And How NASA used it to put a man on the moon.
You’ve finally found it…
How do you set employee performance goals that your team will attack automatically?
How do you build behavior like that into your company culture?
When you’re setting employee goals and trying to get your team to break free from old performance levels, the challenge is to get human nature to work for you without feeling like you’re using a red hot poker.
I’m going to show you the same approach that I used to grow a business fifty percent a year for five straight years. And the cool thing is you’re already familiar with it and you learned it before you were eight years old…
I’m going to show you the complete blueprint for setting employee goals and objectives that will actually drive growth in your business. It’s the same approach that NASA used to put a man on the moon.
If you’ve taught a child to ride a bike, then you’ve seen it in action.
Leaders who are the most effective at building high performance teams understand how their teams respond when goals and objectives are set.
Call it emotional intelligence or experience but either way they understand what it takes to build confidence from the inside out so their teams repeatedly attack bigger and more challenging goals.
Much of my success as a business leader came in part because of the approach I used to set business goals. I’ve often used a series of escalating goals based on my team’s prior successes and what they believed they could accomplish to teach them how to build momentum and grow the business.
Every time the team succeeded it fed their belief that they could deliver on even larger business and employee goals. It’s like a snowball rolling down hill, getting larger and picking up speed with every revolution…
To do that, you’ve got to appreciate how people approach their work…
How often have you heard a business owner say they want their employees to take an ownership view?
For the rest of this post, humor me; take your employee’s view. It’ll be worth the ten minutes. Once you understand what goes through someone else’s mind when you roll out bigger and bigger goals and objectives, then you can really move the needle in your business.
A Simple Model for How Employees See Goals
Several months ago I was talking to a three-decade HR professional and we were talking about the dynamic that’s created when leadership sets goals and objectives for their team.
A few days after our conversation he pointed me to a research document written by professors Edwin Locke and Gary Latham. The document is titled “Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35 year odyssey“. In short, it summarizes 35 years of research on goal setting.
In his early work, Locke showed that when a person is assigned a goal, they run it through two quick filters when they decide what level of effort to commit…
First they compare the business goal to their personal goal, and then they check it against their belief in their own ability to succeed in that situation. Their self-belief has a direct effect on the personal goals they set for themselves…
Have you ever looked at a problem that way?
Think back to the days when you were an employee – if you ever were…
Or maybe the day you decided owning a business was your path.
Maybe you’ve seen this idea play out when you were assigned a goal that was too difficult to accomplish. What flashed through your mind?
In my experience, when employees figure they can’t hit a performance goal, they deliver a result (their personal goal) that allows them to say that they exceeded previous performances but keeps them out of trouble.
This is where you’ll need to acknowledge a few ideas before we get too far into this discussion.
- Every one of your employees has a performance goal for themselves whether they’ve told you about it or not; and whether it matches your business goals or not.
- Each one of your employees has the free will to decide whether or not they want to participate in the business goals that you’ve created for them regardless of the impact that has on their employment situation;
- Setting goals for your team is somewhat of a negotiation process.
Does that mean that management should lay back and set easy goals?
Absolutely not!
In fact, Locke and Latham’s document discusses the value of moderately difficult goals.
Moderately difficult goals promote the best results because employees feel that its management’s way of expressing confidence in their skills and abilities.
Goals that are too difficult are demotivating and very often underachieved. Goals that are too easy are also demotivating because they don’t require creative problem solving or effort to achieve them. Employees want to be part of something special and know that they’re not wasting their time.
The Space Race and the High Performance Cycle
On May 25th, 1961 when President Kennedy stood in front of the U.S. Congress and announced the visionary goal of putting a man on the moon the U.S. was four years behind the Soviet Union in its space program. Wernher Von Braun said that to put a man on the moon would take a rocket ten times more powerful than the rocket the Soviets used to launch Yuri Gagarin and Sputnik in 1957.
Putting a man on the moon would require the successive accomplishment of many smaller goals.
Have you ever stopped to think about what an accomplishment it is to have two space capsules connect in space when they’re flying at 17,150mph?
Thanks to NASA and the many movies we’ve seen we think this is easy…
But it was just one of many extremely complicated and critical steps that needed to be learned to retrieve a man from the surface of the moon.
