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HOW TO PINPOINT AN OBJECTIVE: 5 CRITERIA

Start at the "bottom," start small, and start specific.  Those are the general guidelines you want to follow in using the Pinpointing technique.  Let me expand a little bit on those guidelines, by outlining a few criteria that we use to make our clients' Pinpointing more reliable.  If you're facing a problem that relates to motivation and are considering remedies to solve it, I suggest you look at each objective with the following questions in mind:

1.         Can it be measured accurately?  Objectives, no less than Behaviors, have got to be quantifiable in order to make any sense to the people who are supposed to be aiming for them.  "Higher productivity" means nothing.  If you set your objective as "higher productivity," an 0.01 percent increase in production can be interpreted as "objective attained."  Unless you're turned on by flat growth curves, you don't want to settle for that.  A good, Pinpointed objective always includes the following information:  it says specifically (that is, numerically) what needs to be accomplished, by whom, and by what date.  In our seminars we use the following model for writing objectives:

"To (action verb) (quantifiable improvements in designated areas) by (date)."

And we add the name of the person or persons who are going to be responsible for the objective.

Some examples, following the model.  "To reduce waste on Joe Gaffey's production line by 0.8 percent by July 1."  "To deliver 75 percent of outstanding shipments by end of this month; shipping department foremen responsible."  "To complete half of the ABC financial statements by April 10; supervisor Judith Carson."

The advantage of setting objectives in quantifiable terms like these is twofold.  First, you know exactly what you're aiming for.  Second, you know exactly when you've achieved it.  If there are eight ABC financial statements in all and Carson completes three of them by April 10, you know the objective has not been attained.  You can't know that if you originally set the objective as "getting some headway on the ABC statements."

There's a motivational benefit, too.  It's a hell of a lot easier to psych people up for going somewhere if they know the destination in advance.  Sure, some folks just like to drive, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that.  But do it on your vacation time, not in the office or the factory floor.  Because if you just "drive" in the general direction of "improvement," you're going to get nowhere.  And you'll get there alone.

 

2.         Is it realistic?  In other words, can it be done?  And - even more to the point - can it be done by improving the effectiveness of human (rather than mechanical) performance?  Maybe you'd like that production line to churn out three times as many units as it's doing now, so you can fill a sudden, increased demand.  Fine.  But if the running capacity of the line is only twice its current speed, you can motivate the hell out of your people there and you're still going to fall short of your goal, even if you can perform the dubious task of getting the human actors involved to double their speed of operation.

 

The first big client I had when I started my consulting business was a North Carolina-based Cannon Mills plant.  They had a headache with turnover, and they didn't know why.  At the time I had one employee:  a sharp young behavioral specialist.  After checking out the Cannon operation for several weeks, he told me that the line managers were so gung-ho about meeting production quotas that they were creating their own "law of diminishing returns."  You know how that works.  You whip a horse a little bit and you might get him to run a little faster.  Overdo it, though, and you're eventually going to demotivate the poor nag:  if the horse sees no amount of super effort is going to satisfy you, he's going to buck you off, lie down, or both.

 

It was the same thing with the Cannon Mills workers, and we cut down on the turnover problem in what was really a very simple way.  We explained the diminishing-return principle to the line managers, and got them to set more realistic production goals.  Not only did turnover drop, but production actually went up!

 

Setting your objectives at a realistic level means making sure that they are consistent with the resources you have.  That means human and nonhuman resources.  The best-defined, most clearly quantified objective in the world is still going to fall flat if your physical resources can't handle the extra load - or if the people who will be involved in reaching the objective aren't convinced it can (or should) be done.  If Carson doesn't think she has a sparrow's chance in a tornado of getting the ABC statements in when you want them, the date you're looking at is by definition unrealistic.

 

I don't mean you should set your goals so low that a well-trained baboon could attain them.  Setting realistic goals is a matter of balancing the attainable with the challenging.  That's a tricky balance to find sometimes, but it's an often overlooked fact that the people who have to perform the objective usually have a pretty fair sense of where that balance lies.  So ask them.

