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 (Music Playing)

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 Detroit Tigers,

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 Sparky Anderson.

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 I don't know how this translates back to goals.

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 He set a lot of goals for the Detroit Tigers because he was their manager. Okay.

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 ( Laughter ) Anywho.

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 just-- Well, welcome back. Yes, we're talking about goals.

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 We are talking about goals. Some of our favorites.

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 All of them are. All of them are.

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 How would you summarize our last conversation about goals?

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 I love how you start the questions on me so that you can be processing your answers. I

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 was totally biased.

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 I totally knew that on purpose.

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 Yeah, so I think

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 in the last episode, what we were talking about with goals in particular is how

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 lot of business owners

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 may have those clear goals in their minds and they have not necessarily been communicated or translated to other leaders, let alone to their employees. So what

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 impact of that then ends up being that employees don't necessarily know what to do or the steps to take to impact those goals. They might not even know what the goals are in general, which then you know what, just makes work. Feel like you're showing up to go do something every day. Feel very tasky. It's very tasky and very just like, I don't know why I'm here. And if you think about engagement in general, I don't know that that's the best way to probably retain your talent either. Right, yes. That is a great summary. Thanks.

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 You know, where we started to close and transition into this next topic is goals are effective if they're driving the behaviors we want to see.

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 And making goals relevant to the people that are driving some of those behaviors. So we used examples of, yes, our goal is to increase business by 10%. Let's make it more specific to we want to increase our sales with current customers so that we're feeding more of the full animal life cycle

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 and that we're going deeper with our current customers. That is more specific, drives a more specific behavior. Another example we talked about is

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 teams within a mill.

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 And while they may not be able to impact the bigger picture goal of sales, those types of goals, the impact of

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 unplanned downtime. And that their goal is to reduce unplanned downtime because that drives a very specific behavior.

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 And one of the ways that we have started to talk about that more is this concept of leading and lagging goals.

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 Lagging goals

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 less behavior than leading goals. So we want to focus on leading goals. As we get into that, how would you define leading and lagging goals?

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 So I would start with lagging indicators, because even though it sounds like it's a bad thing, I think lagging indicators are often what we think of when we think of goals. These are the outcomes. These are the results of when we know that we will have been successful. So it's that

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 have seen $1.2 million in local earnings return to shareholders or return to members.

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 It's the 10% increase in our margin, or whatever that end goal might be for the year, revenue, whether it's net income.

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 Those are the measurements, the types of things that we'll know at the end. Leading indicators are more of what are the things that I need to see early on that are going to help me get to this result. So I think sales examples are some of the best ones

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 use, where I might have a lagging indicator or a goal overall to increase my number of customers by x number or x percentage by the end of the year. OK, great.

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 a leading indicator heading into that would be some of the behavior, some of the things that I would need to see that would lead me towards that goal, and things that I can measure, and help somebody know that they're on the right track. And so I could be measuring that by way of the number of prospective outreach calls I'm making every week. Because what I

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 find is that I have to make a certain number of prospect calls every week that are going to lead to a certain number of appointments, that are going to lead to a certain number of proposals, that are going to lead to a certain number of acceptances. And those acceptances are what become my new customers overall. So it's

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 accumulation and accumulation, I should say, of the behaviors I need to see getting me to that end result. How would you describe it? So yes. And I'm going to bring that back to what we talked about in

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 last discussion about walking in circles. That to me, that lagging indicator is the finish line of this is where we need to be at the end.

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 So that's important, because we need to go to this finish line. We're not saying, walk in a straight line. We're saying, walk to this point. And then those

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 leading indicators, the leading goals. Like prospect calls are the landmarks along the way to make sure everybody is staying on that same path. And if you look at it, then to your point, the lagging indicators are important. The leading indicators are the one

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 that's going to drive that specific behavior that we want to see. Well, and what I love about getting into goals this specifically, and

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 the lagging and leading indicators, is that when we work with clients on this, these are things that we actually incorporate into job descriptions. Oh, yes. I love that. So it's part of, what are the behaviors that I need to see from my warehouse associates?

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 are the behaviors I need to see from some of my feed mill operators

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 are some of the leading indicators that help me achieve less downtime, which helps me get to the point of having better profitability or better efficiency throughput within my facility. I love

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 because usually job descriptions are the, here's the list of tasks that a person needs to do to be successful in this role. And job descriptions are my number two sexiest parts of HR. You can't see errands. The second sexiest part of HR. You can't see Erin's face right now. This is total sarcasm.

