Architecting Change: Rethinking goal setting's role in achieving necessary change
We talk a lot around here about Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), and in this episode, we dive into an adjacent topic: the role that goal setting can play in making a case for and achieving important change in our organizations. The audio for this episode is from a LinkedIn Live that I hosted recently (if you'd like to hear about our every-other Wednesday Live gatherings, join our email list). Those Live sessions are geared toward changemaker leaders and strategic implementors within organizations who are hungry for ways to increase change effectiveness, increase employee engagement, and spend more time focused on achievement of their most important priorities.
In this episode, we look at:
A few of the factors that make change hard for people and teams;
Separating myth from fact about goal setting for change;
The importance of shifting how we think about goals from a win-lose mindset to a win-learn mindset;
I share some important tips for changemakers to increase their effectiveness at making the case for and achieving change in their work;
And share a set of key questions you can use to unblock change.
I also share some updates about opportunities to work with me this month to help set your 2023 up for success:
Join us for the week-long No BS OKRs series focused on achieving change, which kicks off next week (asynchronously on Dec 12, first workshop on Dec 13);
We have two very rare individual coaching slots available in our monthly membership 1:1 coaching schedule; and
I'm in the early stages of planning a cohort of our deep-dive Leading the Connected Strategic Organization learning series specifically for people who are neurodivergent.
This course is for people leaders (and aspiring people leaders) who want to improve their skills with communicating expectations clearly; leading through conflict; and leading their teams for growth and high performance. This class and what we practice in it are helpful for all leaders, but we're hearing especially positive feedback from autistic participants, leaders with ADHD, and people who have cognitive impacts from trauma. The approaches we learn and practice give leaders a toolkit they can adapt to their work (and fills in a lot of blanks for many of us who have struggled to develop effective leadership and management mechanics) to reduce the cognitive overhead of leading people and help us refocus on goal achievement and leading our teams for growth.
For more information on any of the above, find me at http://redcurrantco.com or email hello@redcurrantco.com.
A full transcript is included below!
Sharables:
“The only constant is change in the operating environment and sometimes, that can lead organizations to hunker down on internal change. But phases like this are a chance for us to really examine the status quo and see where we must make change.” — @saralobkovich [0:11:04]
“We don’t want to lose our high performers because we are resistant to change.” — @saralobkovich [0:12:44]
“The status quo is really risky too. So we need to be eyes open about the relative risk of maintaining the status quo and embracing change that needs to happen.” — @saralobkovich [0:13:19]
“Curiosity is an antidote to anxiety.” — @saralobkovich [0:19:04]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Coupon code: THINKYDOERS for No BS OKRs
Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey
TRANSCRIPT
EPISODE 7
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:05.7] SL: Welcome to the Thinkydoers Podcast. Thinkydoers are those of us drawn to deep work where thinking is working but we don’t stop there. We’re compelled to move the work from incite to idea, through the messy middle to find courage and confidence to put our thoughts into action. I’m Sara Lobkovich and I’m a Thinkydoer. I’m here to help others find more satisfaction, less frustration, less friction and more flow in our work. My mission is to help change makers like you, transform our workplaces and world. So let’s get started.
[PROMOTIONS]
[0:00:47.7] SL: Right now, registration is open for the next cohort of No BS OKRs, which runs the week of December 12th and this cohort will be focused on OKRs to achieve meaningful change. Participants will start and finish a set of OKRs on a page in a single week using our efficient effective approach for getting to inspiring and useful objectives and key results and I’ll be by your side the whole way through.
Registration is open now at findrc.co/nobsokrs. You can also find that by searching for me on Maven and to sweeten the deal, you can use the coupon code, THINKYDOERS, all one word, all in caps, to save $100 on your registration fee. This is a great way to invest your unused learning and development budget for the year before the clock resets on January 1st.
We are also doing something we don’t do very often, which is opening up availability for individual and group coaching. We are also doing something we don’t do very often, which is opening up availability for individual and group coaching and we’re hosting a bunch of year end and Q1 learning and development programs to help you start the new year right.
I have two very rare spots available for my monthly individual coaching package, which includes one, one hour, one-on-one coaching session every other week, and access to me in between coaching sessions for questions. Individual coaching is a great choice when clients need more hands-on help than our training group or corporate sponsored programs provide.
