Objectives: could we manage without them?
How would we cope? The guys in H.R. would throw up their hands in horror.
- We couldn’t rate our staff.
- Pay for performance would flounder.
- Annual appraisals would become a farce.
- We wouldn’t know what we were doing.
How could we manage our businesses?
But how do we manage with objectives?
They just get in the way:
- We argue vociferously about the targets.
- If we set different goals for different people, then collaboration goes out of the window.
- We waste huge amounts of time evaluating performance.
- And people just plain cheat.
Why do we do it to ourselves?
Why do we set objectives?
The answer is simple. We set objectives and incentives to direct our staff. We do it to control how they behave.
There is a problem though. If we have to be that prescriptive doesn’t it show we don’t trust the people who work for us?
What would happen if we set a direction and let our staff work out how they were going to get there? Then all we’d have to do is give a little support.
If you can’t trust your staff should you really be employing them?
And the argument that our staff wouldn’t know what they were doing… Let’s be honest, most of them won’t get their new year’s objectives until March anyway. Yet somehow our businesses survive.
Do you want control or performance?
We can’t hope to know everything our teams need to do. So why do we think we can control it? Perhaps, if we relinquished a little power, they would tell us what needed fixing. What would that do for performance?
If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough. Mario Andretti
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James, there is a widely (I hope) known but not widely heeded phenomenon that says that if you leave your people to set their own objectives then they tend to set higher goals and also tend to succeed them more often than when objectives are foisted upon them.
I wonder if managers could start to learn and, therefore, adopt this but starting small i.e. running a pilot that allows them to test, l;earn from it and build their confidence in it? Rather than just suggesting that they switch from one mode to another.
Adrian
A very interesting point Adrian, though unfortunately I don’t think it is widely known at all :(