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 The number one sexiest part of HR are employee handbooks.

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 So when we think about job descriptions, people see it as,

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 write down everything that this job does. And oh, by the way, we're going to get to that specific detail of

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 other duties as assigned, and we need to have this specific thing, because people aren't doing it. Where when we look at job descriptions, we look at them in terms of what is that goal? What is that measurement? And then what are the responsibilities they need to complete to get to that measurement? And what you find is, at the end, they're probably 80% to 90% the same.

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 It's a different

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 energy when you see the bigger picture of what it was tied to.

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 We were working with somebody, vice president over retail, who was talking about convenience stores, and we were talking about where can you have the biggest impact, right? What is your

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 indicator? Make more money.

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 The leading indicator was closer to more foot traffic in the stores. So we talked about measuring that by the number of tickets, the number of sales that you have through the day.

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 Is the

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 that people are headed to, the behaviors

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 They become much more clear, because then you start, as an employee, you start walking in going,

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 OK, if I were somebody driving by, what would encourage me to come in the store? Or what would stop me from coming in the store? This trash on the floor, that doesn't look good. Somebody isn't going to want to come in. I joked with this person about the cleanliness of the bathroom. Let's be real, at a convenience store, the cleanliness of the bathroom is going to drive the foot traffic. So it's not about they're cleaning the bathroom. It is understanding why it's so important that they do that. So it creates

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 different energy, a different perspective. It's not do this task.

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 Let's look at the bigger picture about why this task is important. And then we start to see things differently, and it drives a different level of behavior. Well, with leading and lagging indicators, too--

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 we've defined what our lagging indicator is, whether that's profitability, whether that's throughput, anything,

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 we may find-- and I think it's OK for leaders to know and understand this-- we may find that the leading indicator we thought was going to drive the behavior might not be the right one. And sometimes we feel like we have to be perfect right out of the gate, and we find, oh, man.

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 So for, I think, a ticket count or ticket value,

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 we might find that actually that didn't have much of an impact at all. We need to look at something else and make adjustments.

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 can adjust, you can switch. And sometimes that level of specificity-- I used your favorite word again--

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 really can have an

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 used in the last example, too, motivating of when you start to talk about it in those terms,

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 people start to think about things in a very different way that really do have an impact on driving.

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 Well, and I get into-- for here, and we haven't talked about this yet-- the eight factors of engagement. So there's a great book by Ashley Goodall and Marcus Buckingham called The Nine Lies About Work.

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 Totally for HR dorks.

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 Totally as-- And for non-HR dorks. You think so? Just general dorks. And I think it would work. For you fellow dorks out there, you can check out the book and see if you feel it. It should be HR specific or general. I could. Yeah. Yeah. OK, go ahead. Sorry.

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 is a study that's referenced in this book that looks at what is the secret sauce

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 highly engaged teams.

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 And it looks at this study of several thousand teams. And what was it that made those teams particularly highly engaged, high performing?

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 And it boiled it down to these eight factors that showed up that were disproportionately present in the highly engaged, high performing work teams. And one of the very first ones is that I clearly know what is expected of me.

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 And I will be recognized for excellent work, but that I clearly know what's expected of me. We assume people know. We assume that they know the task list. We don't necessarily assume-- we often don't give it much thought that they know why it's important. And that's the difference for me is, yeah, you might have given somebody their job description or just walked them through what they need to do during their onboarding or during their training. But if we've missed the connection to why it's important,

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 we're missing a huge part of what it takes to engage that person at work.

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 You just brought me back to one of my college jobs. I worked-- Oh, I have not. Every once in a while, Erin and I share a story that the other has not heard. Have you heard about my story about working at the office supply company? I don't know. Did you even know I worked at an office supply company? See, today is a day, learning something new. So I worked at this office supply company, and it was totally dating myself here. It was back when you had the

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 matrix printers with the holes on the side of the paper. I don't even know what they're called anymore.

