What we can learn during the annual goals “silly season”
This podcast episode evolved out of our blog post from last week about “growing pains” teams experience with annual goals during this time of year.
This time of year is called the "silly season" in motorsports because we're in the literal middle of our racing season AND we're all already operating in the 2023 season: planning partnerships, talent moves, and logistics for the year we won't start for another six months.
Every summer I see something really similar with my corporate clients who set goals annually: sometimes between mid-July and September, even IF the organization did a mid-year reset after Q2, we find ourselves looking at our annual goals, scratching our heads, and wondering, "What were we thinking?"
For organizations that set goals annually in November or December of the previous year: when we set those goals, we did so based on the information we had at the time. Now, we have seven (or so) more months of information that may line up with or be dramatically different than the assumptions we set those goals based on. We know a lot more right now about what our goals for this year could or should have been. But, generally, now is not the time to "revisit" or "reset" our annual goals. In a lot of situations, it's better to stay the course, notice what we're learning about our goals while we work with them right now, and get ready for our next annual planning cycle (which is just around the corner) to improve, with what we learn during this "growing pains" phase.
This episode talks about a couple of specific opportunities that you can leverage for learning right now, while we're "living with" annual goals that may feel awkward:
The creative exercise of evolving (not changing) Objective language; and
What we can learn right now that makes us smarter about our most important organizational measures of success, which we may reflect next year as a North Star Metric and/or Topline Measures.
This awkward mid-year growing pain phase can be a source of frustration, and it can be a really valuable source of information and learning that helps us do better with our next round of annual goal-setting.
Key Points From This Episode:
If your organization is experincing “growing pains” with your annual goals right now, you’re not alone
Why Sara encourages teams not to over-deliberate when originally drafting Objectives, and why we focus on Objective themes and candidates instead
This time of year can be frustrating but it can also be a chance to get curious, and see what we can learn about how we might improve our goal models for next year
Writing down what we are learning during our growing-pains phase and why that’s important.
Why now’s one of the best times of year to consider the organization’s North Star Metric and Topline Measures
Why it’s risky to focus on revenue or growth as “the one key metric”
A few notes about how these pieces fit into the Connected Strategic™ Stack
Why taking stock of what you’ve learned thus far is important for setting up 2023 goals.
Tweetables:
“The awkward mid-year growing pain phase can be a source of frustration or it can be a really valuable source of information that helps us learn how to do better next time!” — @saralobkovich [0:03:48]
“I am not supportive of having a model where we are constantly moving the goal posts; introducing new objectives or changing the objects mid-year can be really disruptive.” — @saralobkovich [0:08:51]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
More personally:
My personal email list / blog: saralobkovich.com
Full episode transcript
(pardon the machine transcription errors here and there!)
EPISODE 4
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:04] 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 insight 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 you transform our workplaces and world. So, let's get started.
[EPISODE]
[00:00:47] SL: All right, friends. I had a little bit of time last week sitting at of all places of motorcycle track day to think about what's evolving in my approach to corporate goal setting. I know that sounds strange, but it was a day where I was working for the Track Day Org. and wasn't able to make the mental shift and context shift to ride myself, which got me to thinking about what my clients are seeing and wrestling with this summer in their aligned goal setting at work.
I took a few minutes to sit down and think through some of what I'm seeing clients learn and thought I'd share that with you today. So for those of us whose organizations operate on calendar years, this is the part of summer where things can get a little messy in our align goal model. Many of us are in implementation mode, working toward annual goals that we might have set back in November or December of 2021. Those goals may, even if we have done quarterly or semesterly refreshes, those goals may be feeling stale or they might be a little bit outdated at best or sending us in the wrong direction, at worst.
We've experienced really big changes in the market and operating environment and in our businesses. Working with clients around their OKRs and aligned goal models, I find this phase it's not just this year, I find this phase from mid-summer to early fall to be about the most awkward growing pain part of the year, every year. By this point, even organizations who have completed their mid-year check of their OKRs, even after that review, they might still be looking at their goals scratching their heads and thinking, what were we thinking when we set these? The reality is we may have set those goals in November or December. We might have set those goals at the end of last year at the beginning of this year, based on assumptions and predictions that we made quite a while ago. We did the best we could with what we had, where we were at that time. Now with the calendar, clicking into August, we have a little over seven more months’ worth of information that affects how we see the goals that we set. This will be welcome news to some and a shock to others.
2023 is going to be here before you know it. So it's important to stay focused on achievement of your 2022 goals, and now's a great time to shift our thinking to spend some of our attention on what we can learn now in preparation for our 2023 goal setting, because this awkward growing pain phase can be a source of frustration or it can be a really valuable source of information that helps us learn how to do better next time.