In the individual coaching, I work with mid and senior career professionals who struggle with being understood at work and with other challenges with workplace communication and relationship navigation.
The confidence to move from that trusted number two spot into the C-suite or self-employment and the mechanics of leading and managing people for goal achievement sustainably with a special focus on the needs of neurodivergent leaders and aspiring leaders and folks who struggle with the effects of trauma at work.
[0:03:12.8] We also focus on supporting people through career transition phases including job seeking, career change, career exploration and job shaping, which is when we might need practices to support wellbeing while you’re staying in a role that might be a misfit or that might be a challenging environment for you.
We have a few specials running through the month of December, so there’s never been a better time to reach out. We’re also about to announce a couple of new group programs for job seekers, career changers and job shapers. Complete information and ways to contact me about individual and group coaching are on my website at findrc.co/coaching.
Last one, before we dive in on today’s material. I’m also about to open a wait list for a super exciting upcoming cohort of my deepdive, Leading the Connected Strategic Organization. The upcoming cohort is going to be specifically for people who are wired differently or neuro-spicy, people who are neuro-divergent, autistic, have ADHD and/or wrestle with brains that are affected by trauma.
Email me directly, if any of those group programs serve interest and I’ll reply back within 24 hours with an update on which cohorts are available when, and what’s open for registration. My email is sara@redcurrantco.com and currant is spelled CURRANT.
Okay, with all that out of the way, I’m excited to share this recording with you. We’re going to be going live at least twice a month, so reach out through any of the ways I’ve mentioned here and I’ll recap my contact info at the end of the program if you’d like to be kept in the loop about future webinars and live events.
[DISCUSSION]
[0:05:11.8] SL: It’s lovely to have you all here this morning. Welcome. This is a little bit interesting because I think folks would think that I would just begin by talking about objectives and key results, since objectives and key results are what I live and breathe these days but I wanted to mix it up a little bit and talk about one of the cases for objectives and key results in our organization and that is using goal setting as a way to help us architect change.
This is my first time live on LinkedIn and I’m nervous and excited and it was really lovely to see so many familiar names in the RSVP list, so thanks for joining today. We are, as you know, here to talk about architecting change and how we can rethink goal setting to achieve the change that we see possible in our organizations and in our work and the purpose of this conversation is to partly acknowledge that change is really hard for people, for organizations.
There’s a book called, Immunity to Change that follows the research on how challenging change is for people. One of the big research points that they cite is that even in matters of life and death, when we know our when we are told by medical professionals, that we must make changes as a matter of life and death, people still have a hard time making change.
So we want to acknowledge that change is really hard and what we’re going to talk about today helps us shift how we think about goal setting, from a win-loss model or a win-loss mechanism to a win-learn model and that can help organizations increase their change impact.
[0:07:08.4] I’m also going to share a little thinking trick with you all because by virtue of you being here, I presume that you are change makers. It’s not folks who are averse to change that would have RSVPed yes for this particular live session.
So I have a little pro tip for you as change makers on how to increase your change effectiveness or your effectiveness at bringing others along in the context of change being difficult. So this is for change maker leaders, when I say strategic operators that means all the PMs. So project managers, program managers, product managers, chiefs of staff also and then also, folks who are in operational roles who are hands on around goal setting and change work.
Then the other people that we talk to here at Red Currant Collective and Thinkydoers are thinkydoers. So individuals who tend to be strategic thinkers who may struggle with frustration in their work. Sometimes as thinkydoers as strategic brains, we can be the only in our organizations or have an orientation that’s different from most of the other folks who are wired for implementation or execution.
[0:08:30.1] So we do create space for thinkydoers to connect with each other, learn from each other and ultimately, I hope to see Thinkydoers come together to change the world for the better. So I presume you are one of those buckets, since you’re here on this call today and I am our host, I’m Sara Lobkovich.
I’m the founder and principle consultant at Red Currant Collective and then I put in a little asterisk there, I’m also the co-owner of Counterweight Motorsports and CW Motoracing. So when I’m not doing this work around career and organizational peak performance, I co-own and operate a professional US National Motorcycle Road Racing team. That’s where I learn everything I need to know about performance, and then I just borrow from that work when I’m here at my desk.
