GigaOM » setting goals

Rypple teams up with Spotify to reimagine goal setting

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:01:13 +0000

Goal setting is traditionally one of the most top-down aspects of business. The CEO sets the agenda with responsibility for fixing targets to reach that goal, cascading down the ranks until the employee on the ground is handed his or her expected piece of the puzzle, often with little to no understanding of how it fits into the larger vision the organization is aiming for.

Now Rypple is teaming up with much-buzzed-about company Spotify to reimagine all of that. The social performance management company (a Net:Work 2010 Future Ideas Lanchpad finalist) worked with the digital music firm to develop Social Goals 2.0, Rypple announced this morning. The platform’s new goal-setting capability is built on the objectives and key results (OKR) model developed by Intel and allows teams to set common goals, see what colleagues are working on and monitor how individuals’ efforts are impacting objectives.

It is also designed to be more user-friendly than existing goal-setting tools, says Rypple’s co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Debow. “Social Goals 2.0 is about delivering something managers and their teams will actually use day-to-day,” he says. That means more engagement and understanding of how specific tasks fit into overall strategy, even as that strategy evolves, according to Johan Persson, the organizational development manager at Spotify. “For a high-growth company like ours, things change quickly,” he commented. “Rypple enables us to be more transparent across the organization and keep our employees focused on what really matters.”

That’s good for the company, claims Rypple, but also good for the motivation of individual employees, who can see more easily how their work advances the company agenda. “We believe people want to make a meaningful contribution — not just spend their days doing useless busy work that doesn’t move the business forward,” says Debow. Rypple is hoping this new feature helps both organizations and team members track and appreciate that contribution.

Is keeping employees in the loop about how their work contributes to the company’s goals an issue at your organization?

Image courtesy of Rypple

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Are annual performance reviews passé?

Terri Griffith — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:35:57 +0000

Although tight ties between performance and feedback are important, the two are often separated by the realities of organizational life. “Annual reviews rely on hazy recall, with managers remembering recent events and overlooking what was done earlier in a review cycle,” says Stanford Professor and organizational expert, Jeff Pfeffer.

Similarly, though with more colorful language, past CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz says,

I have the puppy theory. When the puppy pees on the carpet, you say something right then because you don’t say six months later, “Remember that day, January 12th, when you peed on the carpet?” That doesn’t make any sense. “This is what’s on my mind. This is quick feedback.” And then I’m on to the next thing.

Our product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter — putting more pressure on how quickly we can form teams and work effectively in and across teams. At the same time, team members are often working apart or on-the-go. In order to give effective feedback in this environment, managers need support, and performance management platforms, such as Rypple, aim to help.

In the most adept teams, members know who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate as a result. Rypple’s mobile capabilities mean that feedback can be given and received in ways that parallel the stream of daily work.

Rypple also helps make goal setting a living process, rather than an annual consideration. After an individual or team goal is set, other people can be invited to track the goal. Progress can also be monitored publicly, adding further accountability.

When I talked with Daniel Debow, co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, he said that Rypple replicates common online behavior. People regularly check spaces like Facebook to update their activities and see what others are saying. Rypple “harnessed what was already happening,” he said.

Rypple supports “a desire to do what we already know is common sense,” Debow said. He also noted that managers should coach people every week or two, update goals, and recognize performance immediately.

In the weeks since the call, I’ve noticed additional cases highlighting the wisdom of speeding-up and socializing feedback.

For example, I went back to reports that Zappos had done away with annual performance reviews. In a presentation on their membership-required ZapposInsights site, they say that they found annual reviews unproductive. “Nobody wants to give them or receive them…If everyone is always in open communication, then annual reviews are redundant and not very useful at all.” Zappos does use a culture assessment as a feedback tool, but they are careful to say that this is not a substitute for annual performance reviews. Given the company’s open communication style, annual reviews just don’t have a place.

“A recession is a good time for managers to focus more on evidence and less on received wisdom or old habits. Asking hard questions about performance management would be a good place to start,” says Jeff Pfeffer. In my opinion, we have an opportunity to improve performance management in modern organizations. The people are ready. The technology is ready. Our organizations should be ready.

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3 Goal-setting Tips That Don’t Work (And 3 That Do)

Celine Roque — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 17:00:53 +0000

“What are your New Year’s resolutions?” As 2011 approached, I heard this question frequently. I usually responded with a cryptic answer about how I always have a list of goals, but don’t necessarily call them resolutions. The word itself usually makes people either hopeful or cynical. I tend to belong to the latter group. With the low success rates of New Year’s resolutions, who can blame us?