I'm going to talk about two pieces of this. I'm going to touch briefly on what you might be seeing or feeling in your objectives during this part of the year. Then we're going to talk a little bit about what we might learn about measurement this time of year during this growing pains phase or silly season. First, let's talk really quickly about what you might be seeing or feeling in your objectives. This time of year, I sometimes have clients have new ideas about what their objective language could or should be. That can lead to a little bit of tension at this time of year, because we set our objectives and key results, we might have even reviewed and affirmed them fairly recently with mid-year.
Now there might be places in the business where we have greater insight about what our objectives, perhaps should have been written as, so then we might find ourselves wrestling with, well, we don't want to constantly evolve our goals, but do we miss an opportunity if we've had an idea about improved objective language that might help us achieve more, because there is a little under half a year left that we could make big progress. This is one of the reasons that I encourage teams to not over deliberate on their objectives when we're forming them. I believe that objectives are a rather creative part of the goal setting practice that can't always be rushed.
When we set our objectives, I find it most helpful for teams and leaders and organizations to be really clear about what the objective theme or themes are, that are most important. Sometimes we see two themes together, but we identify the themes first and then we might write a candidate objective, but the crisp, clear, rallying cry, motivating objectives that might be coming to mind for you and your teams now that you've been working with themes with KRs headed in a direction together now for half a year. Sometimes those words come to us as we work with objective themes, a candidate objective and their KRs.
This isn't a part of the year where I encourage making a lot of changes to our objectives and key results, but this is a part of the year where if you have a model like that, where you recognized we identified our themes, we wrote the best objective we could, and now that objective has evolved, and we have better language that we can use to communicate our shared purpose, then I think it is okay to evolve an objective. If you have new objectives than at this point in the year, I'd say, those could be treated as a project or initiative based objective and then identify the most important measures of success that are important to achieve this year, but we try to avoid introducing net new organizational objectives at this point of the year, unless we miss some big opportunity otherwise.
If there's a really good reason to, then we absolutely can and sometimes must, but what we want to avoid is a situation where our goals are just always evolving, always changing, because then we lose the benefit of setting non-moving goalposts working to them and seeing what we learn. That's a bit of a long explanation. It's also a bit of a lawyerly, it depends. But if you are experiencing that dynamic, where now you have better language for your objectives than what you started with, at the end of last year, or the beginning of this year, write those down. It may be that that can become an objective nickname that might get picked up by the organization.
Usually, that is actually beneficial when the earlier objective language was so long or unclear or so draft that no one's paying attention to it anyway. I am supportive of evolving from weaker to stronger objective language at this point of the year, organically, but I'm not supportive of having a model where we're just constantly moving the goalposts introducing new objectives or changing the objectives mid-year can be really disruptive, unless it's really important and really business justified to do so.
All right, so that's how I'm thinking about objectives these days. We get crisp about their themes, we do the best we can with writing objectives during our set process, but then we know we're going to learn about that objective and what that objective language could be over the course of working with it. So we may remain flexible to better or improved objective language that might evolve as we work with our goals, But we're going to watch out, because we don't want to wind up in a situation where we're always moving our goalposts. It's better to set our goals and then see what we learn in working to achieve them.
Okay, so I'm going to give you a couple other things to watch for around improving Our measurement approaches. During this mid-year silly season, I've got three things you can watch for. One is for the objectives and key results that are feeling stale, uninspiring or that might be pointing you in the wrong direction. What do you notice about them? Are there any common threads or trends? Often, we might have set activity based goals that have just become irrelevant, because of changes in circumstances. Sometimes when we take stock, what we see is that we need to prioritize setting objectively measurable goals about what's most important, what matters most, because those will tend to keep us pointed in the right direction and give us flexibility to make our decisions about how to achieve them and adapt our activities.
You can also notice are there any goals that are way behind or ahead of pace? What do we notice about those? Is it that we didn't set them ambitiously enough? Did we set them too ambitiously? Have we set too many goals? Have we prioritized too many things? Are there goals that didn't actually get resourced or prioritized once we said they were a most important measure of success? So we can see what trends or patterns there might be by looking at our goals that might be way behind or ahead of pace. Then we can also look at if we've learned anything about what our most important durable measures of success might be. We'll talk about that a little more in a minute.
Taking a moment during this silly season to see what we're learning during our growing pains phase and writing it down helps identify critical areas of learning and improvement that we can draw on when we iterate for next year. This step also might help us identify some missing pieces of our connected strategic stack before we go into next year's planning. That's what we're going to talk about now is that two possible missing pieces of the puzzle around a North Star metric and our top line measures. I'll deep dive into the connected strategic stack in the future episode. I've written a bit about it on our website at thinkydoers.com, including the gaps that this stack approach is meant to address.