So that’s what we’re going to work on today, that’s what we’re going to do together. I’m not going to read for you but I’m going to include in the materials that we send as follow-up. What we do at Red Currant Collective is OKR coaching and consulting for specifically for organizations forced on measurably improving outcomes. That’s our specialty here, making OKRs work better for organizations.
We also do a lot of learning and development work for change maker leaders and thinkydoer teams. A lot of our leader development is focused on people who may not have kind of had the easy pathway into leadership, people who might have been essential number twos, making the move into a P1 role We work with a lot of folks who are going from that kind of senior leadership level into the C-suite or moving through the layers of leadership and what they find is what got them there won’t get them there.
[0:10:22.3] What got us here won’t get us there and so a lot of our learning and development is focused on helping people leaders build consistent toolkits for leadership that they can carry with them through their entire career and then bringing together, as I said, community for folks who fit those criteria. So executive coaching and community connection for strategic operators and thinkydoers but let’s get into the meat of why we’re here.
This topic of how do we architect and successfully achieve change is always relevant but we are working and existing in a market right now where the volatility is bananas. The only constant is change in the operating environment and sometimes, that can lead organizations to kind of hunker down in terms of internal change but I see the phases like this as a chance for us to really examine the status quo and see where we must make change.
Where can we eliminate risk in a volatile operating environment by embracing opportunities to change? Performance pressure right now is really high, results are really critical in a down market like this and so again, this is a case for reexamining our business a usual and then making necessary changes so we can really focus on driving results and not necessarily on kind of just executing business as usual.
There’s also increased pressure. I mean, ever since the beginning of the pandemic on organizational purpose and employee engagement. So on that question of, “How does my work connect to what’s most important?” or “How does my purpose and how does my work matter?” those questions remain really top of mind.
There’s some great research on the impact that those questions play on retention and satisfaction and engagement in our work and so the acknowledging change in creating pathways to change are one of the ways, two of the ways that we can help increase employee engagement with those questions and also, employee sat around critical issues that do need to change and evolve.
[0:12:44.5] We don’t want to lose our high performers because we’re resistant to change. We don’t want to lose our high potentials because the organization is resistant to change and what gets in the way of change, you all know this as well as I do, change is hard. As I said, we have that immunity to change as human beings.
Even those of us who are wired for change, we’re still overcoming a lot of programming to have that orientation. Change feels risky but what we acknowledge in especially in market conditions like this is that the status quo is really risky too.
So we need to be eyes open about the relative risk of maintaining the status quo and embracing change that needs to happen and then there is just an uphill battle in a lot of organizations around organizational alignment and the internal appetite for change.
So this is a lot of information on one slide but I’m going to again, send it to you as an after read. These are the myths that I hear most commonly about goal setting for change and the one most common that I hear so frequently is, we can only set goals we can control.
[0:14:04.8] The model that I work with, with objectives and key results is based on setting goals around things that we might not control. We have to think beyond what we can control in order to actually change things.
So courageously and creatively setting goals that we influence even if we don’t actually control them, allows us to actually make change. When we set goals within our control, that leads to an overfocus on activities because we feel like we can control what we do every day, even if we don’t feel like we can control the outcomes we’re working toward or achieving.
And then it also tends to lead to really siloed or individualistic thinking because when we have to think together or when we’re thinking about collaborating, we are giving up some of our control and so this is a really big myth.
When we are working to change, we need to think about setting goals that we may influence, not only control and so then our organizational operating systems need to create safety for us to try and fail on those goals that are able to be tried and failed on in the pursuit of progress or learning.
[0:15:26.4] I also often hear from this is it comes up a lot amongst senior leaders, certain senior leaders that we can’t set challenging. We need to set goals that are very achievable for our teams because we want them to feel the success of goal achievement. Challenging goals are demotivating is one of the statements that I hear often and what we actually know from motivation science research is that setting the highest and most difficult produces the highest levels of effort and performance.
So again, these facts all presume a certain amount of healthy operating and healthy ecosystem in our organization around trust and safety but what we see in research from Locke and Latham on goal setting is that setting high and difficult goals actually produces the highest levels of effort and performance.
