Behaviours of Goal Driven Organisations

What makes organisations set goals and work towards achieving them? More likely than not it’s the same drive that makes you do the same thing. In this blog I’ll unpack the top behaviours of goal driven organisations and provide a behaviour based checklist for you and your organisation to use.

What are the top behaviours displayed by goal driven organisations: knowing where they are headed, communicating what their future looks like, bringing people along for the ride, capitalising on established trust, rewarding progress?  In my experience its all of the above.

I often marvel at organisations that know where they are headed and wonder what I can do be more involved. They fill a behavioural need I have as a human to become an active participant in something I believe in. Like all small boys of my age I needed to be an astronaut. All because an organisation knew where they were headed, displayed a need I could relate to and captured the public imagination with that heading. So much so that this need still holds currency decades later. For the lucky ones among us following this need in themselves has resulted in a fulfilling vocation, career or recreation activity shaping that heading.

Organisations that are good at communicating what their future looks like are bellwethers of public sentiment.  They lead the way by driving expectation and building a swell of support for what they are intending to do. Most likely you are currently waiting for something to arrive from your favourite organisation rather than accept what is currently available. Buying into these visions not only drives behaviours of expectation, that manifest in future loyalty, it also guarantees interest in current offerings as people like me and you wait until the future becomes reality before investing. Guaranteeing a continued market presence.

The most successful goal driven organisations are household names, that’s because they’ve mastered the behaviour of bringing you along for the ride. Take a look around you I’m sure there are examples in your immediate reach.  Did you go to the local hardware store to replace that handle on your drawer or did you go to a hardware super store?  I went to the hardware super store because I’m on board with the message that they have everything that I will need at a good price. Our relationship is pragmatic,  not  personal, which is right on message with the organisation strategy. It pervades the customer experience, supply chain and economics.

When we trust someone or something it takes a shock to break that trust. Organisations demonstrating behaviours capitalising on established trust relationships are perceived as part of the fabric of our lives. A car manufacturer recently advertised that it built its own raw material processing plant in a bid to capitalise on progress toward achieving its goal of a purer raw material. The focus of the advertising was that it that did not trust the quality of raw material from its suppliers so took control and makes better cars as a result. This advertising not only went a long way to strengthening trust in this car manufacturers end product, it also damaged my trust in its competition and their supplier relationships. This approach engenders further trust in a market where quality is a key selling point.

Do you take the opportunity to reward yourself when you’ve achieved a goal? Goal directed organisations make a point of rewarding progress. These organisations have to measure progress to reward it. They make effective use of information and have a finger on their market’s economic and social pulse. When have you been rewarded as a contributor, as an investor? Were the rewards directly relatable to achieving a goal?  What did the rewards relate to?  I recently watched a movie where a frequent flyer was so locked in to achieving the goal of elite flier status that he made it his top priority. Now that is brand loyalty. Chances are, like me, you are a member of one or more airline loyalty programs. Hooked by the goal of a higher status or more privilege based on the number of miles you fly or the number of points earned on contributing purchases. Rewarding progress promotes an internal leadership focus on the team / product delivery and an external focus of benchmarking against the competition.

After all, what’s the use of winning against all odds if you don’t set a reward for doing so?

Is your organisation goal driven? Think about your goal horizons and use this checklist to check in with yourself:

- Your inner drive pulls you toward a vision of what is possible – Your energy attracts people who want to help you. Capitalise on their enthusiasm and keep your eye on achieving your next goal. Beware of time wasters.

- You continually reinforce your message to your target audience Your persistence feeds a familiarity that increases the opportunity for intuitive recollection. People select you because you are comfortable. Sow the right message for the right time and harvest success.

- You’ve proven you can deliver what people need and are expecting to do it again You set goals and achieve them. People find it convenient to trust you and your track record when making decisions. Weigh up ‘doing it for them’ or ‘doing it for me’ periodically.

- You set rewards for when you achieve your goals and take them You meet a goal and rewards are unlocked. People benefit from the achievement of your goals. Resist the temptation to reward yourself for almost getting there.

Smarter Organisations

360 Degree Framework

A framework can be thought of as a structure for attaching objects. It becomes the connector to associate objects that may at first glance seem unconnected. Objects can range on the spectrum from abstract to concrete.  An Architects concept drawing, for example, may not immediately appear connected to a building’s foundation stone – a linear view. The foundation stone is connected to the concept drawing if we take into account the framework required support the creation of a habitable space – a multidimensional view. Adding in factors such as the impact of the users of the habitable space and the maintenance required for the space to reach its expected useful life gives us a more 360 degree view. Complex organisations show the traits noted above – direction, product, safety, users, suppliers, a beginning and an end. Each of these traits has a behaviour and response. It is fair to posit then that complex organisations are viewable and measurable using a 360 degree framework.

A 360 degree framework for complex organisations could be created by utilising the Smart Challenges and Smart Operating behavioural responses noted previously – providing a contextual view of organisational interdependence and independent identity. A matrix may then be applied to create a multidimensional view by intersecting Smart Challenges and Smart Operating. It also stands to reason that mapping the behaviours and responses of the traits noted above into the model would complete a 360 degree framework that succinctly articulates an organisation in a way that is comparable to other organisations.

