A new method doesn't get into a company. A cure for the problem people have this morning does

The hardest question in implementing goals is not how to write them. It is: how do you get people to buy into it. I hear it at the first meeting in almost every company, and for years I had no answer to it that could be put in bullet points. In this implementation the answer turned out to be simpler than I expected, and it had little to do with the method itself.

The change was introduced here as a cure for problems people had every day. Not as a new management methodology and not as a project with a name. The problems were very concrete: working on the day-to-day, a day organised around whatever came in by email, projects breaking off halfway, sales and production meeting only through the order schedule. A methodology has no address in a company. A Monday morning problem has a very precise one.

That is why people bought into it. Not because someone gave a good talk about quarterly goals, but because the first thing they saw concerned their own work. The reverse order is the most common mistake I see: a company announces a new methodology, sends people on training, and is then surprised that they come back with a notebook full of notes and nothing more. I once started with training like that myself, and I know how little of it stays.

Throughout that whole conversation I was looking for their recipe, and I will say honestly that I still don't have it in a version I could hand to someone. What I have is something better: the whole journey told from the inside by the person who led the implementation. From the first homework for the board, through the things that hurt, to what she would do differently today. This text is about that journey and about what from it can be carried over to another company.

Strategy first, even if the values really are lived

At the first meeting I ask about the mission, vision and values. Usually this is the moment when the board would like to move on. Here it was the other way round: the company had had all of this for a long time and was proud of it, and in the conversation someone said that these are not values that hang on the wall, but ones that people in this company really live by. Over the time we have worked together this has been confirmed, because you see them when decisions are made, not in a presentation.

One element was missing, and it was the strategy. This is where we stop most often, before anyone writes the first goal. Mission, vision and values say why the company exists and how people work in it. They don't say where the company is going this year and what, as a result, it will not do. Without that answer there is nothing to derive annual and quarterly goals from, so the work began with the strategy, not with the goals.

This produced an effect we hadn't planned as part of the communication. The first thing the leaders got in their hands was not an explanation of the method but a finished strategy. A document this company had never had before. At a moment like that, the tangible result of a small step does more than an hour of explaining why we are doing all this. People don't buy a method, they buy proof that something has really moved.

I am not writing about the values here out of politeness towards the client. Values hung on the wall and values people reach for when they choose are two different things, and the difference only shows when something has to be let go. If they don't exist in that second sense, quarterly goals become one more document. If they do, the change has somewhere to land, and I think that is half the answer to the question of why it worked here in particular.

Where to start if things look similar where you are

Start with four questions and answer them honestly before anyone starts writing goals. Is the organisation ready today to work with measurable goals. Does the person with the highest authority want this change, because if they don't, it won't work. Do you want to check progress on goals as you go, rather than look at the result at the end of the year. Do you have leaders who will take responsibility for these goals. Four yeses mean you can start. A single no means something else needs attention first. And if you do start, the biggest correction made in this episode after two years of work concerns precisely the start: from day one it should have been treated as change management, not as a project to implement, and led by two people. An implementation like this costs a lot of time and quite a lot of emotion, and one person has no cover at all.

Then comes the choice, and this is the part you can't get around. The board's first homework was to write down the business goals the organisation is facing today. An Excel sheet came back, split across all the departments, with a hundred goals in it. We chose four. That work had been done thoroughly, and even so most of it never turned into goals, because the sum of lists from individual departments is not a company plan. Choosing what matters most always means letting go of something else, and that is hellishly hard, even after years of working in this rhythm.

How do you know what to let go of. Sometimes the numbers tell you, and then it is easy. Sometimes the numbers tell you nothing and you are left with intuition, and that is a more honest answer than pretending everything can be calculated. There is also a third way: for a topic where you don't know whether it belongs to this year for you at all, set a test goal on a shorter cycle, monthly or two-monthly instead of quarterly. Its only job is to settle whether you want to take the topic on.

Finally the roles, because without them it will come apart. Every goal has an owner, and the owner has three duties: to put together a group of the people with the most experience in the areas needed, to meet with it regularly, and to draw conclusions about why something isn't working. On top of that, a sponsor from the very top, who gives the green light not only financially but also mentally. A person from HR who works with the leaders as things happen. And someone who provides and calculates the data, because without calculated numbers you won't align, for example, production with sales. There is also a fourth duty of the owner that can't be written into a job description: they are also responsible for the mental side of their group, because if resistance appears at any stage, the goal won't be delivered.

A silo doesn't disappear because people talk to each other

The most striking example in this company is sales and production. Production carried out the orders coming in from sales on the basis of a schedule, and that schedule was the only point of contact between the two departments. Sales sold, the order went into the schedule, production found out it had something to make. This is not a story about people who didn't talk to each other, because they did. They simply had no shared goal.

Organising the work around goals forced the company to calculate something nobody had needed in that form before: how much it is able to produce against how much it sells in the financial year. A single group combining sales and production was formed, with a single goal. Today production knows in advance how much of what it has to produce by the end of the year for the result to add up, and it works from forecasts. That is the difference between reacting and planning, and no tool made it, only a shared goal and calculated numbers.

There is one more detail in this that I like most of all. A goal group made up of production design engineers is led by the head of the sales department. Someone from outside wouldn't guess that it is run by a person from sales, because after a long time she knows the technical details of the product. A shared goal does that kind of thing to people along the way, without any team-building programme.

I once ran a retrospective of one of the teams in this company and heard that people had started working together and were curious about each other. It sounded like a textbook example, so the first thing I thought was that they wanted to be nice to me. Only later did it sink in that they meant it. With the right people and a culture that can carry it, this change is much easier than it looks from outside. The difficulty rarely lies in the method itself. It lies in how many obstacles have to be overcome before the method has something in the company to take hold of.

I have no better ending for this than a sentence said in passing in this episode. You can't implement this and close the topic, because new people keep joining the organisation and coming across it for the first time. Keeping up this rhythm no longer belongs to the person who started the implementation, but to the leaders who run the departments. If you are looking for the moment when you can announce the end of the project, there isn't one. There is something else instead: a company that knows where it stands in relation to where it wants to get.