There is also a myth that is really common even in OKR circles that people have to write their own goals to be motivated by them and again, Locke and Latham’s research shows that participation in goal setting isn’t required for motivation if adequate rationale is given. So for teams or organizations that are struggling with thinking about the massiveness of properly setting and localizing ORKs and having everyone be involved in the goal drafting.
We can dial down that investment quite a bit by recognizing that according to the best available motivation science, if we prepare a strong rationale, if we communicate goals with a rationale as leaders, then that might bring our team along without them having to be involved in the drafting of the goals. They can be involved in the review of the goals and the communication about whether that rationale is adequate.
[0:17:24.3] Then the last one, this one I couldn’t even sum down to a handful of specific examples but I just hear objections around OKRs always that they are inefficient, that they are confusing, that they are inconsistent within the organization, that they waste time to create or we spend way too long creating them and not enough time working to achieve them and that particular, I shouldn’t even have shown that as orange, as a myth because those things can be true.
OKRs maybe really poorly implemented and so when we see those issues with how OKRs are implemented in an organization or when we see those symptoms, that isn’t necessarily that ORKs are all those things. It’s that the implementation in the organization is letting our OKRs be those things or be those downsides and so what we work to do with organizations is to ensure that those downsides of OKRs aren’t present.
That we have operating practices, rhythms, shared words and meanings that let us implement OKRs really simply, really efficiently and for usefulness. So our OKRs, our goals, they aren’t just something that sits on a shelf. They are created for the purpose of being used to help us make change and do better, so usefulness is a core principle. So victory on change with changing our mindset around goals replaces fear with curiosity.
Curiosity is an antidote to anxiety and when we can create conditions in our stretched goals, in our OKRs to be safe to try and even fail in the pursuit of learning and progress, we can be curious about what we find and how we’re doing at every step of the way, replacing that fear of what’s going to happen if we fail with it is safe to fail on these particular key results because they’re in the territory where we know they’re an experiment, they’re set a stretch.
[0:19:41.3] We work to replace the idea of winning and losing with winning and learning. So we are never losing in our stretch goal territories, in our change or transformation territories. We are winning, if we are on track, we’re making progress and if we’re off track, then we’re getting valuable learnings that we can learn from and figure out how to get back on track or shift our course or approach.
We are building resilience to take on hard challenges and celebrate progress. This isn’t a switch that flips overnight, what we’re talking about here is behavior that has to be modeled and reinforced by our leaders. We need to see our leaders taking these risk steps into uncertain territory and then being intellectually humble about what they learn. So we model replacing spin or focusing on looking better with actually sharing with our organizations the truth of how we’re doing and what we’re learning from it and how we plan to improve going forward.
We also, this is that mind shift slide that knowing who is on this call, knowing how many change makers we do have here, I wanted to give you a little nudge to rethink the role of the change maker because most of us become people who are working in change because we are professional problem solvers. We see the issues, we see the potential solutions, we see how things could change quite often.
So we’re the issue spotters, the solution seers, the answer havers and we get really depended on for those skills but what that does when we exercise those skills is it puts us in a position of persuading and trying to bring our organizations along with our vision, which is really important and that is a very important role that change makers play.
[0:21:44.7] But the reason we’re following that conversation about myths, within a minute I am going to share some key questions for uncovering change opportunity in your organization, is that the muscle that we as change makers can build to be more effective is actually around asking questions, building a case for change based on data not based on our opinion or what we see of the future or of what’s possible and then creating an opportunity for other people to come along on their own as collaboratively invested in the change that we saw possible.
So if you’re a change maker who is really strongly wired for solutioning, for enunciating the problem and the solution and then you experience what I hear about all the time in my coaching work with one-on-one clients is, “I just don’t feel like people engaged with my idea” or “I don’t understand the resistance in my organization” or “The feedback was really unsatisfying when I presented my vision of change.”
Then those are signals that we might work on our ability to question and collaboratively create the case for change with better data, with more participation from others, so that by the time we get to the room and we’re walking in and we are sharing that case for change and the solution, the other people around the table are nodding their heads because they’ve been involved every step of the way and they feel invested.
