🔪 Chop It Up!

One of the biggest obstacles that I see in organizations when driving any kind of transformation is the absence of emotionally appealing goals. The fact is that nobody ever changes behavior or even routines based on logic. Studies prove over and over again that we need emotions to move. Logic only makes us think. 

So, why is it so difficult to define goals that make people move?

The simple answer is because most of us never trained to create them. From early ages on, we learned to create rational and logical goals. 

Do I suggest forgetting all the things about SMART goal-setting and the like? No, not at all.

Instead, what I suggest is a 3-step method to boost the commitment of your people that many don’t know, maybe even not you.

It goes like this: 

1. Ask yourself: “If I were an employee who was expected to contribute to the business goal, how would I know and feel each day that I truly contributed?” You see the problem: it is very hard to see the contribution to the improvement of the overall customer satisfaction level from 7.6 to 8.2 on a daily basis. But it might be easy to achieve a goal that sounds like this: “Every day, each of us should make ONE customer feel better about our company."
2. Translate the abstract business goal into words that have a meaning to your employees. As in the example above, “make ONE customer feel better each day” has a personal meaning, because everybody knows how to make somebody else feel better. There is no business language needed. It’s simple and human.
3. Chunk big goals down into pieces that can be reported frequently, in the best case daily (as in the example above). Never leave goals as yearly goals. Always chunk them down: what does this goal mean each day in our work? Perhaps we reply 5 minutes faster to each customer request. Or we make one sales call more each day. Or maybe we cancel one meeting per day to free up some time for productive activities. You get the idea.

Next steps:

When you're ready, check out my ➔ coaching programs and set up ➔ a 15min appointment here to get to know each other.