Now that we’ve defined a 360 degree framework to assess and compare organisations let’s look at the top 25 behaviours of smart organisations in the next post…

Smarter Organisations

Smart Challenges

When we think about challenges our thoughts tend toward pending adversity. It’s a natural response and turns our thinking inwards. Being Smart about these challenges assists in switching us to an outward, more engaging thought process. This opens up the possibility to actively participate in how we manage our interconnectivity with other complex organisations.

Turning thinking outward switches our default position from protection to opportunity. The enduring opportunities for organisations lie in how well these common challenges are addressed. Five key challenges come to the surface if we distil this commonality: Goals, Returns, Innovation, Sustainability and Talent.

Let’s review Smart Challenges in the Ultimate Organisation. There would be no necessity to set Goals, expectation of a Return, need for Innovation, requirement for Sustainability, or Talent to nurture as there would be only one organisation. We’ve discounted this scenario as improbable and have chosen to focus instead on complex organisations.

So, complex organisations interacting with each other display behaviours promoting interdependency. Applying the Smart Challenges to these behaviours brings us closer to being able to measure and compare.  We need to be able to identify and categorise organisational activity on Goals, Returns, Innovation, Sustainability and Talent that gives us a scale to compare against other complex organisations.

Being Smart about challenges introduces mechanisms to measure the interconnected behavioural response.  As we measure complex organisations we build a platform for comparison and improvement.

Smart Operating

How we operate defines us. It shapes the external view of our identity, manifesting as perceived resilience and independence. We subconsciously operate in particular ways to protect our independence and identity whilst responding to our environment. Being smart about operating brings our instinct for survival to a more conscious level. It creates an opportunity to leverage and nourish our environment to build a resilient, independent complex organisation.

Independent organisations come to the fore by consciously leveraging and nourishing the environment. Resilience can be measured by how consciously common operating activities are embraced. Five key operating practices present themselves if we distil this commonality: Focus, Momentum, Competency, Relationships and Results.

Let’s now look again at the Ultimate Organisation, this time using the lens of Smart Operating. There would be a singular Focus, constant Momentum, full Competency, perfect Relationships and consistently excellent Results. Based on the earlier discussions we’ll discount this scenario as improbable and focus instead on Smart Operating in complex organisations which are fallible by their very nature.

As in the exploration above, applying Smart Operating to behaviours promoting independent identity brings us closer to being able to measure and compare. We need to be able to identify and categorise organisational activity on Focus, Momentum, Competency, Relationships and Results that gives us a scale to compare against other complex organisations.

In the next blog we’ll explore how Smart Challenges and Smart Operating contribute to a 360 degree framework for comparing complex organisations.

Smarter Organisations

Introduction

This is the first article in a series of posts inspired by setting up new-clarity in the BizDojo creative space. A great melting pot for explorative conversations with the wonderful collaborators who work in that space.

A few years ago I started exploring what it means to succinctly understand the context of a complex organisation. I’d worked in and around a number of complex Government, business and charitable organisations and found no way to easily compare them other than using intuition. My thinking was that a common contextual view was the key.

This bugged me. So much so that I started building a model based on observations and experiences. The approach to developing the model was based on the premise that “there is a succinct way to compare complex organisations”.

These posts and the resulting framework are the culmination of this work.

Smarter Organisations

Let’s imagine for a minute that nothing is connected. Humans don’t connect with each other, ants don’t build colonies and plants pollinate themselves. This type of world is hard to imagine because we would not exist if it did. Everything has some form of connection with something else. We’ll call this the ultimate organisation.

Now let’s imagine that there was no need to want for anything, everything was provided for. A state of nirvana. This is slightly easier to imagine as it’s a goal we all aspire to having. Unfortunately we are all faced with access to finite resources. This brings rise to the opportunity to create subsets of the ultimate organisation as a matter of survival. We can call them complex organisations.

Complex organisations will need to be interconnected with other complex organisations to survive within the ultimate organisation. Alongside this connectivity comes a requirement to compromise to protect the complex organisation’s independent identity.

We can demonstrate that the same behaviours above exist in Government, business and charitable organisations.

Taking the premise that “there is a succinct way to compare complex organisations” then the most logical way to do this is to understand the ability for each organisation to maximise being interconnected whilst maintaining its independent identity.

Both being interconnected and maintaining independent identity can be characterised by behavioural response. The interconnected behavioural response can be demonstrated by how well the organisation responds to challenges. The independent identity behavioural response can be demonstrated by how well the organisation operates.

Suppose being good at these behavioural responses is smart. Let’s use Smart because these responses are “Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely”. We can then label the responses as Smart Challenges and Smart Operating. We are now in a position to describe and measure the behavioural responses as they are observable and can be captured using qualitative measures. Eureka, we’re on the path to improved certainty!

In the following posts we’ll explore Smart Challenges, Smart Operating, how they fit into a 360 degree framework along with the top 25 behaviours complex organisations can embrace…