In 1966 NASA launched Gemini 7 and nine days later they launched Gemini 6 (yes, out of order) from the same pad to demonstrate that we could connect two space capsules in orbit. This mission was conducted in Earth’s orbit a full three years before the launch of Apollo 11 which put Neil Armstrong on the moon.
The Space Race brought together several key elements of the High Performance Cycle to create a high performance team. Here are a few:
- Buy-in: President Kennedy didn’t conceive of putting a man on the moon. This idea was already floating around inside NASA when he announced it.
- Self-Belief: With each successful step in the Saturn, Gemini, and Apollo programs, NASA built belief within its team that the goal could be achieved.
- Continued Commitment: With each successful test and trial NASA also built commitment and knowledge in every person on the team.
- Management Support: NASA had management’s (The White House and Congress) full commitment of resources.
This is how NASA came from four years behind to win the space race eight years later.
How do you get your team to figuratively put a man on the moon?
In 1975 Locke published in the Journal of Applied Psychology a diagram of the High Performance Cycle which still holds true today. A business that’s willing to put these tools and methods into place will build a high performance team.
The stakes in business don’t usually include the loss of life if something goes wrong.
In business, unlike in sports, practice and execution generally occur at the same time.
The High Performance Cycle allows for that to happen so that your company can move forward while learning how to succeed.
The Goal has an effect on Your Team
Effective business goals focus effort and resources on what leadership finds important to create high performance teams.
Goals and objectives affect how persistently our teams work on related actions.
Goals and objectives motivate employees to work late into the night to deliver on a fast approaching deadline; or like the tortoise, to work slow and steady toward the finish line over a longer period of time.
When employees are faced with new performance goals they lean on what they know to accomplish the goal.
Because people naturally look for similarities, your employees will try to relate the new goal to projects they’ve worked on before. If you give them enough time to work on something they’ve never seen before, your employees will use creative problem solving and come up with new ideas and strategies to achieve the new goal.
When a team has the right training, they’re more likely to use the strategies they’ve been trained on.
However, if the approach your team uses isn’t suited to the goal, then you may wish you’d either given them an easier goal, or the training to achieve the goal because the result you get may likely be worse than you hoped for…
Control, Moving Targets, Buy-in, and Belief
You’re reading this post because you’re looking for a way to control the outcomes in your business.
Your employees are no different about their needs to control their outcomes. And as long as they feel and believe that they control their performance, they’ll work toward the goal and you can rely on them and predict their performance.
As soon as you remove their ability to control the things that affect their chances for success they’ll “check out”. This realization is why you’ve so often heard world renown executives say that the secret to their success was hiring good people, promoting a positive vision, and then getting out of their way.
No one enjoys trying to hit a moving target…
When you hold moderately difficult employee goals constant and set the expectation that they’ll be achieved, the result is higher performance. This is one of the reasons that companies have adopted annual goals and objectives. It gives their teams a chance to buy in and commit.
If the goal is changed too often, employee effort drops off and you’ll start to hear remarks about the “flavor of the month”. Another side effect of changing the goal too often is confusion about what the goal really is.
We’ve been taught to get buy-in from our employees because a sense of ownership creates greater commitment to the goal.
Self-set performance goals lead to better results for employees who have a greater belief in themselves to deliver on the assigned goals and objectives. It’s far easier to gain buy-in with these employees.
Employees who are committed to the company’s business goals come up with better strategies to achieve them and respond better when you need to give corrective feedback on their performance.
However, you can take the idea of a self-set goal too far…
“Do your best” goals don’t work in business situations because they allow employees to decide for themselves what good performance looks like…
I coach my clients to set moderately difficult goals for their employees based on prior successes and the needs of the business. Hold the goals and objectives constant each year or quarter. And unless you’re facing a catastrophe don’t change them.
Thoroughly explain where the goal came from. Show how much improvement you’re expecting in relation to their previous best performances. Talk about what lead to those prior performances and then show the areas where your team left money on the table with little things that could have been done differently.
Allow your employees to help with developing the strategy and tools needed to execute. Give them the resources they need, and then get out of their way!
I’ve developed a goal setting worksheet for you to download that will use your prior successes as a jumping off point.
The Smell Test
Once you’ve hit the limit of either their skills or their commitment to the goal your team’s performance will drop off or stop improving.
Every goal you set has to pass the smell test with your employees. They need to understand that the goal is important.
