How to Manage Your Goals and Metrics

February 8, 2015 Business Strategy, Product Development

Hitting Your Metrics: Reducing the Impossible to the Possible

Every year, companies and businesses establish their annual goals and performance targets. At some point in time, responsibility for achieving those objectives is placed into the hands of managers and individual teams, sometimes, with minimal direction. Though just about every organization has a standard set of metrics, many managers still struggle to map a path towards success, year after year. Without a strategy or plan to achieve the desired results, though, managers and business leaders will essentially leave their performance metrics up to chance. Hope, my friends, is a bad strategy. We’re going to discuss ways to ensure you will meet your metrics and to avoid leaving things to chance.

First, A Basic Approach

Rather than testing your luck like you’re at a roulette table, there is a better way for you to deliver real results and meet your business metrics. Success starts by making a plan.

Well before you even think about execution, you need to create a roadmap for achieving your goals. Further, this roadmap should tie the metrics directly to the individual performance of employees on your team.

To illustrate this idea, take for example the universal metric of a sales goal. You will often hear people in Sales and Marketing positions refer to their ‘quota.’ In order to link the team’s goal to individual performance you would simply decompose the team’s top goal into individual components which are assigned to the individuals.

FREE MRH DOWNLOAD: The Goal Alignment Template

This “divide and conquer” approach is very effective both in terms of meeting your overall business metrics, as well as setting clear performance measures for your staff, as you will see.

Now, let’s dig in deeper to show you how to map a success strategy that will truly work.

1. Calibrate Expectations

The first part of your strategy should involve confirming and clarifying expectations. Make sure you truly understand what is expected of you by asking yourself the following questions:

What are the metrics?
What do these metrics mean?
What are these metrics intended to achieve?
When and how exactly do I consider the goals fulfilled?
Are there formal definitions I need to be familiar with?

To effectively manage metrics, you need to spend some time digging into the details. Determine what you need to do, and what challenges you may encounter along the way. Make sure you know the formal definition of the metrics as recognized by your firm to avoid missing the mark due to a technicality.

2. Identify the Targets and How They Were Formed

The next part of the strategy requires planning and mapping. Once you know the definition of your goals, you can then embark on creating your plan to meet them.

Discussing with the key stakeholders or senior leaders how the metrics were decided is a valuable exercise. In other words, if you’re given a metric for delivering 4 new product launches this year, seek to understand how the number 4 came about. Is it just the same as the year before? Last year’s total, plus one more? Are there four specific projects in mind? Whether or not you get the answer, make an effort to understand how the number was generated, so you have some basis for planning execution.

While some businesses may use a Balanced Scorecard or other formal reporting method to monitor group performance over time, not all organizations do. If your organization does not have a specific reporting format, create one for yourself that lets you track the progress towards each goal over the course of the year.

3. Assign Owners

Now that you’ve identified what you’re going to do, the next step is to determine who will do it. That is, to whom will you assign the various tasks? This is perhaps the most important step in outlining an effective strategy.

If you have a certain cost reduction target that your department must obtain, for example, spend some time figuring out how such a value can be achieved and assign smaller targets to each of your individual employees to manage.

A good way to start this process is to look at your employees and assume a standard contribution by position within your reporting structure.

Returning to our cost reduction example for instance, you may wish to start by having your associate buyers achieve 3% in cost reduction per account. Next, have your senior buyers obtain 5% from their suppliers, and your lead buyers achieve 7% cost reduction on their accounts.

Once you have a standardized plan, you can then modify and customize targets at the individual level based on the specific workload and objectives for each employee.

4. Plan to Overachieve

Face it. Something will always come up that will hinder progress. When it comes to managing metrics, follow the number one rule in sports: the best offense is a great defense.

If you are expected to secure 5 new contracts in the coming year, plan on delivering 7. This will give you some margin of error when unexpected circumstances arise. If you need to hold 12 customer feedback sessions, assign one to each of your 15 employees to make sure you can get to your target value.

It may sound simple, but far too many managers plan to hit the bare minimum, and when challenges emerge, they’re left scrambling.

5. Don’t Procrastinate

The fourth step of your strategy may sound like something your parents would tell when you were a teenager, but rest assured, it is a key piece of effective execution. Any successful strategy leverages the power of incremental progress and your plan to achieve metrics is no different.

Assigning owners for each item is not enough. Once you have outlined what you need to do, and who will do it, shift your attention to when you plan to deliver. Deliberately set yourself up at a pace to be successful.

Back to our new contract example in the previous point, if you need to have 5 new contracts signed this year, plan to sign one about every other month. Don’t wait until the last 6 weeks of the year to hit your numbers; instead, get off to a fast start and aim to get some early victories. If you jump into every new year with a plan in your hand, you’ll leave your competitors in the dust.

How this Approach Will Help YOU Succeed

As the manager, your department and team’s performance is a reflection of you and your ability to lead. Thus having a strategy to meet your goals will make both your employees and you as the manager successful. Here are some of the additional benefits of this approach to meeting metrics:

1. When you assign components of the team goals onto individuals, you will invoke a sense of teamwork. When employees know that their individual performance will directly reflect on the team’s overall performance, and that their peers are relying on them, it creates a sense of shared success.

2. The goals flowed down from a organization are often ambitious and intimidating. But by breaking down the impossible to the possible – dividing up the overall objectives into smaller pieces – it is easier to monitor progress and manage changes mid-stream.

3. As a manager, breaking down department goals will inevitably help you keep in contact with your employees. Regular follow-up and check-ins will ensure you are making your rounds and engaging your employees on a regular basis. For them, face time with the boss is always good.

4. At the end of the year, when the numbers are in, this approach will help you clearly and objectively measure the performance of your employees. After all, you will have a black and white trail of information to measure their contributions to the team and their overall effectiveness.

Putting this Strategy to the Test

To illustrate the effectiveness of this approach, I offer this brief example: In late 2012, I was asked to take over a department that was underperforming – and had been for some time. I was tasked with turning around the group.

Like many firms, the business used a tracker to monitor performance and progress towards goals over the course of the year. When I took over the team, however, the tracker was literally “red” from top to bottom. The only green metric was the budget. And the only reason it was green was because we had not filled an open position and we just weren’t paying all he salary we expected. Had we done so, the budget would have been red as well. All metrics were off course, if not lost at sea. With limited exception, none could not be resurrected by year-end.

The team had other issues – lack of accountability, lack of vision and relatively poor alignment in what everyone was doing. The year marched to a close. We managed to pull a few metrics in, but for the most part, it was a dismal year and I was now the one who had to do all the explaining. Expectations of massive improvement from the top were clear.

A new year started January 1. When I published the metric tracker that I had to report to the executives, the team was taken back. They had never seen it before, or the prior year’s which was glowing red, and had no idea that performance was so far off. We then set out on a mission to get our metric tracker green.

Working with my team, we developed a very simple pact: collective success or collective failure. We also looked at our metrics for the new year and broke them down and tied them to the contribution of the individuals. We planned to overachieve as a means of protect ourselves should we encounter unforeseen circumstances.

Twelve months later, our tracker was nearly green top to bottom, with my team being praised as one of the best examples of execution in 2013. We did the same in 2014 and continued since then.

The beauty to this approach from my experience was the fact that it not only broke down the team goals to small pieces, but it also created a form of unity and pride across the team. The team members developed an ‘all-in’ mentality that they shared and it has kept the team focused on performance and meeting our goals ever since.