 

3.         Is it meaningful?  Is it worth doing?  Will the objective that you're considering really, visibly, improve a key performance area in your organization?  And will that performance improvement feed in naturally to the larger, long-term goals that are going to keep your operation healthy?

 

In the great old movie The Caine Mutiny, Humphrey Bogart, playing the rattled Captain Queeg, gives a classic portrayal of a manager who doesn't know the difference between meaningful and meaningless performance.  Queeg, a case study in how not to motivate a crew, uses the typical "four insults to one word of praise" of the bad manager, and at one point in the story turns his entire ship upside down to find a pint of strawberries that he believes has been stolen from the officers' mess.  The Great Strawberry Hunt, which finally convinces the crew that he's bonkers, is a classic example of using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito.

 

Granted, no manager wants stealing going on under his nose.  Stealing is definitely the kind of Behavior that you want to demotivate whenever you can.  But Queeg in this case was doing what many "rule-oriented" managers end up doing:  confusing his own authority with his team's performance and effectiveness.  He was able to convince himself that finding the strawberry thief was a worthwhile objective, but he was unable to convince the crew.  As a result, the energy he put into the search - and forced the crew to put in - eventually lowered their performance rate rather than increasing it.  The same thing happens ever time a gung-ho administrator transforms one of his own pet projects - say maintaining a rigid agenda for management meetings - into a crusade against company "inefficiency."

 

To be effective as an incentive toward greater motivation, an objective has to be understood as important by everyone in a position to impact it.  Everyone.  If that doesn't happen, you're going to have every department head off on his own Great Strawberry Hunt, with no coordination - and no results.

 

4.         Is it easily understood?  Start small and keep it simple.  It's the old story of "one step at a time."  Leave it to the financial wizards upstairs to plot out our company's every move for the next five years.  If you're trying to motivate behavior at less than the boardroom level, you always do better by focusing on immediate gains.  And on those single Behaviors you need to make them a reality.

 

I once saw a sales manager give a year-end address to his reps that showed the relative value of simplicity and detail in Pinpointing objectives.  His company was about to move into a potentially lucrative new territory, and he spent about forty-five minutes telling the salespeople why that was a good thing.  He had charts and overheads and magic markers coming out of his ears.  He traced the competition's experience in the territory over the past three years.  He itemized the potential revenues available, explained the company's expansion plans, and went into detailed demographic breakdowns of the area, practically street by street.  He described everything but how to ring each individual doorbell, and then finished with this conclusion:  "The upshot is that we should be able to capture 40 percent of this new market within the first eighteen months."

 

That was the objective, clearly stated.  But he had taken so long to state it that half his audience got lost along the way.  I'll never forget the comment I overheard from one young sales rep after the manager had tied up the talk.  "If that's what he wants us to do," he whispered to his neighbor, "why didn't he just say so up front?"

 

A word to the wise is enough.  If you can't state the objective you want in the "model" form I mentioned above, maybe you don't know what it is.  Maybe you have two or three     objectives.   If so, you should split them up, talk about them with the people to whom they apply, and attack them one by one.  You want to row across the Atlantic Ocean, fine.  But you start with one pull of the oars.

 

5.         Is it "owned?"  This is probably the most important criterion of all, and it's the one most managers forget.  We're back to Square One in the analysis of motivation:  people will only perform - will only change their Behaviors - if it makes a difference for them to do so.  The way you show them that difference is by ensuring their stake in the objectives you want.

 

The former general manager of my company, Hank Conn, had a favorite expression that illustrates what I'm saying.  Hank said, "People don't resist their own ideas."  So if you want them to contribute to your goal, make sure they see it as their goal, too.  People will work for their own goals.  And those are the only ones they'll work for.
 
