Hi, I'm Joe Crosby. And this video is about goals and aligning the organization around goals. It's a critical leadership function. As you can see in this rainbow chart, which was created by my mentor and father, Robert p Crosby, and you can find it in his book culture change on organizations. There are three critical types of goals to focus on. The first is bottom line, one of my favorite customers was a plant manager of a plant that was the highest cost producer of their product in the global system of the large organization for which he worked.

This was not a good position to be in if there was a recession or other types of cost cutting of course, then his plant might get shut down. So he got in front of his people and gave this very message. said, Look, here's where we are on the cost curve of making this product. And where I want to be is at the top of the curve. And we need to get there by this time. And so he set out that challenge to the organization and then engaged people in thinking about now what's their piece of getting towards that goal and they very successfully did.

So. The second type of goal is work processes. Every person in your organization can be engaged around, knowing what they need from others, and in what manner of time they need it in order to do their task before they pass that on to the next downstream step in a process. So the input throughput what they do and output the input can be measured. Of course, all these things can be measured. And so everyone should have some metric around.

Are they getting what they need on time and the right quality? Are they dealing with it in a reasonable amount of time? And then are they delivering it to the next step in the process with the right quality in a timely manner. And if you get everybody thinking about these things and working on them, you are going to continuously improve performance in the organization. All of that should be tied around the work processes which are most important and hitting the bottom line goals. The third factor here human factors can often be thought of in terms of survey results.

So you can measure for instance, whether or not people think they're respected by their immediate supervisor. If that score is lower than a organization, you're going to have high turnover, high absenteeism, quality issues, safety issues, morale issues. You want that to be as high as possible. And you can have people measure it, and then look at it together, the supervisor and their subordinates can look at it together, talk about it, they may need help. Some of those might be tense conversations. But this is not about blame.

This is about identifying what's happening, figuring out together now what can we do to improve it? Maybe we avoid the supervisor when there's bad news. Well, that's probably not what the supervisor actually wants. Now, maybe there's something about their behavior which has fueled people avoiding them. You have to have people throughout the organization looking at human factors in figuring out how to improve so that issues are surface so that groups are talking to each other effectively. So that the whole system is working as well as possible.

So that's the three elements of this rainbow chart of goals, which I hope you will go after, as a leader. Now, aligning the organization around goals is easier said than done. If all you do is give a speech to the whole organization, or to your plant, or to whatever lies below you, and then you think it's going to happen, well, you know, good luck with that. You have to, to create alignment, have conversations with the next layer with the people that report immediately to you. Go over the goals with them, maybe adjust them and then have them thinking about now what do they need to do in order to help get to those goals and what do they need from each other from their peers? You need horses On total alignment, as well as vertical alignment, and that has to be cascaded layer by layer.

A predictable outcome. If you don't cascade it layer by layer conversations with your immediate reports, then they have conversations with their direct reports. So on down the food chain, if you don't have that kind of alignment work done around goals, then you will have what's known as the black hole effect. It will suck the life out of what you're trying to achieve. Not because people in between are dysfunctional or against you, but because they just have not been brought effectively into the picture. So if especially if you skip from the top right down to the bottom, you're likely to set up this kind of phenomenon.

Groups need to be talking to each other horizontally, maintenance production, whatever the different groups are engineering in your organization, if they are having conversations with each other about what they're working on, and in terms of pulling off the goals and what they need from each other, then you are going to needlessly suck energy out of the effort because the groups will be misaligned. So alignment around goals takes conversations one layer at a time and cross functional conversations. And if you take the time to do that, you will save a lot of time later, and you will almost certainly pull off what you're attempting to achieve. Alright, it's been a pleasure talking to you again. I look forward to the next conversation. Take care