Setting goals - lots of them

I have always been a keen, if not terribly gifted, long distance runner. Of course one of the ultimate challenges for any runner is to complete a marathon. But, ask some runners and you soon learn that just completing a marathon isn’t enough.

12 years ago, I was told that the difference between a runner and a jogger was that a runner had broken the magical three hour mark for the marathon.

So 12 years ago I began my quest to become a real runner. There I was, in my prime of life in my late 20s, it shouldn’t be too difficult ...

I was running four or five days a week, playing and coaching in a soccer team, working on the personal staff of the Admiral in charge of our Navy, and participating in a pretty active social life. My previous best marathon time had been 3 hours 18 minutes or so run just a couple of years before. I now had my three hour goal. So I just had to go out and achieve it.

Does this sound familiar? Well, maybe not the marathoning bit, but what what about having a goal set and then achieving it?

I got close, don’t get me wrong - within four minutes of my goal in Sydney in 1996. That’s nearly good enough isn’t it? But the bloke that told me about the runner/jogger diarchy, simply raised one eyebrow, told me I’d done okay, but that I was still a jogger.

So what has my jogging (yep, still haven’t broken the three hour mark) got to do with leading, managing or teamwork?

My view is that goal-setting and management by objective are immensely powerful ways to lead teams, organisations and businesses - but, like lots of other things, it needs to be done properly.

There’s been plenty written and said about goal-setting, and of course the SMART acronym is a useful way to approach the setting of any goals. They must be (or have):

* Specific
* Measurable
* Attractive
* Realistic
* Timeframe

My three hour marathon goal met all those requirements, but I still fell agonisingly short. So what went wrong?

It took me a few years to realise it, and it wasn’t until I was the Commanding Officer of a large military unit and preparing some background information for my team for a discussion we were having during an annual planning session. In this context, many of our goals had been set by the General we all worked for back in Melbourne, but we obviously also had some other goals that we were setting ourselves. Some of the goals were very ambitious, and some were really quite long-term. How could I clearly articulate what we needed to do today to help achieve a goal that perhaps wouldn’t be realised for five or ten years?

Of course, part of the solution was to break each of the bigger, more ambitious or long term goals down into sub-goals or objectives that could be comprehended (and achieved) much more easily and in a more timely fashion.

Interestingly enough, just two weeks ago I bumped into one of my team from those days, and one of the first things he mentioned was how I had used a story about Tatiana Grigorieva (a very talented and glamorous Australian pole vaulter {http://www.tatiana.com.au/}) to explain how our Unit might structure our goals.

Back then I had suggested that it wasn't enough that Tatiana knew what the world pole vault record was. Breaking the world record might be her ultimate goal, but what were all the interim steps she needed to take? What were all the targets along the way she needed to hit? Perhaps some of them had to do with her weight training, her diet, what lead up competitions she would enter, etc.

This then became a very productive discussion on what our immediate goals (monthly) would be, what the 1, 2 and 5 year targets were, and most productively of all, it led us into developing a series of actions that we needed to take or develop in order to meet the ultimate goal.

So goal setting by itself is not enough. We need to develop a series of interim goals - signposts that mark the pathway we need to follow to reach our destination.

Oh, and I'm still chasing that elusive three hour marathon time. But my training plan for this year has a bunch of lead-up races, and training sessions that I am following. As of 20 May 2007 I'm on track after running 1 hour 26 minutes for the half marathon on the Great Ocean Road. Bring on the Gold Coast Marathon on 1 July 2007!

Made from Beer?

Catchy title huh? It's actually one of the advertising slogans for an Australian beer - Carlton Draught. (More about Carlton Draught?) And if you haven't seen the commercial based around Flashdance's signature tune, then check that out too.

But what has made from beer got to do with leadership or teambuilding?

As my bus trundled past a billboard with this slogan on it the other day, it got me to thinking about how many organisations could really describe themselves as being made from people. Yeah, I know; not as catchy as made from beer, but the same message is implied.