Now, there's a straightforward and reliable method for getting people to "own" an objective, and it's not the common ruse of selling them a bill of goods.  I've been talking in this chapter as if you, the individual manager, figure out what your objectives are and then transmit that favored information to your teams.  Actually, that's not what happens.  Not in any effective team setting.  The way you achieve group ownership of goals is to involve every member of your team in the original setting of those goals.
 
There's a critical distinction to keep in mind here.  It's the difference between simply having an objective and helping to set that objective yourself.
 
Say I'm supposed to push the yellow button six times an hour and you're my line foreman and you tell me, "Fran, I want you to increase it to eight."  I can be said to have a new objective, but I sure as hell can't be said to own it.  But say you take me aside on a break and say, "Listen, Fran, we have an inventory backlog that's driving the bookkeepers crazy.  How much faster do you think you can move the size forty-two units through your section?  What's a reasonable speed-up time until we get the backlog under control?"  What's my reaction going to be then?  I've tried this hundreds of times, and I can tell you what it will be.  It'll be to set myself a higher objective than the one you had in mind.  Because you've had me set it myself.
 
Traditional management doubts this.  There's a strong suspicion of mere "workers" on the part of traditional managers, and many of them remain convinced that, if you let the guy on the line set his own objectives, he's going to set them too low.  In a lot of cases this is true, but do you know why?  It's because the workers involved have only learned to fear the consequences of failing to meet an objective, and have never been properly rewarded for success.  Naturally if your primary focus is fear of failure, when you get a chance to set up your own target you're going to put it two feet in front of you, not twenty.
 
But if you're part of an organization where people are consistently encouraged to perform better, where they're reinforced according to the "4:1 Syndrome," and where performance really does make a difference to them, you're going to find them setting objectives that find that difficult balance between "attainable" and "challenging" every time.  And you're going to find that, when they miss the balance, it's because they set their sights too high, not too low.
 
I'm not saying that the guy on the production line should necessarily have the last word in deciding how fast the line should run or how many quality checks should be performed or how often the lubrication can should be brought out.  Any effective objective has got to be acceptable to everybody involved in its implementation - and that means supervisors and management, too.  In fact, the establishing of "ownership" means that managers have to own the objective also.

The way you establish management ownership is a very simple one:  you get the relevant supervisor to give approval.

Getting approval for the objectives that you've Pinpointed is the last step in the "P" stage of the P.R.I.C.E. motivation system, and it's critical.  When I say everybody involved in achieving the objective has to believe it will work and want it to work, I don't mean that these people should make unilateral choices without consulting management.  We're talking about cooperation, not revolution.  You know what will happen to a game plan that only the line workers see:  unless it's so brilliantly conceived that it outstrips management's wildest dreams, eventually it's going to run into trouble.  Eventually a department head or division manager or financial whiz from corporate headquarters is going to get wind of the plan and say, "This thing's no good because I didn't sign off on it."  And you're right back to Square One.

You can't avoid approval, and you shouldn't try.  But approval from the top alone is just as useless in establishing ownership of objectives as unilateral consensus from the "bottom."  That was true in every huddle I ever "managed," and it's true of every successful business group:  the objectives that work are the ones that everybody agrees can and should work.  The reason hooks right up to motivation.  It's that when you feel an objective to be your own, you're going to want to make it a fact.  So you're going to be motivated to perform those Pinpointed Behaviors that can bring it into being.  And the reverse is equally true:  no ownership, no motivation.  No motivation, no Behavior change.  No Behavior change, no results.

To summarize the Pinpointing process, then:  you start with objectives that are easily identifiable and measurable, and you check to make sure that those Pinpointed objectives are also realistic, meaningful, and simple to understand, and perceived as personally worthwhile by everyone involved in their implementation.  That process comprises the first, essential step in motivating people toward their achievement.

The second step is to establish a scorekeeping system by which people can tell how fast and how far and in what direction their motivation is taking them.  I call that step Recording.

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