Systems eat goals for breakfast
The title of this post is a bit of a play on Peter Drucker’s famous quote, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” I’ll give you another quote. In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals, but fall to the level of your systems.” Take a moment to let that sink in.
I recently worked with a non-profit organization that had every director create SMART goals for the past several years. Senior executives were frustrated with the level of performance coming from the team under them. I came in to help them with a fresh perspective. What became obvious to me is that despite whatever goals the directors would set, they all had very different ways of going about their work. So I developed a project that we could work on together to flesh out ideas.
Many non-profits are led by staff but then operate with volunteers. It was no different for this organization. The staff didn’t have a clear process for recruitment or volunteer enrollment. So, even if each director came up with a goal of recruiting 20 volunteers within a quarter, they were all over the place on their skill level and tactics. We developed a simple and clear way to get the word out and have interested parties provide just enough information so the directors could follow-up. What we did was create a uniform system of getting the word out, collecting the information, inputting them into a system, and creating follow-up procedures. It’s just like working through a CRM, but for a non-profit.
If I left it here, we’d be incomplete. A CRM isn’t a system. It’s just software. From here, we clarified the enrollment standard operating procedure (SOP) down to the tee. I provided sample scripts for conversations, timelines, and tools for how this is done. For comparison, in the past, if they had received 100 interested volunteers, it could take over a month to work through all the volunteer information and the data would be all over the place because of the lag time in execution based on the skill level of each director. Once we implemented this new system, all 100 volunteers were contacted by the next day. That’s a 1-day turnaround time. Now, the process continued and was based on the response of the interested party, but nonetheless, each director reached their goal, not because they set a goal and mustered up willpower to get it done, but by running through a newly created system. In other words, it was already established that every director could not rise to the level of their goals. But in this simple real-world activity, every director, regardless of skillset, fell to the level of their system.
What systems need to be established or improved upon in order to set your team up for success?
Summary
If performance is an issue, it may not be a goal setting issue, but a systems issue.
Software is a tool but it’s not a system.
Systems provide a standard for peoples’ varying skill level.
Systems set people and the organization up for success.
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