Could you double productivity in your business or leapfrog over
competitors? Think these are just dreams? Not so fast. Stretch
goals can make the impossible happen--"that's the formula
for turning fantasy into fact," says Jeff Blackman, a
management consultant in Chicago and author of Peak Your
Profits (Career Press). "When President Kennedy said
we'd have a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, many
people laughed. But it happened, and that shows us exactly what a
stretch goal can accomplish."
Doubling your employees' productivity isn't easy. But is
it harder than landing a man on the moon and bringing him back
alive? "You'll never know how great your people can be if
you start off telling yourself to be realistic in setting a
goal," says Bill Roche, an executive coach in Silver Spring,
Maryland. "My advice: Start off very big when setting a
stretch goal. Even when the goal isn't achieved, you've
focused the attention of your people on how great you want to
become."
Plentiful research emphasizes the value of setting huge goals,
says Deborah Crown, a professor at the University of Alabama's
College of Commerce and Business Administration in Tuscaloosa.
"For a real stretch goal, you want to set it at the 10 percent
difficulty level--meaning that one person in 10 can be expected to
accomplish it," says Crown. "Research says this is the
ideal difficulty level when you want to get people initiating,
working harder and squarely directing their efforts at achieving
goals."
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Why so stiff a challenge? "That difficulty level means the
goal is tough--but it can still be achieved. It will stretch
people," says Crown. Better still, she adds, you can bet that
nearly 90 percent of your workers will come through. "How can
that be? The goal itself is motivating. It gets people to give that
extra effort and to keep on pushing."
To achieve results, you've got to properly define the
goal--and that's not always easy. Vague goals are worthless.
For instance, "Work harder!" isn't a goal that
motivates anybody. But "increase productivity by
12 percent within three weeks"--that is a clear, useful goal.
"Goals need to be both specific and quantifiable," says
Don Vlcek, a former Domino's Pizza vice president who is now a
business consultant and author of The Domino Effect
(Business One Irwin).
But a quantifiable goal isn't enough. A valid stretch goal
also needs to have measures that identify progress toward it.
"Any long-term goal has to be broken down into monthly, even
weekly steps along the way," says Crown. "Workers are
much less likely to slack off when forward motion is continually
monitored."
"You need a continuing stream of feedback whenever you are
really stretching," agrees Charles Garfield, an Oakland,
California, speaker and author of Peak Performance (Warner
Books). "The Apollo moon flight was off-course 90
percent of the time between here and the moon," recalls
Garfield, who worked at NASA on the Apollo mission. "But
Apollo had feedback mechanisms that allowed it to make rapid course
corrections."
Will any stretch goal suffice? For the most part, yes, but there
is one thing to avoid: "A goal that is absolutely unattainable
will frustrate and demoralize workers and can lead to internal
squabbling about who's to blame for the failure," warns
Crown. Stretch your workers, in other words, but don't break
them.
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