The Need for Mountains

I was working with an organization to improve its technology development process, which was going too slowly for the CEO. The problem was not that the goals for improvement were too aggressive. It was the constant destructive conflict due to a clash of the titans.

Whenever the CEO met with the leaders who worked with him, each meeting was filled with arguments that had repeated themselves many times over. There were passive-aggressive personal attacks in those meetings and in the hallways. Sarcasm was becoming the common way to discuss other leaders and their initiatives.

His biggest frustration was that in the past, this behavior pattern had been rare. The majority of the leadership team was the same group of executives who had stayed with him through much of the journey of the whole organization from start-up to success. They struggled for years simply to survive as a business. During those years, the team members worked hard together to overcome the challenges before them.

His leaders had engaged in conflicts in the past; however, they had always been constructive. They battled about ideas, but in the end they came to agreements that were better than the ones they had before.

In the struggling days of the start-up, they had to work in temporary trailers in a field. The trailers were often way too cold in the winter and way too hot in the summer. They worked long hours.

Now, they were in a real building that the company owned. The company had grown to over 500 people. They started out making customized software for select customers. They now had a product line with multiple customers. They were successful.

Their behavior had changed, and the CEO wasn’t sure why. He asked me to help.

The Case of the Clash of the Titans: Finding the Root Cause

To find the root cause, I interviewed each of the leadership team members, including the CEO. I asked each of them three questions:

1. What were three highlights that were personally meaningful to you in the last ten years of the organization?

2. What was the overall goal of the organization in those ten years?

3. What is the overall goal for the next ten years?

The answers to these questions soon formed a pattern. Within a week, I came back to the CEO with the root cause behind the troublesome team dynamics.

Everyone had the same answer to the question “What was the overall goal of the organization in those ten years?” The obvious unifying goal was often stated as a single word: survival.

The stories people remembered very fondly from the previous ten years were all about overcoming tremendous obstacles to survive difficult situations. The organization almost ran out of money multiple times. They almost lost key customers multiple times. They had all crammed into hot, badly ventilated, cheap trailers to get the work done in relentless hours of overtime. Together, they had overcome each of those challenges to survive.

There was a very telling thing about the stories of the past. None of the stories that people remembered fondly were about the previous eighteen months. All the stories were from before they had finally achieved economic success. They now had large, steady customers. They had secured significant funding. There had been no recent danger of running out of payroll or of losing customers.

What were the goals for the next ten years? People had wildly different answers. The most common answer was “I don’t know.”

The root cause of the trouble became clear. In the past, the conflicts were constructive because they were all headed for the same goal of survival. All the decisions had time limits. The conflict was about how to get there. Those conflicts produced positive friction. Then, a decision was made and they moved. Success from each survival instance built trust in each other to face the next survival challenge.

Now the team was without a compelling organizational goal. Coupled with the lack of that compelling goal was that any deadlines the team faced now were not real compared to the adrenaline rush of knowing that unless they did something miraculous, they would run out of money by the end of the month.

The leadership team had run a ten-year journey of survival. They had now crossed a line. They had arrived. However, they were now thirsty for something . . . something more.

The Need for Mountains

In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition became shipwrecked. It took 500 days for the commander and his crew to reach safety while living in the harshest conditions our planet has to offer. Years later, though, Shackleton returned to the Antarctic on another expedition, and most of his crew joined him. They went back because they recalled the freezing, starving, dangerous journey as one of the happiest times of their lives. It wasn’t just that they relished the challenge, it was that they remembered overcoming the challenge as a team.

There is a need for challenges as high as mountains. There is a need for people to gather together and work toward a great goal. There is a need for quests.

If you see people having the same arguments over and over and again, it is almost always a battle about what the next steps should be, or what the overall solution should be. The root cause of this repetitive argument is not about being deadlocked on which solution is superior. If those people battling took time out of the battle to dig deeper they would often find that the individuals deadlocked have different goals in mind. They are headed to different destinations.

Even organizations in the midst of the survival journey are better off if they set compelling goals. For example, Shackleton set a compelling goal before his crew when it was clear how dismal the situation was. Other Antarctic adventures with similar mishaps had resulted in few to no survivors. Everyone on the crew knew this. Before they set out Shackleton set the clear goal. He said with great conviction that everyone would make it back home alive and it was up to everyone to make that come true. After 500 days everyone did indeed make it home. Alive.

Along the way, many of the men kept journals. In spite of the freezing conditions, in spite of the long dark days, in spite of hunger, this was an entry in Dr. Alexander Macklin’s diary, which matched many others, “It has been a lovely day, and it is hard to think we are in a frightfully precarious situation.”

In some ways, Shackleton had it easy when setting a clear compelling goal. Survival as a goal was obvious. If your organization is successful and survival is a given, the need for compelling goals is even more critical. But how do you set a compelling goal when the obvious one of survival is no longer there?

What do you do as a leader when success, by itself, is not compelling enough?

Seven Ways to Create Compelling Goals

1. Start with the “big why.” Why is your goal important to you? Even more important, why is it important to your clients? Why is it important to your employees? You can set goals for a period of time, for a project, or to set the stage for creating a new organization. Whatever you set a goal for, start with the big why!

2. Make your goals about going somewhere inspiring. Too often, managers put forth goals about “not doing” something. We are going to “stop providing bad service” is not nearly as compelling as “customers will call other people to tell them about the service we provided them.”

