Talking Technology
Here’s a different view on setting goals for your business

By Steve Burns, Capital News contributor

I thought I would take a different viewpoint on the topic of goal setting for my first column in 2005.

While many of us do take the time to establish our short and long term goals for our businesses, I think that we have missed a huge opportunity. No, it is not an opportunity to further refine the goals that you have already established but rather it is time to find out about the goals we so often miss—our employee’s goals.

Perhaps you know me well enough to realize that I enjoy approaching business differently. In fact, I think that today’s businesses desperately need fresh and innovative approaches that will help their company, their shareholders, their employees and their customers excel.

Let’s assume for a minute that all of us are diligent enough to have already established our business goals for 2005. With our hectic schedules this might be a stretch but allow me to make that assumption. Here is my question—how well do you know what the goals, aspirations and dreams of your employee’s are? Based upon my recent research of CEOs, managers and business leaders in the Okanagan, over 90 per cent admitted that they don’t clearly understand the goals of their employees.

How about taking the time at the beginning of 2005 to ask every employee or director to report what their goals, aspirations and dreams are for 2005? I don’t just mean what their job or performance goals are but also what their personal goals are. How often I hear “I get more satisfaction from the things that I do outside of work.” While there is nothing wrong with that and “loving your job” may no longer be the ideal, shouldn’t all employees be using all of their talents and abilities to the betterment of the companies that they work with?

Sadly, many employees in today’s work environment feel that they are being asked to do more with less and the stress level of ultra-performance continues to build. Last month’s performance is not good enough for this month, rather, it is the minimum expectation. Stress, stress and more stress.

According to a recent survey of over 25,000 employees by Gallop, less than 20 per cent of employees in North America are actually operating in their sweet spot. Their sweet spot describes the job that utilizes the majority of their unique talents and abilities and that they are passionate about. As a result, they show up to work everyday and the fire that perhaps was once burning brightly has become a small ember—their passion for what they are doing is gone.

While I perfectly understand that there are always ways to improve a job and the working environment, it is clearly the job of the entrepreneur to ensure that your most valuable assets, your employees, are actually using their varied talents in a way that inspires them to be passionate about what they do.

I had a conversation with a CEO at the end of last year and she commented “I have a very simple recruiting strategy—I just want people to join my team who are like-minded. Our team members must absolutely love what they do and show it with their passionate response to each other and our customers.” As she so aptly put it “as the business leader, you can’t create passion where there is none but you can direct an employee into something that they are passionate about.” No one has said it better.

As business research shows, a clear vision and strategy is important but it is not the most important factor in your success as a business leader. In his book entitled Good to Great, Jim Collins sums up his research on great companies, “We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off of the bus, and the right people in the right seats—and then they figured out where to drive it.”

So why not take the risk and find out what your employee’s passions are? Perhaps there are ways to rekindle the spirit of enthusiasm that they once had by varying their job, eliminating tasks that they hate and adding tasks that they would get fired up to accomplish. A passionate team is a high performance team.

steve@steveburns.ca

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