to get tickets out as quickly as possible shouldn’t be spending time deciding what ticket they wanted to work on. It creates an incentive to cheat, one of the classic causes of goal misalignment. We created restrictions on the queue, where the tickets were prioritized by age, and an agent completing a task automatically had the next ticket in the queue assigned. No one could cheat, and no one had to worry that their co-workers were taking advantage of the system.

Secondly, we decided that prioritizing quality and productivity was incompatible. We changed the grading so the agents got credit for tickets that went past the SLA (only fair since they could no longer choose their tickets), in the hope that a focus on quality would lead to an increase in overall system productivity as Lean Six Sigma predicts.

It worked! Within two weeks, the team that consistently failed SLA on ~20% of requests, and had rejections on another 10%, got the backlog of tickets to under 10 during the working day and kept it there. Rejections also fell to less than 1% of requests. This was all done with no additional resources or automations. It has been over a year, and tickets that fail SLA are now very rare despite this no longer being a grading criteria.

Treating My Kids Like Employees

Now, how could I apply this approach to my kids? First, we had to decide what my wife and I wanted, keeping it simple and focused:

• good effort at school (grades are like SLA, not the measure we want to track)
• household chores done

What did the kids want?

• time on electronics
• desserts

With these goals and incentives in mind, we came up with a system that awarded them points for positive reports from school, and completion of chores that we thought the kids could handle on their own. Points could be lost for poor reports from school. These points could be converted to 30 minutes of electronics (up to the 1 hour per weekday and 2.5 hours per weekend day previously established), or five points for a dessert.

The next morning my daughter unloaded the dishwasher and my son made his bed, both without being asked, for the first time ever. A screaming success. It turns out that our arbitrary rewarding and punishing behaviors was demotivating to the kids. They were reluctant to perform a chore with an uncertain payout, and were less hesitant to do something wrong when the punishment was unknown. Now that they knew the score (literally!) they enthusiastically looked for ways to get more points, and now that my son knows that not doing an assignment could cost him his full hour of Fortnite that evening he is far more likely to get it done.

We’re all self-interested, and even the most disciplined of us is going to spend more time on things with a greater payoff and avoid things with a higher downside. One of the magical aspects of leadership is truly understanding your employees and the system in which they operate. Without that knowledge and empathy, you have no hope of designing a system so that it encourages the behaviors that provide the greatest payoff to the organization. But if you can do so, you can create an environment where employees love to come to work, and you never have to beg or threaten to get the results that you want.

Everyone sets goals for themselves, and every leader has goals for their team. These goals may be informal, aspirational, explicit, or any number of other things, but, in the end, goals are just what you hope to accomplish, both for yourself and for your team.

But what makes a good goal? What goals, and how many should a leader set for themselves and their team? Is it good to set easy goals so the team can have a sense of accomplishment, or should one make very challenging goals to inspire the team meet the challenge? The answer to many of these questions is: “it depends”, however there are a few criteria that all goals should adhere to, and several mistakes around goal setting that should be avoided.

It’s critical that goals are not only SMART, but well thought out, intentional, few in number, focused, and aligned with the company’s incentives. It may sound funny, but it is far more common in my experience for a company to want one thing, but structure incentives that encourage something totally different.

Aligning Goals and Incentives

For example, have you ever worked at a company that paid its sales team a commission on signed contracts? Once the ink is dry, the salesperson gets a cut of the agreed on sales price, and the company gets a new project. Great deal, right? Well, what does this scenario really encourage? Does it incentivize the salesperson to make reasonable promises and set appropriate expectations? Does it encourage the salesperson to collaborate with the implementation team to ensure that the project can be completed on time, on budget, and to the customer’s satisfaction? Or, instead, does it encourage the salesperson to say whatever they need to, make whatever promise is necessary, to get the contract signed so they can move on to the next one?

In most cases, the company doesn’t want a signature on a contract. That’s a nice and necessary first step, but what the company really wants is a successful implementation, a happy and reference-able customer, and repeat business. That first contract should just be the first of many if the company delivers on their promises, but if those promises aren’t made with respect to reality, then the company is going to get that signature on a piece of paper, and likely none of the things that they really want.

You can’t blame the salesperson for this scenario; they’re just doing what they have been encouraged to do. You can’t expect to set incentives that encourage behavior that doesn’t contribute to your ultimate goals, and hope to achieve them.

Aligning Goals Vertically

Another common mistake when it comes to goals is the creation of independent goals at every level of the company hierarchy. Imagine that the company leadership is looking to grow new sales by 20% year-over-year, the engineering team has decided to work on issues for existing customers to increase the Net Promoter Score, and the sales team is working on customer education to get existing customers to adopt more modules of the product.

These are all fine goals, but they do not contribute to each other at all. Neither the engineering team or the sales team is contributing to each other’s goals, and neither of them is contributing to the overall company goal. Imagine three teams of people all pulling a section of an enormous rope in different directions. Nobody’s going to get very far without the support of the other people pulling the rope.

Now, imagine instead that the leadership team has announced that the company’s goal is to grow new sales by 20% year-over-year, and then works with the engineering team to decide to build new features that prospective customers have been asking for, and with the sales team to reach out to contacts made at conferences to increase their awareness that the features they were interested in are in the pipeline. This is an organization all pulling the rope in the same direction, and it’s amazing how much can get done if the goals set by every team align with each other and contribute to the goals of the greater organization.

When you’re deciding on goals for your team, make sure to understand what goals your boss has set for their team, make sure that the goals you set for your team align with them, and also be sure that your incentives encourage behavior that will accomplish them.

Less Is More

Yet another mistake when setting goals is a loss of focus. Sometimes a team will have so many things to do, so many issues to resolve, and so many stakeholders to please that it’s tempting to set dozens of tiny goals to try to make everyone happy. In my experience, this only results in
the team not understanding what the real priorities are, no stakeholder really getting what they want, and results in the sense that little was accomplished.

Your goals set your priorities, and having a few, clear goals that everyone on the team understands and can work toward is far more valuable than many smaller goals that seem unrelated. It is a very powerful thing to tell a team that in the next three sprints we are going to accomplish two things, and everything everyone does is going to contribute, in some way, to the accomplishing of these things. It sets the vision, it enlists their support, and gives clarity to why they are working on whatever tasks are assigned to them.

It is fine to have smaller sub-goals, but they must all align and contribute to the greater, stated goals, otherwise the message gets confusing. If everyone on the team is working on tasks that clearly align with each other and contribute to a greater communal goal, it creates a sense of team, partnership, and purpose that cannot be replicated otherwise.

What your goals are and how challenging is less important than their focus, and alignment with incentives and greater company goals. Being thoughtful and communicative about your team’s goals is a great way to develop a high performing team with a track record of accomplishments.