High performance teams believe they can accomplish the goal and cope with any complexity that might stand between them and the goal. And they must receive feedback so they know how they’re doing. Each of these filters play off one another like the flavors in a slow cooking stew.
Commitment is widely considered to be the single most important filter that affects how hard an employee pushes to achieve a goal.
Commitment is affected by importance, previous successes, and the satisfaction that an employee has with their own performance and how they were rewarded for their prior efforts.
Everyone understood the importance of putting a man on the moon because the President announced the goal so publicly and we knew the Soviets were beating us. Your leadership team has to have integrity to set a stretch goal. When you and your management team creates an inspirational vision and lays it out for all to see; they’ve got to support it.
Support comes in many forms such as resources and training. If leadership doesn’t support the business goal, or only supports it superficially, your employees will see that and the goal won’t be viewed as important.
Just how important is this goal you’ve set?
The employee performance incentive that you tie to the goal will explain that.
To set up an effective employee incentive, you need to know two things. First – size matters; the bigger the better. Second – keep the system simple so that a fifth grader can understand how they’ll get paid.
If you’d like to read more, I’ve written a post on how you can screw up your employee bonus plan.
A word of caution: For very difficult goals, all-or-nothing payout systems don’t work well because as soon as the employee figures out that they’re not getting a bonus they check out and their performance drops. This explains why so many companies use profit-sharing models.
Belief is built up using training and prior successes. This is why you may have to start smaller than you want if your team isn’t used to stretching and executing.
The series of tests and small pilot projects (like the Gemini 6 & 7 launches) built belief within NASA that they could perform as the President had announced.
When people believe that they have the ability to accomplish a task, they’re more likely to commit to increasingly difficult goals.
Feedback and Creative Problem Solving
Without feedback, your employees won’t know how they’re doing against a goal, or when and where to start creative problem solving.
Effective business goals feed information back to the team on how they’re doing on their goals and objectives.
There’s a second part to feedback and that’s how it relates to the employee’s personal goal…
If your employee doesn’t have a personal goal that’s related to the company goal then there’s no amount of feedback or coaching that will help them improve their performance. That’s an alignment problem that will ultimately result in the employee leaving your company.
People differ greatly in their creative problem solving abilities…
The gap between the skills needed to achieve a goal and the skills your team has is what Locke and Latham refer to as complexity. The complexity of the task will separate out those who are better problem solvers from those who aren’t.
Very often, as business owners, we define this as intuitiveness. You’ll likely begin to recognize employees who deal successfully with complexity as your super-stars. As a leader, you can give your team the ability to deal with complex goals by providing training to cover the gap.
What Latham’s High Performance Cycle model suggests is that performance is affected by three things:
- the goal itself;
- the mechanisms for achieving the goal;
- the filters that affect how a person views a particular goal.
Your employee’s performance determines how satisfied they are with the incentives they receive for the work they’ve done.
In turn their satisfaction determines how committed they are to pursuing new, larger goals. And commitment is a large factor in determining how successful a team or individual will be at pursuing their next goal.
So how can you use all of this to your advantage?
If you’re trying to get your employees to pursue a goal such as a massive growth rate or you’re trying to break free from a low growth rate, as long as you’re not in a financial emergency, you can start by increasing the goal to a new level, but not to a point that’s so high that it’s demotivating.
As your team learns, gains skills, and commitment improves, you’ll benefit by being able to set even larger and more difficult goals.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
One final, huge benefit of using this cycle for improving the performance of your team…
On April 13, 1970 Apollo 13 had to abort its scheduled landing on the moon because an oxygen tank exploded during the trip.
Both Mission Control and the Astronauts relied heavily on their training and on the significant self-belief in their skills and abilities that the Apollo program had built up over the previous nine years to bring the astronauts back home.
NASA, through its many smaller victories and trials, had built up an organizational culture that said that they could accomplish the most difficult tasks that mankind could face in space. Years of engineering tests had doubled as employee performance goals.
Choosing to commit to the High Performance Cycle, successively increasing the difficulty of goals and objectives, building the skills and belief within your employees, and rewarding them for their efforts will one day pay huge dividends when your company is faced with a difficult problem or emergency.
This is why I highly suggest developing an escalating set of goals with buy-in and profit-sharing styled payouts, rather than just handing down one big goal with an all-or-nothing reward and little explanation.
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