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 They're very satisfying, though, to take. Yes, I got to do that a lot. And it was like a four-ply thing. And every order, different portions of that, the four things needed to go in different places. And they only taught me the task. And I could never get it right, because I was only to put this here and put this here and put this here. I couldn't get that task down. I couldn't get it right until somebody stepped back and said, oh, this is why this is important. And I went, oh. And from there on, I could get it right. But we focused so much on this is the task you need to do your job, that without that why, I couldn't get it. It was so painful for me, because I was so frustrated that I couldn't get it. And it took one person defining the why. Well,

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 love-- no, I had not heard that story before. That's cool.

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 This is where I see we have such an opportunity within the ag industry that

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 when we have so few people who have grown up in ag, ourselves included, right? We were not-- We are now. I mean, we've been in it more than half our careers now.

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 But as we have and want to welcome in more people that don't necessarily have ag backgrounds, connecting to that why we do what we do, the impact that it makes is even more important for us to do. So otherwise, we're just handing over a task list, which is no different than any other job in that particular area, when we're able to talk instead around what the impact is on that community or around what that particular community or what that particular rancher or producer has

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 what it is that they're doing and why it's important. And now we're starting to hit several elements of those eight factors. I know we didn't go into detail on all of those. Don't worry, we will. We'll do those in a future episode. But that I clearly know what's expected of me is more than the task list. Yes.

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 you structure your business.

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 don't want to go there right now because it's a big topic. So what would your spark be for this episode?

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 I would think about from this episode is as you have already identified your goals, now I would challenge you to say, OK, is this a lagging indicator or is this a leading indicator?

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 More often than not,

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 I'm going to make the assumption that this is going to be a lagging indicator. And if it is a lagging indicator, it's a result. It's an outcome, something measurable there.

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 some of the behaviors that I would need to see that would lead me to believe that somebody is on their way to get to that lagging indicator? So if I have a higher ticket count as a goal-- I'm just pulling that one from today-- if that might be the case, what are one to two, maybe three leading indicators that would tell me that somebody is on their way to get there? And just start that for maybe one of your jobs. Don't try to take on the entirety of your organization. If the bulk of your business is in retail, start

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 the retail level. What are the two or three leading indicators that would help you know that somebody, a retail associate, is on their way? If you're in a feed mill, if I have decreased downtime as

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 lagging

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 what are the top two to three things that I would need to see from some of my operators that are going to help me to get there?

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 What would you add? I just think about how this applies to so many other things like safety. We spend a lot of time talking about safety. We were working with a client at one point to focus on safety. Well, the biggest thing

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 they could do

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 is

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 increase the amount of safety reports. So people reporting-- Report hazards. Yes, reporting hazards. And every business has their own term for that. That is the leading indicator that will ultimately impact the bigger picture of we want to reduce the amount of injuries or unsafe work conditions that we have.

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 That's the behavior we want to see. That's the leading indicator to get us to the end. So I love that you used-- so far we've talked about retail. We've talked about operations. We've talked about safety. We've talked about sales.

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 Which haven't we talked about? Which areas or functions do we typically see in organizations where we haven't given examples of leading and lagging indicators? Well, I think you would probably see it certainly on

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 side of things, too. Yep.

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 So

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 it could be either number of deliveries. It could be the volume of the deliveries overall. What are the leading indicators that I would need to see? So I think of a client.

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 had both in-house drivers and then they had contract drivers. The contract drivers were

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 able to make more stops per day than their in-house drivers were.

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 And we're like, huh, what's going on with that? Right, because that's not what I expected you to say. So that led them to, hmm, I need to be setting some clearer expectations for my in-house team because I'm spending a premium for my contract drivers.

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 What do I need to do then to reduce some of the downtime in between deliveries for my in-house drivers?

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 Because the in-house drivers, they're the face of my business when they're showing up on a

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 area. So

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 needed to get really clear around some of the specifics that they needed to see there so that they could actually reduce some of the contract drivers.

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 Well, and that's a fascinating reflection, too, about how you identify that of who are the people that are doing it well.

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 goals that they're hitting, what behaviors are they doing

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 really identify that? See, we could continue this conversation so long. Love it. So

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 will continue with this conversation

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 as we get further into-- now, what does that mean for the structure of your organization?

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 Because it's Erin's second paper topic, second sexiest topic, we will get into more around job descriptions, decision making until that point. So if you like some of these sexy topics about HR, we do encourage you to like and subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your podcast material. Usually you don't hear sexy in HR in the same sentence. I know. That's why it makes it memorable. It does make it memorable.

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