5 Ways To Crush Your Goals & Take Your Game to the Next Level in 2020

“Everybody loves the idea of ‘disruption’ as long as it happens to other people,” Salesforce founder Marc Benioff mused after a Virgin Disruptors seminar in San Francisco. “You need to get to the future first, ahead of your customers, and be ready to greet them when they arrive." Sir Richard Branson, the tie-cutting, disruptive founder of the Virgin Group, was sitting within earshot: “Yeah, if your strategy is to change the world," he said, "you’d better start by looking yourself in the mirror" to ask a simple question:

"Does your current annual plan actually ignite any excitement?" Will your team really want to make it happen with urgency? If you're not absolutely certain, then rally your troops around five OKR's — Objectives & Key Results — that make growth plans stick at high-performance organizations like Virgin, SalesForce, Google, Junior Achievement, WD-40 and Lyft. Cofounder and CEO Logan Green (at Lyft above) WD40 CEO Garry Ridge and Asheesh Advani, CEO of JAWorldwide and fellow G100 member, have built a solid base for growth on these five principles. In fact, these five will predict whether your plans are doomed for defeat or poised for progress in the new year: Team Talent, Capacity, Alignment, Authority and Accountability.

"Once upon a time, we lived in a house, a city, a country. Today we live in the world--and we prosper when we represent each member" ~ Garry Ridge, CEO WD40

1. TALENT STRATEGY— Do you have the right people on the team, and are you teaching them to LIE to you? Alan Mulally, (right) the CEO who lead Boeing and Ford through legendary turnarounds, and today is a fellow member and mentor of the Goldsmith100. Alan argues that the belief that “your people should just bring solutions, not problems,” is a myth worth killing. Ford appeared doomed for bankruptcy when Mulally arrived for his first staff meeting, but his team spent two hours sharing dashboards which showed green across the board. “I’m not a car guy,” Mulally sighed, looking mystified. “But if your plan was to be losing billions of dollars, it looks like you've achieved it!” He told them to come back with the brutal truth. It took awhile, but finally one executive summoned the courage to reveal a few red signals, asking for help from the entire team to find solutions. His peers held their breath, expecting the grim reaper to open some trap door under his feet.           

Instead, Mulally gave him a standing ovation. You shouldn’t shoot the messenger, but too many bosses do exactly that. Worst yet, the rest of the executive team is allowed to pile on when you finally do admit you're in trouble. When people are afraid, they hide reality until it implodes. Tremendous effort is poured into managing a secret rather than finding a solution. Listen to Alan Mulally's awesome Goldsmith 100 podcast with me.

“The transformation begins in me. When I have the courage and vulnerability to grow, then I have the credibility to ask others to grow” ― Gabriela Teasdale

Rather than obsess over disrupting competitors, build a stronger, higher performance team whose experience and values align at your company, says Whitney Johnson, bestselling author of Build an A Team. Make sure your management systems celebrate (rather than punish) those who promote collaboration and challenge business as usual. Don’t wait for the C-Suite to do this for you—start by role modeling that behavior as a leader of your team at every level in the organization. Bestselling author and change management guru, Price Pritchett, (above center) believes it's disastrous to make plans and set goals without a staffing strategy that makes it safe to work as a team through difficult times. As you hire new people, be on the lookout for recruiting a deeper bench of experienced talent who love to learn rather than hold court—auto-didactic executives who have the confidence and hunger to lead and improve at the same time.

If you're experiencing no discomfort, the risk you're taking probably isn't worthy of you. The only risks that aren't a little scary are the ones you've outgrown. Price Pritchett

2. STRATEGIC CAPACITY—The second critical skill is to evaluate the capacity of your team to take risks and get the job done. The battle is lost or won before the players get on the field. What strategy, resources and skills are necessary for your teams to lead the business transformation that you’ve outlined in your annual plan? In other words, you’ve set the table and bought the ingredients, but do they know how to cook? Leaders often engage in "wishful thinking that people can easily take the leap of faith" to execute your plan without actively "preparing them to win," Bill Gates told me when I first met him at the World Economic Forum in Davos. We were serving on a panel focused on strategic planning, and he gave us a stern reminder that the "people expected to do the work are rarely in the room" where those great plans were conceived, mandated and "passed down like tablets from above." Whenever you do that, you take their power away.

As fellow World Economic Forum member and leadership authority, Sergey Sirotenko, insists: "A great way to turn workers into leaders is to make sure they own the outcomes as their own and make it clear you fully recognize each person's meaningful contribution to the goal. Then they'll race to achieve it."

People may take a job for more money or a title, but they often leave it for more recognition. ~ Bob Nelson

If there’s any major changes in process involved in building new plan, how will you reward your staff at every level to embrace change, or have they just been asked to tolerate the changes you’ve made rather than own them? says Bob Nelson, bestselling author and world authority on employee recognition. "You can't 'manage' change if your team doesn't understand how you're supporting them" through the transformation. It may be obvious to you, but not to them. You've got to show them, Gates said, "don't just think they heard you because you told them."

