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Satisfaction Destroys High Performance

This article is more than 10 years old.

Leaders who are trying to achieve high performance in their organizations must beware of the allure of satisfaction.  Allowing teams to feel satisfied for very long will leave you stuck on a performance plateau that is very hard to exit.  Setting easy to hit goals—or worse yet no goals at all—is a trap.

My 18 year old college-bound son came across an article he found interesting by James Clear, titled Forget Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead.  Clear argues that goals just create stress, but systems (your consistent behaviors that will generate results) are what you really need. However translate that thinking to a midsized business, and you may have hundreds or thousands of employees running through the motions of their daily work processes but not contributing to organizational success.  The owners of such midsized businesses most certainly have goals in mind, like profit, cash flow, or achievement of the vision.  If the business doesn’t make progress, its leaders will end up with a goal of finding a new job.  Consider what happened at Apple.

Steve Jobs understood the importance of keeping a team hungry for success. When he regained control of Apple in 1997, he told his team they would all have to leave the company over the next two years because they were too content; they’d already tasted success. Fourteen years later, his new, much-hungrier team turned Apple into the world’s most valuable company.

Appropriate, “just achievable” goals must be set such that leaders are excited about achieving them. However, goal setting alone is not enough.  Leaders must craft and write strategies and action plans (or systems, in James Clear’s parlance) and diligently execute them.

The setting of goals is a powerful admission that today’s corporate results are not good enough for next year.  It should make you dissatisfied with your current condition.  Top athletes do celebrate when they win a game (momentary satisfaction), but quickly they look forward to the next game, hungry to win again.  The risk of failing to win pushes them to perform at higher and higher levels.  If a leader in your company truly just wants to feel satisfied with the status quo (and you want high performance), then let them work for your competition.

Goals don’t exist independently.  There are sets of goals that must work together.  First, there is a long-term company vision & long term goals.  Supporting the vision are shorter term goals.  The idea is to set longer term goals that keep us hungry (and dissatisfied) over time but also to set short-term goals we will achieve often.  This allows for celebration (and some satisfaction) propelling us toward our long term goals. We must also re-evaluate our goals at times and adjust when necessary since conditions change.

Midsized companies live in a world that they don’t have control over.  They earn profits because they figured out how to deliver value to their customers despite all the surprises and setbacks.  I’d argue that the more uncertain the environment, the more essential goals are, because to set them you must analyze the situation, prioritize, make decisions, then adjust the plan and execute. In total, I call this planning and plan governance. This is healthy.

Some leaders focus too much on hitting targeted results, beating the team up month after month for shortfalls.  Instead, focus on the right behaviors (systems).  For example, measure if the sales team is prospecting enough.  Track if prospects are moving through the pipeline at the right pace.  Set goals to measure if the team is following known good habits.  For example, “We will make ten proposals to qualified prospects each month”.

A system for systems

Leaders of midsized companies can’t afford to think about goals and systems as a New Year’s resolution.  Keeping the team dissatisfied but inspired by the goal requires a tried and true process tended year ‘round.  The approach I use with my clients is the One Page Business Planning process, and you can watch me explain it in a short video here.

Follow me @RobertSher and check out my upcoming book, Mighty Midsized Companies; How Leaders Overcome 7 Silent Growth Killers.