3. Be fearless in your challenge. Outright impossible goals are depressing; however, goals that are outrageously hard and very worth doing are inspiring. Leaders are too often anxious in setting hard goals. They want to make the workplace fun. They may fear attrition or complaining. Fear not. People want to climb the metaphorical mountains that are important. They will invest in the leader who believes they are capable of the difficult journey.

4. Create goals that are worth the journey. Goals that are worth the journey are the perfect complement to being fearless about the challenge you set forth. The goal may be difficult. It is possible that we may fail to meet the full extent of the goal. Nonetheless, with great goals, everyone knows it is worth the journey. They know that they will personally be better for it because they were part of the journey. The famous goal to “put a man on the moon by the end of this decade” was hard, was exciting, and to the United States, was worth the journey.

5. Work on language that will create visceral emotion. Think about emotions. How can you state your goal so that it will evoke an emotion that people understand, care about, and will remember? Instead of saying, “We need to ensure that we deliver on time” say “We are the exemplars of our industry. Our customers will know that we know more, care more, do more about delivering great value to their needs than anyone else ever can.”

6. Leave room for people to take their own meaning and ownership. Be ambiguous in details on purpose. If you provide too much detail, it leaves no room for the imagination to take hold. It doesn’t leave room for a dialogue. Steve Jobs once told a team that he wanted the “buttons to look so good on the screen that people would want to lick them.” It is visceral, exciting, and worthy. It is also so ambiguous that it leaves room for people to be inventive.

7. Use your goal to engage in dialogue. People often complain about ambiguous goals. But that is the secret ingredient to great goal statements. When a goal is put forward and there is no dialogue, there is no way to truly know if it was understood or even heard! When teams engage in the dialogue, even to complain, they will start to figure out what the goal means to them and how they can contribute.

The goals you provide are not the end of the conversation but a compelling start to the conversation. Done in this way, ownership of the goal grows throughout the organization. Further, the results the leader is seeking also grow beyond original aspirations.

Pointing the Battling Leadership Team to a New Challenge

The company I worked with had achieved success. Yet the members of the leadership team were like a sailing ship on a becalmed sea. It seemed that they were not making progress toward anything!

These squabbling, dysfunctional titans did not need a team-building event in the desert. They did not need trust-falls. They did not need training on how to speak politely to each other. They needed a quest that would challenge them intensely. Further, it had to be a quest they believed in.

The CEO worked to create compelling goals that would engage the leadership team and the whole organization in a new quest. The CEO and I worked together to create a speech to set the stage for the next step of his company’s journey.

In creating the speech, we worked to follow the hidden structure of many great speeches. That hidden structure is to draw three distinct, inspiring lines for the listener. These three lines represent where we have come, where we are now, and where we need to go. For example, in JFK’s famous speeches about putting a man on the moon, he recognizes the past and how very far we have come to reach today. He then goes to the future and draws a compelling vision of where we can go. He returns to the present day and notes the big gap between the current state of the U.S. capacity and how much growth is required to put a man on the moon. He then returns to the past and says we can do it because look what we have done before.

The CEO gathered the entire leadership team at an offsite event and set the stage for what was to come. He said:

We have come a long way. We remember the various times that we almost went out of business. We remember sweating in the trailers in the farm field we used for offices, putting in long hours across nights and weekends to pull off the impossible.

It was worth it. We have arrived. We are out of danger. Looking backwards we can see that our journey was the hero’s journey. We had to battle the equivalent of ogres, trolls, and various other monsters to survive.

We did survive. I am personally relieved to be at a place where we have many loyal customers. We have payroll in the bank well into the future. We have loyal, enthusiastic people working for us. We actually have a real building! We have now arrived.

We are not done. It is time to thrive.

We are not going to be the Chicago Cubs, who last won a World Series in 1908. For our industry we are setting our goals to be akin to the New York Yankees history in baseball. We are going to from this day forward build our organization to produce multiple championships.

The heroics that got us to this place are amazing. It will take more than that to go to the places that we can go. It is what we learned on that journey that will enable us to do so much more.

I have a set of outrageous goals I am going to lay out for us. They are about our technology, about our industry, about what we can really do for our customers. This workshop we are about to do is to take those goals I have and for us all to wrestle with them. I want us to make them more outrageous. I also want us to create the start of the plan of what we must do to achieve them.

The CEO then went on to lay out his critical three goals about what he wanted this team to achieve in the next five years. He made his goals concise, memorable, visceral, and sufficiently ambiguous. They spoke to the passions of his leadership team and were indeed outrageously hard. The goals pointed to new marketplace segments and also outlined some new product lines that would be extremely hard to create.

After his speech, he had each of the leadership team members take time to speak about the goals including what they would mean to them personally to be able to engage in this quest. He wanted to know how they could make those goals more important, more exciting to the organization and to each of them as leaders. What could they do to contribute?

The ensuing discussion was passionate, exciting, and filled with laughter. I must note that there were some arguments, but the arguments were constructive and built toward a better, clearer, more exciting set of goals.

The CEO gave them a mountain to climb.

It was not the end of conflict for the team. However, it served to transform the conflict from destructive to constructive. The CEO and his leadership team followed through and made sure that transformation was tremendous.