ACHIEVING GOALS

It’s the beginning of a new year.  Are you going to make some goals and move them to gold?

Listen to the podcast here:

The Achieving Goals Discussion:

Karla Nelson:  And welcome to the People Catalysts’ Podcast. Mr. Allen Fahden.
Allen Fahden:  Hello, Karla.
Karla Nelson:  Hello kind Sir, how are you today?
Allen Fahden:  I’m good.
Karla Nelson:  2020 first podcast of the year. We got some time off for the holidays, so…
Allen Fahden:  Yes, let’s have another holiday right away.
Karla Nelson:  I got to the point I was ready to get back to work by the time the sixth came around. A lot of people just based off the way the holidays fell. It was kind of nice. Got to spend some time. I’m sure everyone has already written their goals for 2020.
Allen Fahden:  Or at least the 20% who do.
Karla Nelson:  Yeah, exactly. That’s kind of a challenging statistic there. We’re doing a little bit of research on goals because everybody talks about writing your goals for the year, which is critical. It’s really important to understand, where you’re going to go. And so, what we’re going to talk about is how to turn your goals into gold in 2020 and obviously you can apply it anytime of the year.
I just think 2020 is cool. It didn’t seem that long ago. We were going to party like it’s 1999.
Allen Fahden:  That’s right.
Karla Nelson:  I did the math on that and I was like, “Oh man… “
Allen Fahden:  Yeah that was too long ago.
Karla Nelson:  And so in order to achieve your goals, just for context purposes, we are not talking about personal goals, these can, these, what we’re going to talk about today and strategies in using the   WHO-DO™ method in order to achieve your goals can be applied to personal. But for the purpose of this podcast, we’re specifically talking about business schools and how to facilitate your team. And you have to remember one of my great mentors of all time has one of the best quotes on this, Allen, which is “if you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it with amazing accuracy.“  Zig Ziglar. And I always like that because it really creates a visual around, how will you know where you’re going, right?
And then for a team understanding that we’re all going there together and there are psychological neuroscience proven facts about why you write goals. And there’s this really interesting Forbes article on it that broke down the two really main reasons why it’s critical to write your goals down, which identifies the external storage, right? It is sitting someplace that is your bullseye that you’ve created regardless of your bullseye sitting on a piece of paper, in your computer, right?
Some people write them on their whiteboard. I’ve had seen people write on their mirrors, right? So, they see it every single morning. So, it’s actually having that external storage of writing where it is that you want to go. But the second one is kind of a little bit more interesting and, I never heard it called this before, reading the article, which was encoding and Allen, you know this, I write everything down. I got pieces of paper everywhere and it’s not that I don’t know how to type. I actually typed really well, but I can’t remember things when I type it.
And encoding is a biological process where our perception, right, in our brain, the perception are out external stimulus travels to our hippocampus, where then we analyze that data or information and decide what gets tossed out and what we throw out and discard versus what do we store in our long-term memory. And I thought that was really interesting.
Allen Fahden:  Yeah. And this is a good period of time to build up our long-term memories given the health problems a lot of people are having with forgetting things.
Karla Nelson:  Yeah, that’s a good point. It probably does. It’s like a muscle that you build up over time. Right?
Allen Fahden:  Absolutely. And, I think it’s an interesting thing because believe it or not, there’s pain that comes with not doing your goals. For example, how do you know what to say yes to and no to? And especially with shakers who are so random, it’s like, “Oh that looks good, Squirrel! Shiny object.”
And so what happens is people get off purpose and let’s say they have a goal, even if they don’t write down their goals, they kind of know where they want to go. And they say, “well, why did I waste this year? I didn’t get anywhere near where I wanted to get.” So, this can be a great pain reliever, which is imprinting your goals and then you can be very clear about what you don’t want to do. And oftentimes saying no to things buys you a lot more time than saying yes to things.
Karla Nelson:  I love that. And your example of the shaker, and we’ll get into a little bit about perception in a moment though, is when you write your goals down to now, the shaker can in doing that and what to say no to, you can say yes and you can play within your goals. So, you can go ahead and embrace your core nature of work, but understand that the object of the exercise is not to come up with another goal. That’s why you write it down, right? And it’s keep that focus.
I mean, and we’ll go through each of the core natures of work in perception in a moment, but I agree with you and what you’re saying, how do you say yes to what you need to say yes to in order to accomplish it? And then how do you say no to something that’s either distracting or not in alignment with where you’re going? Because now you know in it as far as a shaker, that’s, well a lot of times when we see Shaker CEOs, that’s not the case because remember we’re talking about company goals is that they’re run home to mommy is to come up with a new idea. And so, every quarter core nature of work is going to respond differently, right? And the first step is, hey, we’ve got to get everybody to agree as a team, at least leadership, right?
And the more people on your team that agree with where you’re going, that’s a real big purpose of creating that buy-in, right? And so, I think that, in each core nature, we’ll do it on the wrap up of each core natures of work of how they see that perception of that goal. So, I’m going to make a note on that, Allen, that we can come back to that just before we move into the how people can use it.
