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Positioning Systems Blog

What Your Business Can Learn From The United Way

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17TH, 2009

Getting ready to leave early tomorrow morning for the Fortune Small Business Growth Summit for our Gazelles Coaches Meetings that precede it and to hear Jim Collins, [Good to Great, Built To Last, How the Mighty Fall], David Allen [Getting Things Done, Making It All Work], Aubrey Daniels [Bringing Out the Best in People, Oops] and Hermann Simon [Hidden Champions of the 21st Century] speak during the two days of the summit.

 
A Quarterly Planning Meeting with one of my clients Thursday reminded me of one of the lessons Aubrey Daniels discusses in Oops, specifically in Practice #2 Stretch Goals.   I’ll provide more on his insights on Stretch Goals when I continue the Oops blogs, however in his “What to do instead” section in this chapter he advises to Make Progress Visible.  
 
The clients we work with that invariably have more success are those that make a public display of their goals. You’ve seen the United Way thermometer in your town. That’s what we mean by making your goals visible.   Out of the many clients I’ve worked with, when the goals are displayed somewhere in the office, when they are reviewing them in their daily huddles, weekly and monthly meeting rhythms and have them displayed somewhere on their desk, wall or cubicle, without exception the team performs better. 
 
In W.B. Abernathy’s book Managing Without Supervising: Creating an Organization-wide Performance System, they conclude that the company that provides data on a graph in the shortest interval possible get the best results. Hourly is better than daily, daily better than weekly, weekly better than monthly and less than monthly is a waste of time.
 
Of course for many of our companies not only are the goals not visible, most of the employees don’t know what the company goals are for the month, quarter, year or future beyond that, and ridiculously many of them don’t even have a clear idea of what their job responsibilities are let alone what their position’s goals should be.
 
So if the lesson on displaying your company and each position’s goals doesn’t hit you square in the face, hopefully the idea of getting accountability and measurements for every position in your company does.
 
I’ll have much more to report from the Fortune Small Business Growth Summit starting Tuesday with hopefully highlights of what each speaker had to say and then more in depth reporting after I return. I hope to give you some updates on what we as Gazelles Coaches are learning and any additional insights that Verne brings us during the pre summit coaching meetings. So stay tuned for insights.

By the way if you’re not coming to the Growth Summit in Dallas, there’s still time to sign up for the webcasts of Jim Collins, David Allen and Robert Cialdini at LIVE webcast.

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