There's lots of fancy marketing and other gimmicks to promote the fermented amber liquid yeast product that is so popular here in Australia. And of course, the angle that the cunning Carlton marketers are taking is: fundamentally all we want is a beer that's ... made from beer. Everything else is secondary.

The same can be said for many organisations. Lots of fancy marketing to suggest that they're innovative, have super cool IT systems, bleeding edge architect-designed corporate headquarters, high-end manufacturing technologies and whatever. But fundamentally, they're made from people.

A few years ago I was giving a talk to a bunch of junior naval officers on what my expectations were of them out in the Fleet. Our Navy takes a great deal of pride in its ships, aircraft and other technology, and a lot of the questions I had got leading up to this talk were what were we doing about some new project, some new process or whatever? I used the title of the American cyclist Lance Armstrong's biography to emphasise my message. (More about Lance?)

Lance's biography is, of course, entitled It's not about the bike. This to me encapsulates a lot of what I was trying to say. Without doubt, Lance was the preeminent road racing cyclist of the last decade - perhaps ever. Yep, he had some amazing technology to ride, a terrific team around him. But those things were available to other riders, but they didn't have the same success. So there must have been something else.

To my audience of junior naval officers the point was, don't just concern yourselves with the technology, the tactics, the qualifications, etc. It's not just about that. It's about the poeople. It's about leading them. It's about working with them in teams - and everything that leading them and working with these teams entails. Everything starts with the people - for all organisations. It's not about bikes. Organisations are made from people.

Leadership and the X Factor

For as long as people have been studying and writing about leadership, the debate about whether leaders are born or made has existed. The adherents of the born leaders school often like to talk about some magical ingredient - some X Factor - that leaders have, and that the rest of us mere mortals simply don’t possess.

My view is that both sides of the debate are true. And I don’t find sitting on this fence too uncomfortable!

If you subscribe to the school of innate leadership, then it becomes just too easy to accept that you and others can do nothing about becoming a better leader. Sure, not all of us can become a truly great leader in the mold of [insert your favourite great leader here]. But I don’t look like Daniel Craig, play golf like Tiger Woods or sing like Luciano Pavarotti either! That element of greatness - the X Factor - if you like, does separate the great from the excellent and the good.

But the school of learned leadership also has its advocates, for the obvious reason that leadership can be taught. But here’s the critical thing - it must be learned, practiced and constantly developed too. I can’t imagine that Tiger Woods simply relies on his innate golfing abilities to be one of the world’s most successful golfers. Obviously he practices, and I bet that he also regularly works on something new in his game as well.

How are you going at working on your leadership skills?

I often begin a leadership workshop or training session by asking the attendees to give me a list of the top leadership traits. Every single time in these sessions, the people there get 95% or more of the most common leadership traits in about ten seconds flat.

So what? Does that make all them good leaders?

That’s the point isn’t it. It’s not the knowing, it’s the doing that’s important.

It’s not just having the theoretical knowledge of what leadership is all about, it’s doing something with that knowledge by practicing it.

Truman Capote, the great American author and creator of the so-called “non-fiction novel” made a very interesting comment to his biographer, Gerald Clarke, (Capote: A Biography http://www.geraldclarke.com/capote.htm) about what it takes to become a good writer.

You might want to think about Capote’s comment as it relates to being a good leader. Capote said:

To be a good writer and to stay on top is one of the most difficult balancing acts ever. Talent isn’t enough ... There has to be some extra X factor, some extra dimension, that has kept us [writers] going. Really successful people are like vampires: you can’t kill them unless you drive a stake through their hearts.

Talent isn’t enough!

Your knowledge, your boss’s knowledge, your teammate’s knowledge of leadership will never be enough. It probably never has been, and it certainly won’t be in the future. True success will come only to those who don’t just know it, they don’t just think it, they definitely don’t just talk about it ... they just do it.

Capote actually finished his comment about success as a writer by saying:

... the only one who can destroy a really strong and talented writer is himself.

If you aren’t refreshing, practicing or learning new leadership skills, are you destroying your own potential to be a strong and talented leader?