Goal Setting To Drive Sustainable Performance
As we are at the goal setting time of the year, I wanted to share a recent coaching session I had with Karl, an Operations Director in a large defence manufacturing company. Karl is a veteran of the annual goal setting challenge and has a background in the automotive sector where Hoshin Kanri (or Policy Deployment) is an annual activity.
This is Karl’s third year in his organisation, and he is happy with the vision and strategy that has been developed. They have a great opportunity, but one that requires them to deliver a step change in their OPEX approach to capture the nascent and rapidly growing autonomous vehicle market in Europe. However, Karl is frustrated that this is not translating into the daily actions of the teams that make up the four thousand people in his manufacturing function. Change and improvement has been too slow and inconsistent.
His focus in the coming months (leading up to the start of his new business year in April) will be to ‘deploy’ the vision throughout the organisation, breaking it down into measurable objectives at each level and for each sub-function. He will create engagement by each team understanding how their work contributes to the bigger picture.
He will create engagement by each team understanding how their work contributes to the bigger picture.
Where policy deployment differs from the traditional ‘objective cascade’ is through a step known (in English) as ‘Catch-Ball’, a collaborative process where strategic goals are “thrown” from leadership to teams, and then “caught” and refined by those teams before being “thrown” back for further discussion.
Karl’s challenge will be to role model this approach to his senior leaders, who are more currently more comfortable defining both the compass and the map. In the Policy Deployment approach, leaders set the direction, but employees provide input on how best to achieve it. This creates a sense of ownership and accountability at all levels – People protect what they build!
This level of team ownership will also provide the impetus to the ‘Daily Management’ process that Karl intends to introduce where teams review their daily progress and adapt the approach through incremental improvement and problem solving to achieve the targets. To the corporate visitor, the daily stand-up meetings will look like the catalyst to improvement, but really it is the team ownership of improvement that is the secret sauce.
Karl also knows that engaging his organisation in the Policy Deployment process to achieve ownership and alignment takes time, so it is right that he is starting this process now for the new financial year in three months’ time.
Karl must build a belief with his senior team that alignment and ownership will only be achieved in his organisation if the leaders own the compass but trust the teams to build the map. Karl knows that the traditional paradigm of leaders ‘knowing best’ just will not bring about change in the pace required to capture the market.