Comp and benefits just get people to show up. Now that they're here, what are you doing to engage them and get the best out of them? ~  Chester Elton

3. ALIGNMENT—Do we have a process to reward and recognize people for working together across silos to make things happen for customers?Do we have the measures in place to make that obvious? You can’t manage what you don’t measure, but we often don’t realize that leaders have contradictory rules in place that make it difficult or invisible when your team goes out of their way to collaborate, according to Harvard's Dr. Carol Kauffman, (above right) founder and executive director of the Institute of Coaching. Carol and I team taught an advanced coaching workshop with bestselling author and career strategist, Bonita Thompson, (above center) at Carol's annual IOC summit, where we heard overwhelming evidence from behavioralists like Dr. Susan David about how "alignment on a shared vision and ownership across teams" are the two lynchpins to high performance. The skills that executives need to accomplish that is a behavior David calls Emotional Agility. She suggest that next time you find your team falling out of alignment “in a moment of stress or dealing with real complexity," ask yourself whether you're dead right, which means "I might be 'right' but is my response really serving me? Is my behavior serving the ultimate goals of this team?

Leadership expert and G100 guru David Nour asks us to consider: "Does our approach to the work serve a purpose; is it aligned to my organization's definition of success? What is my objective here? What am I truly trying to do? What action here is most aligned with my values and those of my organization?" Think about what team behaviors you want repeated: create a structure for that and shine a light in.  

“Your customers are the judge, jury, and executioner of your value proposition." Alexander Osterwalder, Thinkers50

4. AUTHORITY: The fourth essential principle is give people the real authority to serve the customer. Make sure that you've busted the barriers in the way of the people you've asked to do the work, says turnaround guru and investor, Mark Parsells. "Have they been given both the responsibility AND the authority to lead change?" 

“Find the people passionate about your purpose to drive the agenda--they'll love being held accountable if you give them the authority to do what matters,” says Logan Green, CEO and cofounder of LYFT. He didn't take a salary for 3 years and slept on a couch in an 'apartfice' before his company was worth $11 billion. Logan knows what it means to have authority and accountability. It's much easier to give people responsibility and think that we’re holding them appropriately accountable than to figure out what level of authority they should have to deliver the outcomes you’re seeking. You must agree explicitly on who can make which decisions.  

Successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to others. Marshall Goldsmith

What makes this especially difficult is that you must be willing to tolerate and support other people making choices to move ahead even when you know they are not likely to be the same choices or maybe even the ‘best’ steps you’d take, according to Thinkers50 #1 Executive Coach and New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, founder of the Goldsmith 100 (above center). There is often a mismatch between the responsibility that’s assigned and the authority necessary to move projects forward because "we never actually had a real conversation in the first place."

"Changing faster than the pace of change around us does not require working harder: it requires a change of paradigm and perspective." ~ David Peterson, Google

5.  ACCOUNTABILITY— The fifth and final principle is to decide who decides. The buck stops where exactly? What makes the planning process miserable are those endless days in the weeds fighting over the wrong issues or enemies, and in the end, it’s still not clear who’s responsible for what outcomes. Admit it, you’ve probably dreaded planning, and studies show that frustration springs from too many unspoken expectations by you and your boss, along with a general lack of pre-agreed definitions of success. LinkedIn Influencer Sanyin Siang, author of The Launch Book and Executive Director of the Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics at Duke University, believes the core to accountability revolves around clear ownership "focusing on what you can control to create the best possible outcome."

Be aware of how you react to different parts of your journey and ask yourself why--you'll be the most successful at those events that give you energy. Sanyin Siang

Ownership and accountability determine the "willingness to be held responsible for an outcome" even though we can't control perfection. "It's about being in total alignment with your beliefs and doing what matters."

We measure so much in our businesses for lots of good reasons. So why not give that same level of attention to our whole LIFE: our health, our finances, and our relationships? Claire Diaz-Ortiz

When I first started out in business, I hated the planning cycle because it felt so strangely disconnected from my life and work until I was lucky to be assigned to report directly (for a dozen years) alongside founder Charles ‘Chuck’ Schwab, (left) the financial services industry disruptor. He insisted that no great plans or projects proceed without four checkpoints:

A.   Identify owners for what creates growth and quality of our services.

B.   Create clarity about how every new hire will have impact on your top priorities.

C.   Establish rewards and consequences for the individual, team and organization that make it self-evident how you’re doing. It’s not the boss’ role to hold you accountable—that’s your job—your leaders are there to bust barriers and help you win.

D.   Nail the right measures to keep things on track. Whenever the planning process started to drift at Schwab, he tasked the leadership team with shifting our external focus from obsessing over competitors, for example, (a natural tendency), when we should instead be fussing over our customers. When the internal conversations devolved into conflicts over power, control or defending turf, Schwab tasked us to remind the team who pays the bills. "Our job is to create breakout customer experiences — every year it's about making things better and simpler in measurable ways,” Schwab said. At this point, Chuck would slap the table and smile as we lurched in our seats. Then he'd point to the plans that we had all signed up for. “I’m proud that you’re all willing to be accountable for that. You own what matters most!”