Last year, the New York Times published an article (login required) citing research finding that about 80 percent of people who make New Year’s resolutions break them by Valentine’s Day. A study from 2007 supports this, saying only twelve percent of people achieve their New Year’s goals.

Perhaps this means that before we list our goals for 2011, we should take a closer look at our own attitudes towards goal-setting. What misconceptions do we have, and what can we do to remedy them?

Myth #1: Tell everyone your goals so that you’re publicly accountable.

In theory, publicizing your goals with friends, or on your blog or Facebook profile, might force you to achieve them, so as not to be seen as someone who’s all talk and no action. But according to a 2009 study by goal-setting researcher Peter Gollwitzer (PDF), this isn’t always true. Most people state their behavioral goals in very general terms (“My goal is to eat healthier”) that gives the premature impression we’ve already done them.

Here’s what works instead: implementation intentions. Gollwitzer defines them (PDF) as a plan spelling out when, where, and how you intend to accomplish a goal. In fact, another study (PDF) shows that implementation intentions work so well that they can help you accomplish your goals despite the presence of distracting thoughts and emotions.

This doesn’t mean it’s easy after you establish a plan. You’ll need to check and update your plan often. It’s also important to start working on your goal as soon as possible. The more time your goal remains inactive after you’ve stated your intentions, the less likely you are to accomplish it.

Myth #2: Reward yourself for your progress.

Some people suggest that to keep yourself focused and motivated in your pursuit of a goal, you need to have rewards for accomplishments. For example, if you successfully stick to your schedule for a week, you’ll give yourself the license to go out with friends during the weekend. While there’s nothing wrong with rewards per se, you need to be careful about how you think of them.

Research shows that for large goals (e.g.. becoming healthier) that have many supporting subgoals (e.g.. sticking to a diet, exercising regularly), whenever you successfully achieve a subgoal, you should reward your personal commitment to the larger goal rather than to your progress. Rewarding yourself for achieving one subgoal may lead you to ignore the other subgoals, because you’ll view them as substitutes. If you reward your commitment to the larger goal, the subgoals will seem interrelated, and you’ll be more driven to pursue each of them.

Myth #3: Focus on yearly goals.

By definition, New Year’s resolutions are goals that must be achieved within a year. While this tradition can work for some goals, it may not be effective to use such a long time-frame. First, even if we think we know ourselves well, we tend to be poor predictors of what we’ll need or feel in the future. Our perspectives, situations, and desires may differ greatly within a year. Second, most research (PDF) backs up the idea that setting short-term goals is more effective than looking at the big picture. This means that even if you have a list of yearly goals, it’s better to break them down into smaller monthly or weekly subgoals.

Given these goal-setting myths, we should be more attentive to how we set our goals, what works in practice, and what only seems effective in theory. By looking at our goal-setting behavior together with the goals themselves, we’ll be more likely to accomplish more this year.

Do you set goals during the New Year? Which tactics improve your success rate?

Photo by sxc.hu user lazydog

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New Year's Resolutions You Can Keep

Nancy Nally — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:00:31 +0000

Jan. 1 is coming, and it’s time to make those New Year’s resolutions!

Yes, I know I said in an earlier article that the New Year is a bad time to set arbitrary goals about changing your life. But while it may not be the best time to start a successful diet, it can actually be the perfect time to do certain resolution-related things for your business.

Accounting: Jan. 1 isn’t just the start of a new calendar year. For most of us, it is also the start of a new fiscal year for our business. So if we’d like to improve on our methods of accounting or record keeping from the past, Jan. 1 is the time to start implementing those improvements so that any new systems we implement cover the whole fiscal year. Many of us don’t get really motivated to make these changes until we have to deal in-depth with the previous year’s mess as tax time approaches in April. By then, at least a quarter of the new fiscal year may have passed and we have missed a prime chance to start improving our systems from the beginning.
Statistics & Goals: The calendar/fiscal year is also the natural time frame that most businesses use to set financial and other goals by. As Jan. 1 approaches, it’s a good time to evaluate how you did against your current year’s goals and create a new set of goals (or resolutions) for the new year. Then, put in place a plan that will allow you to make progress towards meeting those goals.
Projects: We all have a traditional resolution-type project that has been sitting uncompleted: the file cabinet that needs archiving and shredding, an out-of-control inbox, or computer files that really should have an off-site backup. Take advantage of all that social programming that says you should be making a resolution and use it convince yourself to set aside the time to do some of those projects. Don’t bother trying to convince yourself that your file cabinet will be in that pristine condition three months from now. But at least you’ll start out 2010 in better shape than you ended 2009.
Organizing: Some of the pressure for New Year’s resolutions in January comes from retailers as they spend the month pushing sales on products that are targeted at “traditional” resolutions such as organization and weight loss. So if you have any organizing projects that need to be done, now is the time to do them, because you can save money on any supplies you’ll need to complete them. Everything from labelers and fire safes to closet shelving goes on sale in January. Who isn’t motivated to get things done by saving money?