It's basically a way that we think of linking all of our strategic planning, our vision, our mission, our durable strategic plans, through to implementation by using flexible frameworks that work at any level of the organization. The connected strategic stack helps everyone in the organization know that their work connects to what's most important. Right now, we're going to focus on two pieces of that stack. One is the North Star measure, and the other is top line measures. For now, the way that we use the term North Star measure or metric in our model is that the North Star metric is the one inspiring company level metric that's most closely connected to our peak performance and purpose.
It's the singular measure that the entire organization should be focused on maximizing performance on. The idea of a North Star metric has been implemented in a bunch of high growth organizations, including Facebook Meta, Airbnb, Amazon, Spotify, and a host of others. So this isn't the idea of a North Star metric isn't original to our model. It was used in a lot of large organizations and then has been popularized in growth hacking circles. But in many organizations, the unspoken or even spoken most important metric is maximizing revenue.
There are a couple risks with maximizing revenue being what we think of as our North Star measure. One risk is increasing revenue only gives certain people in the organization a sense of purpose. I mean, yes, we are all employees in a commercial business, but some people aren't as motivated by increasing revenue. Some people might see the challenges that come with growth or some roles might be particularly affected by the challenges that come with growth.
Also, a focus on maximizing revenue doesn't necessarily take into account that revenue can come at great expense. We may need to look at profitability or margins to make those numbers make more sense for more of the business, but we still see revenue as a most important measure for many leaders. We encourage organizations to identify a non-revenue North Star that's more closely connected to the organization's peak performance and purpose. So that everyone in the organization can look up at that measure and be inspired to align their labor to the organization's success on that North Star measure wherever possible.
When we do so, that tends to support revenue growth, so a non-revenue North Star is a win-win. Then we identify a small number of most important company level measures as top line measures. Think of them as pillars that support our North Star. They are the small number of most important company level measures of success that the organization's labor must drive to maximize progress toward that North Star strategic plan, mission and vision. I always think of them as pillars of measurement that support our biggest picture strategy. These measures might evolve with more frequency than our North Star, but they do tend to be fairly durable, at least some of them or some may be more durable and then we might have some that reflect the places where we're innovating are transforming, that may evolve with a little bit more frequency. These are the major measures that right now are contributing or supporting achievement of our North Star.
Now, when I describe top line measures, sometimes people say, “Well, isn't that what our company key results are for?” It might be that that's the case in your organization, your company level key results might be at the fidelity of that thoughtful of a measurement model. But what I see sometimes is that the company level of key results have been ideated, based on what our most important measures of success are for a given quarter or year. So they don't always take into account that alignment to a long term strategy. You also may have more company level key results than are workable to think of as these top line measure pillars.
With only in most organizations have a handful of top line measures where we may in a typical company that has three to five objectives. If they have three or four or five key results per objective, that gets to be a number of potential measures that is too large for us to keep in mind as those pillars of our North Star. So then when we've got our North Star and our top line measures identified, then our key results can benefit from looking up at the North Star and top line and then taking direction from them inspiration, measurement ideas and possibilities that are already aligned to those known top line measures and North Star, so they become a lightweight measurement model that the organization can look to for direction when setting their own OKRs.
Now is one of the best times of year to take stock of what we've learned about what these measures might be. If we do that now, before we're setting our 2023 OKRs, we get some time to do some critical thinking some, experimentations, and testing before going into our 2023 reset. We can make sure that we go into our 2023 reset with that company level measurement model crystal clear as guidance for the rest of the organization.
[OUTRO]
[00:19:56] SL: All right, team. That's enough for today. Thank you for joining and listening. I would love to hear from you about what here resonated, where you got stuck or confused. That's on me, not you. Also, if there's anything you have questions about. You can find me at saralobkovich everywhere. It's S-A-R-A-L-O-B-K-O-V-I-C-H. I know I wish my name was easier, but on the other hand, you don't, once to your Lobkovich, you just own it. I think I'm the only Sara Lobkovich there is, so that makes it a little easier. My email address is a bit easier that is sara@thinkydoers.com.
I'd be thrilled to have you as an email subscriber for infrequent more formal just business messages, you can subscribe at redcurrantco.com. I've got a more personal list that takes side trails into topics around well-being, mental and emotional health and my motorcycle life and other serendipity at saralobkovich.com. You'll find the show notes for today's episode at thinkydoers.com.
Tune in for our next episode for a conversation about one of the least understood parts of goal setting key results. We'll cover some of what we've learned to help make key results impactful and usable for you and your organization and to help you and your organization use key results well to help close your own hope and confidence gaps and help increase the likelihood that you will achieve your big bold outcomes. Thanks again.
[END]