Are there times where you feel like your organization is stalling and lacking in business success? Do the employees feel like the mythological Greek King Sisyphus who was forced to push a giant boulder up a hill every day only to watch it roll back down?
If so, according to Franklin Covey, a company that specializes in performance improvement, your organization is likely not focusing on the truly important goals. Failure to focus with great intensity on the few goals that will drive business success results in wasted efforts and burned out employees
Franklin Covey divides goals into two main categories; they even gave them fun names to make them easy to remember.
- Wildly Important Goals (WIGS)
- Pretty Important Goals (PIGS)
Driving Business Success – WIGS
Define Your WIGS
If you want to drive business success, ask yourself this question. What are the three things, which if not done well, will mean that we have failed as an organization?
At first glance, this may seem like an easy question, but really take the time to sink your teeth into this. Sit down with other members of management and dive into each part of your organization from operations, to administration, to customer service. Trust me – you will be surprised with what you end up with. We were.
After you nail these three things down, define where your organization truly needs to be in order to say that you are 100% in compliance with that goal. Don’t worry if it doesn’t seem achievable; that part comes later.
For example, say you are a quick-serve restaurant. One of your WIGS may be that customers need to get food quickly. How quickly? When does the clock start – when they walk in the door or when they place their order? Be specific here.
Your WIG should end up looking something like this: Customers will wait no more than 4 minutes 30 seconds from the time they get into line to order their food until they have received their food.
Implement your WIGS
Now that you know what you need to measure, it’s time to implement a way to actually measure it. This will be easier for some WIGS than for others. For the aforementioned WIG, store personnel may need to periodically measure this time throughout the day. If you are measuring the amount of time it takes from the time the food is ordered until the food is ready, that data may be more readily available in your POS systems.
Communicate Your WIGS
This is, I think, one of the most critical parts of effectively executing WIGS. I think we all agree that it takes the entire organization working together to achieve these goals. One person or department cannot carry the goal alone.
For example, your cashiers could be cranking through the orders; however, if the kitchen is running slow, if there is not enough food inventory, if the systems malfunction…you catch my drift. Any number of other factors can and will influence the wait time.
As such, everyone in your organization needs to be aware of what the WIGS are, how they are being measured, and how their specific role impacts each WIG.
Moreover, the progress on these WIGS needs to be visibly posted every week so that people can see how things are (or aren’t) progressing. This will keep it top-of-mind.
Meet About Your WIGS
Franklin Covey recommends having short weekly meetings where team members discuss the status of each WIG. After each meeting, each team should leave with the following information:
- What one thing do I need to do this week to move us closer to our goal?
- What does my team need to do to help others get closer to their goal?
Then, you execute. During next week’s meeting, you report on what you did and what impact it had.
These incremental changes will drive success much faster than you think. What you once thought was unachievable will suddenly become the new normal.
Stalling Business Success – PIGS
When you are defining what your WIGS are, you will come up with a lot of good goals – goals that really would help the business but that aren’t critical to its success. These goals land on the Pretty Important Goals (or PIGS) list.
Be careful with these PIGS. It’s easy to get caught in the tyranny of the urgent and turn a PIG into a WIG. For your quick serve restaurant, a PIG may end up being the restroom cleaning schedule. Yes – having very clean facilities is important to restaurants for a wide variety of reasons, and yes, you do need to have procedures in place to ensure this happens; however, this may not end up making your top three.
Don’t allow yourself to get side-tracked and sucked into these PIGS at the expense of that truly matters – your WIGS.