Don’t expect to change your whole life overnight just because the date on the calendar changed. But if you are realistic about your expectations and make the best of the arrival of Jan. 1, you can use it to start off your business year on the right foot.

What will you be doing to start off 2010 better than you ended 2009?

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How to Learn From Unfulfilled Goals

Celine Roque — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:41:53 +0000

Web working, whether you’re a freelancer or a corporate employee, tends to be performance-based. We are judged by our output, which includes the daily and the weekly goals we meet.

Sometimes, however, we don’t meet all of the goals we set. I’m guilty of this. Every month there’s at least one goal I don’t accomplish. In fact, if I miss just one goal, I count myself lucky. These mistakes were the hard way for me to learn about goal-setting. But is there any other way to learn?

I believe there is. You can learn from how I’ve handled my own mistakes. Perhaps you can learn something that will keep you working on those New Year’s resolutions and goals you’ve set, and deal with the ones you were unable to meet.

Focus on your success. It’s easy to sink into disappointment, or even depression, if you don’t accomplish your goals. The more important your goal was, the more disappointed you’ll feel. But sometimes, if you look at the list of things you’ve accomplished, you’ll discover that you’ve achieved some things that weren’t in your list of daily, weekly, or monthly goals.

For example, you might not have met the deadline of the application for the freelance gig of your dreams, but you did finish an outline for a book idea you suddenly had. You might have been slow in one of your big projects, but you were able to finish ten minor projects earlier than expected. Don’t let your mistakes occupy your mind so much that you prevent yourself from finding long-term solutions for them.

Find out what went wrong. The inability to accomplish a goal means that something went wrong. The mistake might be found in the process you set, the time available to you, or the other people you’re working with. Here are some of the common mistakes I’ve made when setting goals:

Vague phrasing. “Become a better writer” or “Learn more about social media” is not a goal. Your goals must be concrete and specific enough that it’ll be easy for you to identify whether you’ve accomplished it or not. Instead, set something like “Write at least three blog posts that don’t get modified by the editor” or “Finish reading the free social media ebook I downloaded”.
Lack of time. It’s also possible that you underestimated the time it would take to accomplish your goal. I’ve learned to double or triple my expected time of completion for some projects, because I know that I’ll be underestimating it if I don’t.
Lack of communication. If you’re working with a team on a specific goal, examine why you weren’t able to deliver the results you wanted. Was the schedule of deliverables clear from the beginning? Is there a proper venue for group discussions?
Too ambitious. The problem with ambitious goals is that they tend to be large in scope. Break down the project into smaller milestones and next actions. Schedule these appropriately. You might take 30 minutes or more to do this for large projects, but you’ll be saving time in the long run.
Too simple. The opposite of ambitious goals are the ones that seem too simple – they’ll take only two to five minutes of your time. Sounds easy, right? But sometimes, the fact that they’re too simple makes them easy to avoid. “Oh that’s easy, I can do that later.” Until later becomes tomorrow, then next week, then next month. David Allen has a solution for this known as “the two-minute rule”. If there’s an item on your to-do list that takes less than two minutes to do, then just do it the second you think of it.

Know why you want to set this goal in the first place. Did you just set this goal because it’s on a list you made six months ago and it’s embarrassing to erase it? Or did you set it because you think it’s a goal you should have, but not necessarily a goal you want? By knowing why you set certain goals, especially personal ones, you can find the initial motivation you had and use it as your continuing inspiration.

Let’s face it – even if I wrote all of this down and you spent fifteen precious minutes reading it, goal setting will still be a trial-and-error experience for everyone. But with a little warning and by learning through another person’s mistakes, we’ll be more aware of what we’re doing the next time we sit down and write our goals.

Do you always accomplish the goals on your list? If not, how do you deal with missed goals? If you always manage to accomplish your goals, what contributes to your success?

Image by ilker from sxc.hu

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