Do any of these frustrations sound familiar?
“By the end of the day, my to-do list is longer than when I started.”
“I’m constantly putting out fires and reacting to problems. I have no time to focus and strategize.”
“My employees work hard, yet we’re not making progress.”
We hear statements like these all the time from agribusiness leaders and owners. This “constantly busy but never making progress” scenario happens when leaders set objectives without having a clear strategy for reaching their goals or a structure for tracking progress. As a result, the whole team—from owners and CEOs to managers and supervisors to sales associates and mill operators—scrambles around madly without getting closer to its goals.
Talk about exhausting—and demoralizing.
Today, in the first of a two-blog series, we’re sharing two strategies to keep you and your team from wandering aimlessly yet frantically in circles so you can start moving forward and stay on track for good.
Step 1: Clarify your business goals and strategies and tie them to behavior
It’s easy to set business goals like being more profitable, increasing revenue, and serving more customers. The challenge—and the key to success—is tying business objectives to your employees’ behavior. You can get there by asking two questions.
Question 1: What behaviors are the business goals driving?
When you set a goal, you likely have an outcome in mind. But before making a big announcement to your team about company objectives, you MUST get clear about the behaviors that goal drives.
Example #1: My goal is to increase sales
What specific behavior supports this goal? Depending on the business unit, boosting sales could mean ramping up your prospecting (such as making farm gate calls); cross-selling related products at checkout; or expanding your product line to support the entire life cycle of the animal (because NO ONE wants to see another company’s feed truck driving into their customer’s property).
Example #2: My goal is to increase margins
Obviously, for your sales team, the desired behavior is selling products with the highest margin. But hold on. If your core company value is for employees to do what’s best for the customer, sometimes the best behavior to drive is selling a product with a lower margin. What goal would drive the behavior to do what’s best for the customer? For your operations team, increasing margin may be focused on decreasing downtime. What behavior do you want and need to see to decrease downtime?
Bottom line: Whatever your business goal, determining what precise behaviors will drive success is essential.
Question 2: Am I tracking lagging vs. leading indicators?
Lagging indicators are long-term objectives you can’t measure until a lot of time has passed. Lagging indicators are goals like increasing new customers or sales per customer or improving the efficiency of the mill or elevator.
Leading indicators are short-term goals that show measurable progress. Leading indicators include increasing the number of monthly customer farm gate calls or prospecting calls —metrics (and behaviors) that are easy to track and invaluable for keeping your company moving forward.
It’s worth noting that lagging goals do serve a purpose because they focus on the big picture of your business. However, leading goals not only move your company forward, but they also provide focus and direction for your team, and, ultimately, drive the kinds of behaviors that result in long-term, lasting business success.
(Distinguish between lagging and leading goals.)
Step 2: Craft an intentional culture
Simply put, culture is the behaviors your company does AND doesn’t allow and the values it rewards (and doesn’t reward). When desired behaviors and values align, companies grow and thrive. Misalignments, however, create big problems.
The importance of focusing on key behaviors is as important in crafting your intentional culture as it is in communicating your business strategies and goals. Many companies identify broad values without defining the specific behaviors that are allowed (or not allowed).
Example: We value integrity
When we ask business leaders to define the behaviors of integrity, we get eye-rolls that translate as, “Duh, it means being honest and telling the truth.” But acting with integrity also means things like taking responsibility for mistakes and correcting them; ensuring customers always get what they ordered and on-time; and following up on questions and responding to calls.
Example: We value service
What service behaviors do you want from employees? Carrying heavy products to the car for customers? Yes. Driving 20 miles to deliver a bag of bird seed to a customer? No. (If your sales person is MIA on an “above and beyond” delivery, customer service on the floor will suffer). Next question: Do your employees know what you expect from them? Be specific about your customer service values and your company culture will benefit.
(Read how to create a values-based company culture.)
Two steps closer to success
These two strategies—clarifying goals and tying them to behavior and being intentional about culture—are concrete ways to move your team and company closer to reaching both short- and long-term goals. They’re part of a roadmap for growth and retention that ensures everyone’s on the same page and moving together in the same direction.
Check back next month for part 2 of this 2-part series.
In our 30+ collective years as HR consultants, we’ve seen languishing teams transform when leaders focus on key goals like building relationships, creating a culture of accountability, and motivating employees. At People Spark Consulting, we love sharing our straightforward strategies to get leadership teams in tip-top shape.