Instead of like, “I’m coming in with these outside ideas” that then, if they are fully baked, they’re going to go right to critical mode instead of collaborative mode. So that’s why we are going to look at some questions that you can use to unblock change in your organization and one is just one of the grounding questions that we always use in goal setting work especially in OKRs, which is, what is ultimately most important to achieve?
[0:23:59.8] It is pretty fascinating how rarely we ask and answer that question for ourselves when we’re just in the regular course of business or when for ourselves or our organizations when we are in the execution of our business but it is an important check in because if something isn’t most important, doesn’t mean we don’t do it but it leads to a second question of, why are we invested in doing it?
So asking that question, refocusing ourselves on what is ultimately most important to achieve, points us to what may need to change and what might need to change might be overwhelming. It might be scary, it might be not possible to implement in one bite but when we have that re-centering to ask ourselves what’s ultimately most important to achieve, it reminds us of the change that we need to consider working toward.
It gives us a chance to check in on our other activities and consider, “Do we spend this much time, effort and resources on these activities that fall into our most important bucket?” or “How can we gain some efficiency around those business as usual or the activities that fall outside of our most important as an organization?”
Another great question, this has become a bit of an activism point for me that we can ask, “Where would we benefit from better objective progress data?” So one of the dynamics I see over and over and over is that teams are estimating progress based on what percentage they feel they are complete with their work.
[0:25:49.4] In way too many cases, we are relying on subjective estimations of progress for keeping a pulse on our performance during the quarter or during the year and then at the end of the quarter or the end of the year, we look at what was our actual outcome on that factor and we might have missed the mark entirely. In the practice, we call those watermelon metrics because they’re green, green, green on the outside all quarter and then red on the inside on the ultimate measure or the ultimate outcome that that was designed to achieve.
So when we are trying to unblock change, we can look at where are those watermelons in our business, where are we at risk of watermelon-ing because when we are, we might be experiencing unnecessary risk or missing opportunities because we don’t have that good progress data to rely on, to examine how we’re doing and then we can also ask where would we benefit from greater experimentation.
This comes back to where are we afraid to try because we’re afraid to fail. So we can get deliberate about thinking about where would we benefit from greater experimentation, where do we need to put a special effort to know that we’re safe to experiment and even fail in the pursuit of learning and learning how to do better in the future and then another biggie is making the case for change on legacy or inefficient practices might require quantification.
This is one of those places where as change makers, we often spot the potential for things to be improved or done better but we might make that case as an opinion or an observation, where we can actually create ORK for a quarter to baseline that measure around how long we’re spending on one of those problematic legacy practices or one of those inefficient practices that we know we’re a problem but have struggled to get the green light to actually improve.
So we can set a goal for a phase to baseline and improve on one of those measures and then it might mean some kind of onerous data tracking to establish the baseline but sometimes, we can really strongly make the case for change by investing in getting data on how much time we’re really spending. So we may quantify the problem, so we can make a better educated decision and a stronger case about applying resources to fixing it. So those questions are my gift to you.
[END OF DISCUSSION]
[0:28:41.9] SL: All right friends, if you’d like to learn more about anything I’ve shared here today, you can drop your email on to our newsletter list at ck.redcurrantco.com or if it’s easier to spell, there is a shortcut to that URL from findrc.co/subscribe. If the spelling on Red Currant is too tricky, it’s Currant like the berries. So you can always reach me via email at sara@redcurrantco.com.
Thank you so much for joining and listening today. I’d love to hear from you about what resonated, where you got stuck or confused and that’s on me, not you. Also, if there’s anything you have questions about, you can find me at Sara Lobkovich everywhere. No, nothing here is easy to spell, I’m sorry but I am pretty sure I am the only Sara Lobkovich. So that’s Sara Lobkovich.
You’ll find a shortcut to the shownotes for today’s episode via Thinkydoers.com along with links to everything else we have mentioned here today. If you’ve got other Thinkydoers in your work world or in your social media network, please pass this episode along. We really appreciate your referrals, your mentions, your shares and your reviews. Thank you for tuning in today and I look forward to hearing the questions this prompts for you.
[END]
