Stop Half Assing.
Your team is no better at multitasking than you are.
Did you watch Parks & Recreation, dear Reader? I did. And I loved it. As much as its fawning view of Government action made my roll my eyes back in my head, I enjoyed the characters, and I cared about their problems. I especially enjoyed Ron Swanson’s interaction with his subordinate and fundamental opposite, Leslie Knope. Ron is a curmudgeon whose point of view rounds out to something like “Government is a farce and radical self-reliance is the only way to live happily.” Leslie, on the other hand aspires to use the Government to do great things for all the people around her. In an era before our modern uh… enmity in politics, they were a fun little odd couple.
Ron never discounted Leslie, though, and as much time as she spent trying to change him into someone like her, he always supported her advancement. Even when it took her well beyond him. The most salient piece of advice he gave her when she was torn between her role in the Parks & Rec department and her run for city council.
And this is a lesson I think we can learn from in our management lives. When planning the goals for a team, a department, or an organization… stop over committing. Stop half-assing stuff. Do one thing at a time, and do it as well as your team possibly can. And here’s why:
Split Brain Ruins Progress
Split Brain is a pain for distributed systems, and it’s a pain for your team (which after all, is a distributed system). I’ve seen managers at every level try to split their teams up and achieve two (or more) goals at the same time. It very rarely works. What winds up happening instead is that all the goals compete with each other for primacy until none of them really gets done. Because every person in your org will have a different implicit ordering for the goals you present as equal, you’re actually splitting your org when you set too many goals.
Worse, the problem grows combinatorically. If you have 2 goals, there’s only two ways in which you can order them. If you have 3 - then there’s 6 ways to order them. The general formula is n! - which is bonkers1. Tell me the last time you let an algorithm with factorial growth go into production.
And all these different orderings come out in various inefficiencies. Teams argue amongst themselves about what the most important thing is, wasting time. Teams will decide to pursue the thing they think is most important, no matter how much damage they’re doing to other teams or other goals.
Of course you can solve this problem by introducing strict ordering to your goals at every level. This is something I absolutely encourage. But once you’ve imposed a strict ordering, why do you need to know more than “Now, Next, and Thereafter”? Do you really think your priorities are going to remain unchanged long enough for you to knock out 8 org wide projects? They’re not, and they shouldn’t. If they do, that means you’re not learning enough from the things you’re doing.
Constructive Interference is How You Get Velocity
I hear a lot “but my team is so big! Surely they can do more than one thing per quarter.” Yes, they absolutely can. But if you’re setting a bunch of individual goals for your subteams/people to achieve separately, you’re wasting your brainpower and theirs. Instead, set a goal at a higher level, and tell them you expect them to figure out how to contribute to that goal. This keeps you focused on your role as a leader, and actually makes use of the incredible people you’ve worked so hard to hire and grow.
The reason you can let them each take their own spin on things, as long as its in service of the larger goal, is all about trying to get your team pulling in the same direction. If you give each team a different goal, or if you let each team decide their own goals, those goals are eventually going to conflict. And when they conflict - they cancel each other out. In the parlance of wave dynamics - this is called destructive interference.
But you can control which way every member of your team is pulling simply by telling them which direction to pull in. It won’t be perfect - you’ll always have mavericks who consider themselves smarter than you2. But the vast majority of people understand the value of aligning with the team, and will do it for you - if you just give them enough information to actually do it.
This is also a reason why most goal setting frameworks advise against specific deliverables as a part of your goal setting. It hampers the ability for teams to get creative with their support when they see “Ship Betelgeuse to production”. They think “Oh, well, I’m not working on Betelgeuse, so I guess I’ll fill my roadmap with other things.” Then when they’re blocking the project, it’s hard to get them aligned because they already went and made other goals for themselves, and you’re asking them to give those up.
Give People a Reason to Come to Work
The last benefit you get from doing one thing at a time is hard to convince you of if you’ve never been in an organization with that kind of focus. But believe me, it’s true: people get psyched about coming to work. Not everyone, and not all at the same level for every goal, but there’s something genuinely electric about coming to work with 5, 50, or 500 people who you know are all working for the same thing as you.
I worked for a FinTech startup in my individual contributor days, and the CEO was one of the most focused people I’ve ever met. He knew what the company’s purpose was, and he said it all the time. We were out to change the game of loan analytics. We were going to change the face of loan packages forever. I’ll be honest, I don’t give a hoot about people who invest in loans. But when he said it? When the whole room was nodding? When we all knew that everyone was here to do the same thing? It was powerful.
People with that kind of motivation work harder. They get less distracted. They agree more. They stop worrying about where their next promotion is coming from because they know if the company does well, they’ll do well3. Tribal Leadership refers to this as a “Stage Four” tribe. One where individual superiority gives way to the overall success of the company, and touts it as the best way to innovate, to achieve huge things. Inspiration is hard to come by, and your goals are about the best place to get it.
So the next time you find yourself walking into quarterly planning, or even just sprint planning, ask yourself “What’s the one big goal right now? How do we win, and how do we help the company win?” I promise you, it’s the starting point of a high velocity, high success organization. Stop half-assing two things. Whole ass one thing at a time.
Shockingly, at merely 10 goals, you wind up with more possible ordering than there are employees in the worlds largest company (3.6 million orderings, 2.3 million Walmart employees)
If you have too many, you’ll have to coach them back into pulling with everyone else. But if you only have a few, they can be a great way for you to test out goals before you export them to the larger group. Prime them for the fact they’re operating outside the org, then let them go and prove their concepts so you can discover the next direction for your team to go in.
I mean, there are a few other things you have to do to achieve that state. Not the least of which is engender that trust, but I promise you can’t do it without alignment.