You Don’t Know Your Strategies and Goals from a Hole in the Ground
I’ve always enjoyed this time of the year at work. Your coworkers realize that they haven’t made any progress on their vague and ambitious annual goals from the prior year. That causes a flurry of meetings to regroup and rescope their totally well thought out plans so they can finish something by next December. This article will help you pause and reflect on what you’re trying to achieve, and might prompt you to rethink whether or not you have the right strategy and goals in mind to begin with.
Quick, recite your company’s mission statement. Don’t cheat and look on the website — just rattle it off. Raise your hand if you nailed it (or at least remembered most of the words). Raise your other hand if you can state at least one of the strategies that your team is using this year. Wave your hands in the air like you just don’t care if you can tie your to-do list with the objectives for your group.
Don’t feel bad if you’re not waving your hands around. The first Google search result I found said that 61% of employees have no clue what their company’s mission is. I would bet that another 38% only have a vague idea of what the mission is, and the other 1% are the people who wrote the mission statement. They probably thought it was a masterpiece when they wrote it last year. Maybe next year’s mission statement will be better (because nothing instills confidence quite like a constantly changing mission).
I’m going to walk you through a few fundamentals on how to create a mission, the strategies to achieve that mission, and the steps you need to take along the way. This methodology can be used for any size of company or team (even a team of one for my self-employed readers out there). I anticipate some skepticism there, but let me assure you this isn’t just busy work as long as it helps your company and industry understand who you are and where you’re heading. It’s a lot easier to align goals between departments (and even on the same team) if you know how your work fits within the overall journey.
Two important things to keep in mind: 1) You won’t get everything 100% right on the first try. The best strategies are usually the result of smart people iterating on a few core ideas. 2) It doesn’t matter what your title is — you can do this exercise at any level of the organization. I would argue that the front line workers are typically the best audience to sniff out any BS masquerading as wisdom. If you can hear the eye rolls when you present your statements, then go back and try again.
Begin by picturing where you want your company/team/group to go. It’s hard to chart a path if you don’t know where you want to end up. This is the Vision for your team. Don’t worry about timelines and resources yet. Focus on a clear, simple, and memorable destination that is worth the journey. Try an exercise with your team to see if the places they want to go are anywhere close to what everyone else is thinking. You will be surprised at the breadth of ideas from even a small group. Have the group vote on a favorite, or average the results until you get to an acceptable destination (unlike when your spouse votes to go skiing, your kids vote to go to the water park, so you end up going water skiing and pleasing no one).
Second, craft a general (yet memorable) statement of how you’ll get to your destination. This is your Mission statement. Focus on an action to be taken or a process to be completed. You’re aiming for just enough words to describe how your Vision will be achieved. An example will help — if my Vision was to be the best writer on LinkedIn, then my Mission could be to become the only source for career advice on the platform (or the mission could be to eliminate the other writers on LinkedIn, leaving me the best writer by default). See? Mission writing can be fun (and certainly memorable).
Third, it’s time to form your strategies. Strategies are just statements of the ways you will use your mission to get to your vision. I say statements because you will probably need a few strategies to get there. It will be tempting to jump straight from the Mission to setting Goals, but don’t skip this step. To become the best writer on LinkedIn, I will probably need to write funnier content, understand and articulate hot business topics, and actually promote my article (instead of casting it out into the world to see if it survives on its own). Those strategies will help me achieve my mission, and they’ll also help me write applicable goals. You’re probably wondering why it didn’t take 8 hours and a catered lunch to craft those strategies, and while I do love a catered lunch, the fact remains that most people overthink strategy writing. You just have to keep breaking down your mission into things to do, and then into steps to accomplish those things.
Speaking of steps to do, it’s time to start writing some goals. Don’t overcomplicate this step either — you’re simply aiming for steps/milestones along the path of putting your strategy to work. Something easy and relevant that will help you knock out that strategy. Remember your SMART goals? That’s how you want to articulate your goals, because otherwise you may get stuck with an unachievable goal with no end date. That’s not exactly following the spirit of getting better at finishing things.
Back to my “super relevant to you” example — let’s start with the “promote my article” strategy from above. I’ll probably want to figure out which promotional options exist in the first few weeks, choose a cost effective promotional vehicle by the end of the month, and complete 5 advertisements/posts in month 2. There’s nothing there that’s too complicated to do, and those goals will definitely help me knock out the non-murder strategies to become the best writer on Medium. When in doubt, stick with the non-murder options.
If you’re feeling extra ambitious, you can break down the goals into specific objectives for each, and then action items for each objective, and so on. This is when you’ll want to loop in any other folks who will be completing the goals with you. You want their buy-in before they’re handed a to-do list, and not after they look at the list and sigh hard enough to deflate a lung. It’s not pretty, plus you’ll have to add “re-inflate lung” to the list, and then you’re already behind schedule.
Last thing to remember — all of the work you just finished is never truly done. Your competitive landscape will change over time. Your audience will be fickle and constantly demanding new and improved outputs. New writers will come out of the woodwork, and you’ll have to “encourage” them to go back into the woodwork. Stay flexible and open to incorporating new ideas into your strategies. Revisit your statements on a regular cadence (a couple of months before your annual goal setting time perhaps). Try asking a representative sample of folks around you to recite the Vision and Mission. If they stumble, then your statements aren’t very memorable (which isn’t helping anyone). Try again, and keep the language as simple and clear as you can get.
I’ve been through several strategy planning sessions over my career, and they all had one thing in common — No one has all of the facts. It’s okay to make some assumptions. It’s even okay to make some mistakes. As long as you have a worthwhile target, a rational path to get there, and objectives that are achievable with the resources at hand, then you are in good shape. Plus you accomplished all that without needing to go to an expensive offsite meeting. Maybe your next objective should be to ask for a cut of all that money you saved the company.
-Philip
