People. Our business, your bottom line.
    Vol. 4, Issue 2, Feb. 2016   

In the January issue of The Human Capital Advisor we discussed eight New Year's resolutions to encourage you to take on some of the more "easier said than done" business challenges your organization faces.
 
For the next several newsletters we will explore individual resolutions in a bit more depth. First on the docket is aligning individual and team goals with those of the organization.
 
The Challenge
 
Setting goals is easy; setting the right goals is harder. Engaging your entire team in the appropriate manner is very difficult. This article is about employee engagement to gain the focus and impact that is required. 

To Rick Torres, the President and CEO of the National Student Clearinghouse, effective and impactful goal management is pretty basic. "First and foremost the fundamentals of successful goal management are about clarity and communication," he says. Focusing there will allow the entire organization team to understand, participate in and help achieve the organization's goals.
 
Over a 30-year career that spanned global organizations such as PepsiCo, Capital One and Phillip Morris, Torres has seen how the best managed companies focus attention on strategic goal achievement, achievement that is truly a team effort.

"First and foremost, the fundamentals of successful goal management are about clarity and communication." 


 

Taking a process that worked well in those large, complex corporations and installing it in a much smaller organization was the initial challenge.

As most executives would agree, you start at the highest level - the organization's strategic plan - and work down through the executive leadership. However, the stumbling block often becomes "how do you then connect those goals to the working teams and individuals?" For this cascading effect to be achieved, there must be specific linkage from the top of the organization to the bottom.  
 
The Process
 
Torres's process required several annual cycles to fully develop and to achieve full impact and took several cycles to adopt. It is now more systemic and revised annually. He explained that "the main reason this took time was that it was new to the organization and it took a couple of annual cycles to calibrate and assure that goals and objectives were being integrated into the fabric of daily execution. Part of this is knowing your organization's strengths and weaknesses. This ideally will enable an architecting of the goal defining process that works to management strengths in terms of what they can anchor their goals around and stretch them into their areas of development opportunity."

"...it took a couple of annual cycles to calibrate and assure that goals and objectives were being integrated into the fabric of daily execution."

Torres summarizes his process:

  • Be clear on the overall strategies for the business and ensure that the top deliverables are supportive of those strategies. Keep it simple and clear. There should be no more than 5-6 principal goals. 
  • Be sure everyone in the organization "gets it." The strategic initiatives created by the CEO and approved by the board must be clear and articulated to every member of the organization.
  • Clearly define the goals. Ensure not only that they are measurable, but that everyone fully understands specifically how each will be measured. This is really about whether the goal is numeric (a yield or a sales number) or service-oriented. The visualization and/or articulation of what success looks like should be evident at the organizational level and at the team contributor level.
  • My senior leadership team needs to be all in. Functional heads understand the drivers that impact their units' goals and must develop the metrics to measure performance and results and share those with team members. Including them in the goal setting process, versus a hand-down target, makes a big difference. The role of the next level of leadership is to assure that the goals are audacious enough to ensure their contribution to the goals.
  • Functional heads should create a mechanism, a balanced scorecard, for example, which serves as the focal point for the execution plan and its ongoing assessment.
  • Managers and supervisors must meet with their individual employees to identify the specific goals under their control that link to the big picture. Some goals rest at the team level and some at the individual level.
  • Integrate individual and team goals. Each and every employee must own their piece of the puzzle. These are extraordinarily important discussions for they serve as the basis for the employees' focus.
  • Measure progress. It is important to recognize, at least quarterly, how individual employees' efforts are contributing to team, departmental and organizational goals.
"Integrate individual and team goals. Each and every employee must own their piece of the puzzle."  
 
As an overarching tool, Torres and his senior team created a balanced scorecard to translate the organization's goals into a reviewable and quantitative measuring stick. See below for more information on the workings of a scorecard.
 
Goals at NSC
 
With a workforce of about 300 staff, the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) is certainly a far cry from Capital One in so many ways. However, Torres sees the structure of the goals setting process as employing the very same concepts. Torres explained that "at NSC the overarching organizational objectives are focused in four areas - culture, management of profitability, operational/execution excellence and enhancing organization nimbleness and flexibility."
 
He continues, "Within these goals we asked managers to create a series of tactics, initiatives and action items that are unique to each functional area but which tie to the organizational objectives."

Let's look at one short example. "We want to emphasize employee learning and growth at every level of the organization," states Torres. "I challenge my department heads to assure that they and their direct reports have a pipeline of talent into their roles cascading down into the organization. Each team reports out quarterly on progress in this area. These could include cross training initiatives, external courses, internal team participation, and so on. Management is encouraged to provide examples of successes and wins to be shared since learning and growth can be individual, team and multi-departmental in scope and impact."

Engaging Your Team

This is where goal execution often goes off the rails. Here are some tips to avoid that:
  • Imbed the goals deeply into the fiber of the organization.
  • Live the goals continuously.
  • Reinforce the goals at every opportunity.
  • Provide frequent performance feedback to every employee.
  • Integrate goal achievement into compensation incentives which can be significant for top management and less so for team members. Reward for what individual behavior and performance can control.
  • Report and celebrate successes.
Balanced Scorecard 
 
The balanced scorecard is not for every organization. It requires a lot of thinking and planning and extraordinary follow-up, but once mastered, it distributes the responsibility for goal achievement to the entire organization.  Click here for more insight.

Torres cautions that "executing such a structured process will create added demands on your executives and managers but the reward will be significant....gains in employee engagement and ultimately significant bottom line impact on your organization."




Click here to see previous issues of
The Human Capital Advisor in our Archives.


   
 
 

 






Meet our Guest Contributor
 

RICK TORRES

Rick is the President and CEO of the National Student Clearinghouse. His distinguished career includes senior roles at Capital One, PepsiCo and Phillip Morris. A native New Yorker, Rick is proud to be a lifelong and passionate New York Yankees fan.


The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), based in Herndon, VA, provides a range of services to higher educational institutions, employers, government agencies and students, in the US and globally. Over 3,600 colleges and universities and 98% of all enrolled students participate in some NSC program. The clearinghouse is a vast repository of data that allows employers to verify educational attainment and provide public policy and education leaders' access to powerful and meaningful data to improve.





Have you seen HCA's new, expanded and enhanced website?  
Take a peek.










BOOK OF THE MONTH

pile_of_old_books.jpg  
This month's recommended book is Achieving Strategic Alignment by Barry MacKechnie.

"You will learn the detailed steps that you, your executive team and your employees need to take to clarify long and short-term company goals....and more."  Click here for additional information.


 

S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Click here to learn more about a systematic way to assess and build an effective goal setting process for your organization.






















What is your organization's most pressing human capital issue?  Give us your ideas and comments on current articles and future topics.

Email
. 
1320 Old Chain Bridge Road
Suite 250
McLean, VA 22101