Allen Fahden:  Sounds great.
Karla Nelson:  You know what that reminds me of though? The Marshall Thurber and talk about alignment, right? Because that’s really what we’re talking about here is having a team on the same page.
Allen Fahden:  Well, and you think about that, all the arguing and all the negative thoughts that come when people don’t agree they’re not on the same page. So when you set a goal, you have an opportunity for people to, even though people are different, we’ve said that for years, people are different. So they may view things differently, but if they’re all on the same page when it comes to the goals, then that’s a way to get people aligned. And what Thurber did was he had bet on every Super Bowl since the very beginning and he’d never lost a bet. And people said, “how can you do this? How can you,” because there were a lot of upsets and things like that. He said, “Simple, I don’t pay any attention to how many points they’ve scored, how many touchdowns or what their yardage is, I bet on the most aligned team and I won every year.”
So think about that, think about these upsets in these sporting teams or when, even a company defies all odds and gets to the top of things, look how you can’t believe this, there’s going to be another Apple example here, but by aligning around doing something different. Look what Apple did, everybody’s pushing the same direction, that’s very powerful.
Karla Nelson:  Yes. And it doesn’t come from doing a ropes course people, just saying, those are fun. And by the way, it does prove when you are aligned, you can overcome ridiculous obstacles. But the thing is that they’re given one obstacle with no process by which to make decisions. And so, you can get aligned going over a ropes course because there’s one objective. What we’re going to talk about today is how do you get aligned with these goals that you want to achieve over a 12-month process?
And so in looking at that, I think we should just jump into the how a mover-shaker, prover-maker would write goals… Or their perception, how about not how they write goals, their perception of how far out a shaker will look than say a maker. Right?
Allen Fahden:  Yeah. Good one.
Karla Nelson:  Each core nature of work is going to have a different… So, a shaker, is going to be big picture 50,000 feet. And you’ve got your movers going to get down to 15,000 feet and then your prover is going to get down to 5,000 feet and then your makers down at 500 feet. So, understanding that is critical, right? Of who’s on your team, their perception of how they would see writing goals differently.
Allen Fahden:  Absolutely. And a shaker will say, have a goal that’s so lofty that you made people just kind of shake their heads, well we’re going to change the world by doing blah blah blah and whereas a mover may have a more practical thing which is, “let’s increase our market share this year by 20%, those two would work very well together as they are on the same page.
Maybe all you need is a 20% increase in market share to take over the world of whatever your category is and be the best in the world. But then a prover’s got a completely different viewpoint. “Oh, I think our goal should be, reduce spending,” and then the maker, you’d never know what the maker’s going to have as a goal. And I’ll give you an example of that. I was speaking once before a chamber of commerce audience teaching in the creativity seminar at the very end I said, “well what do you think? Are there any questions?” No hands go up. And then finally, and this was a whole room full of makers, you could just tell finally in the back of the room, a hand comes up and “Oh, you’ve got a question, what’s your question?” And she said, “Could we get some more of those donuts back there in the back?”
So, everybody’s got a different viewpoint and yet…
Karla Nelson:  You know what? It’s crazy because if their stomachs were empty and they couldn’t pay attention, that actually could be a decent goal. But it’s just so different from what you’re going to get from, “hey, we want to take over the world” to “can I have some donuts?” So that’s just, like you were saying, and we’ve said forever people are different, so that’s why it’s so critical to gain that buy-in and get the people, everyone on the same page through your ideation. So,
Allen Fahden:  That’s right and you have to have that.
Karla Nelson:  You have to go through that and get everybody on the same page. So, if you’ve got take over the world, increase market share, reduce spending, and know more donuts, then you have to start-
Allen Fahden:  They can all be compatible, if you communicate.
Karla Nelson:  If you communicate.
Allen Fahden:  And understand.
Karla Nelson:  Yes. And the other piece I think here, which is critical Allen, is that when you write goals typically you know it’s 12 months out, so it doesn’t feel like it’s reachable. That’s why it’s a little bit easier for earlier adopters to go further out then say, “I want more donuts or better coffee or something like that.” But you also have to run the process twice in ideation because say for instance you have an agenda that is, we want to rewrite our vision statement. So, for instance, ours is, we want to revolutionize the way work is done. Well, after you completed that task, you’re going to shift gears into implementation. Now your prover becomes your point guard and you’re getting it done. Well, now all of a sudden, it’s like, okay, well it needs to be on the website.
We need to maybe put it here, we need to, like you still could run the implementation because there is a plan by which you are handing it over and I think a lot of people write goals and they go, “okay, let’s say we want to increase market share by 15%.” Well you have to then go back because until you have that plan, you have to keep on running ideation and dive down into the how? So, it’s, “what are we going to do” is ideation. When you’re writing goals because it’s so far out, then you have to go ideation again. How are we going to do it? Because now it’s like, okay, come up with all the ideas. We’re going to build strategic relationships with commercial banks. We’re going to create some type of referral program. We’re going to create, add extra points when we facilitate this way. So, you’re going to have to come up with all those ideas.
As the approvers got to have something tangible, a one liner, which is how goals are typically written, is not enough to then hand off to the team as far as implementation. It’s going to how much, when, who, like all of those things have to be handed off to the prover because you’re still going to run into challenges and issues and have to run the process, but you don’t hand it off because then you’ve got everybody staring at each other going, “okay, we’re going to increase market share by 15%.” Crickets, right? Or it’s everybody then running, doing different things. Now they’re not moving as a jointed team and the implementation aspect of it.
Allen Fahden:  So, part of that is to learn, who’s got the right inbox that matches the right outbox so that people can talk to each other and understand each other and not have conflict. And that’s built in to the WHO-DO™ method, but especially when you get into implementation, you start getting into these more finite things. You get down to a level of where you’re moving from strategy down to tactics and you’re getting like 50 feet off the ground. And that’s where it becomes so important. And that’s why the prover is a great, great person to be running the implementation part because they are the ones who can organize and run a-
Karla Nelson:  Yes, like you don’t want to give them a blank page. And the other piece of that is, now here’s the key, Allen just said in the implementation stage, because think about your idea there you said with the prover earlier reduced spending. What if you handed that off to a prover and that’s all you did and didn’t figure out how you were going to reduce spending, right?
Allen Fahden:  Disaster.
Karla Nelson:  Disaster, why, because you didn’t get specific enough. That’s why they’re going to make it up and they’re going to see it and they’re going to see that the perception of reducing that spending very different than a shaker are very different than a mover, different than a maker. And so that’s why it’s critical. You have to run the ideation twice. It reminds me of a large bank that…
Allen Fahden:  Absolutely.
Karla Nelson:  You know where I’m going with that.
Allen Fahden:  There’s a large bank corporation, when they repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and allowed banks to own brokerage companies, they decided to buy one of the hottest brokerage companies in the country. And so what did they do now? These people were going, I mean their book of business was expanding meteorically they paid top dollars like $1 billion. They paid for this company. And after about a year and a half, the book value of it was down to about half of what it was. And all the clients were saying, “Hey, if you don’t leave this big bank, then we’re going to leave you. Otherwise if you leave them and start something new, we’ll go with you, but we can’t stand this.” And here’s a, you get down to the cause of that. The provers had kind of taken over, unchallenged. And so, one of the things they did was, okay, we bought the company, so you’re going to have to change your ways and play by our rules.
And they had, because they saved money on airline tickets. They had him fly through hubs and that was great, except they started missing meetings and being late for meetings. And the customer service was just trashed. So, nobody had talked this over and the damage that was done just by taking over a kind of a hot entrepreneurial company and laying the rules down on them of the big corporation, can be tremendously-
Karla Nelson:  Disaster, even though you can have the same goal. And that’s kind of the point here is, you can have a goal of reducing spending and there’s a million different ways to implement that. And so, you want to not only get buy in, but you also, it would have been different instead of handing over to the prover here reduced spending but then figuring out the how, but think about it. You didn’t give the prover a chance to even poke the hole in the fact of, Oh, the idea of not going through hubs. You see, that’s the second piece of the ideation is going they could have said, “hey, this is how we can reduce spending. We’re going to reduce our travel costs. We’re going to go see your hubs,” and then when you run the process before handing it over you would have been like ooh that might, we have got to think about that because now they might have to get in the day before and get a hotel room because, missed meetings-
Allen Fahden:  It could actually increase expenses on that note, have to have an extra night of hotels
Karla Nelson:  And they might decide on a different goal instead of reduced spending, it’s increased revenue. So the whole point is that if you give it to another team member unchecked they’re going to run home to mommy and it’s really critical with goals that you not only figure out what to do, but then how are you going to implement it and get as specific as possible
Allen Fahden:  In a way where everybody wins. So, it’s not a zero sum game. You know when they cut the expenses, made them fly through hubs. Well the parent company won, because they had less, fewer expenses but the company they acquired lost big and then ultimately it came back and beat the parent company in big chunk so-
Karla Nelson:  Yes, because they didn’t take the time to analyze it. It’s just, “oh, we need to reduce expenses. So, well that is awesome. And I have written my goals for 2020 we’ve written our business goals and we’ve written our personal goals, which is pretty cool because normally I’m about halfway through January before I actually get to them. But this year that was one of the nice things about the holidays. So remember, write your goals down because you create an external storage for your goals and then you also encode them so that your perception of it travels to your brain, where then you analyze them and figure out what’s going to get checked and what’s going to get stored long-term. So any last words on that, Mr. Allen?
Allen Fahden:  Well, I just thinking of personal goals too. And that reminds me of my favorite sage of great wisdom, Yogi Berra, who was asked if he wanted his pizza cut into eight slices and he says, “No, absolutely not, please cut it into six” and I go, “why?” He says, “Oh, I could never eat eight.” So, if you’re truly, if you want to lose weight this year, just get your pizza cut into six slices instead of eight and you’re going to be way ahead of the game.
Karla Nelson:  There you go. Well, awesome. Here’s to an awesome 2020 and we look forward to seeing you next time.