Evergreen Leadership Blog

Goals

SMART goals or HEART goals?

Lately I’ve been wondering if SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based) goals only represent a tiny part of what really matters, what really makes a difference, what really makes for a life worth living. For I’ve seen what happens when we create SMART goals, especially when we are going to be measured (and rewarded) for them in a work setting. We think small – remember they must be achievable. We divide our work into small fragments, losing sight of the overarching purpose. We document the doable into a tiny time box.

I wonder what would happen if we also created HEART goals, ones that are: Holistic, Enduring, Aspirational, Really matter, and Timeless.

The reason SMART goals are effective is that they provide a way to break big things into smaller pieces that can be measured. However, you have to know what the BIG thing is. My suggestion: start with a HEART goal and then, and only then, create SMART goals in support of it.

Some examples …

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Leadership

Leadership is About Who You Are and What You Do

At times people are startled when I refer to them as a leader. “But I’m only an employee, a student, or a volunteer,” they say in protest. For they believe that leadership is defined by role, position, age or appointment. I don’t.

I believe leadership is about who you are and what you do. It is seeing a way to create a better future, stepping up to make that happen and engaging others in the pursuit of that goal.

To illustrate my point, let me tell you a story about Lilly…

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Change

Make it Easy to Do the Right Thing – Planning a Successful Change Initiative

We all fall prey to the path of least resistance – doing what is easy and expedient over what is in our long term best interest. We are hungry and pop into a convenience store, where we are overwhelmed by poor choices. Do we seek out the isolated piece of fruit hidden among the chips, candy and donuts? I don’t know about you, but peanut M&M’s win out every time for me.

Understanding the human proclivity to take the path of least resistance can help us design ways that “pull” people into the desired behaviors more easily. That’s why this simple mantra can make a big difference in any change initiative…

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Intention

What’s Value Congruence Got to Do with It?

Think about these three retailers: WALMART, KMART, and TARGET. All discount department stores. All ones that you have likely shopped in at some point. Now, see if you can match the company values with the retailer.

Retailer A

  • Great shopping, anytime, anywhere
  • Celebrating diversity and inclusion
  • Design for all
  • Community support and engagement
  • A fun and rewarding place to work

Retailer B

  • Creating lasting relationships with customers by empowering them to manage their lives
  • Attaining best in class productivity and efficiency
  • Building our brands
  • Reinventing the company continuously through technology and innovation

Retailer C

  • Service to our customers
  • Respect for the individual
  • Strive for excellence
  • Act with integrity

Read on to find the answers… and to explore what value congruence has to do with profitability.

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Drawing: There is no elevator to success, you gotta' take the stairs.
Intention

How Do You Define Success?

A few weeks ago I friend told me she was “so proud of my success” – which gave me pause. Was I really successful? By whose measure? Why did it make me uncomfortable to consider myself successful?

And in that same day I stumbled across the notion of a continuum of success – that we move from Survival to Stability to Success and finally to Significance. I thought it would be a fine thing to blog about – but the reality is that I’ve struggled for two weeks to pull together some cogent thoughts about the topic.

None the less – the time has come to share. So this post will be a combination of known and unknown, comfort and discomfort. And with that, I’m hoping to spark a conversation so that your thoughts can help me make more sense of this topic.

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Leadership

Workplace Hazing

Say the word hazing and we immediately think of college fraternities and high school locker rooms. The idea that if you want to be “one of us” there is a price of admission – sometimes embarrassing, sometimes requiring great sacrifices, sometimes acts of daring, and sometimes outright danger or death.

It’s not called hazing at work. It’s called things like, “just the way we do things here,” or “our culture,” or “orientation”. None the less, many organizations have strange (and less than helpful) rituals designed to test new members before they become a part of the group.

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Challenges

Persistence and the Art of the Pivot

The idea of pivoting comes from lean startup – starting with a business idea and testing it in the real world with real customers (potential customers at this point) very early and very often. You test and explore and learn as an early step with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) or just enough to get started. The hard reality is that more ideas fail due to not finding a market than due to poor execution. Build it too fully without testing it with the market and you are likely to miss the mark. You tend to overbuild. You might miss some brilliant insight from a customer that makes a real difference in your product or service; one that you would have never stumbled upon in the inner sanctums of your garage or home office. In lean lingo – one learns quickly, fails fast and avoids the tendency to over-engineer or perfect things before the customer (and their wallet) has their say.

As you test and learn and fail, you “pivot” or make changes and tweaks that make your product or service or business model better. You don’t lose sight of your goal; you just recognize that the path to get there might look like this:

crooked line

So today I share with you a real life story of pivots and of persistence. And it is my story.

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Kris speaking at event
Change

Organizations Built for the Future

Late last year I was able to check off a bucket list item of mine: to do a TED talk. I spoke about the need to shift our worldview from one of striving for stability to one of dealing effectively with continual change, in a talk entitled, “Is Stability What We Should Strive For?”

At the end, I describe some of the characteristics of emerging organizations that are thriving (rather than thrashing) in our global, networked, connected, hyper-fast, technologically driven world. It is an interesting list – and I wonder how your organization stacks up to it.

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Change

The way you were taught to learn may not work anymore

Make no doubt about it – the need to learn new things and learn them quickly has never been greater. As of a year ago, close to 90% of the North American population was connected to the internet. Globally the number is 40%.  Growing at a pace of 676% – it will not be long until most of the world is able to connect, communicate, create, collaborate and innovate. Add to that the increase in computing power (doubling every 18 months), the ability to transmit that data faster and faster (doubling every 9 months) and a dramatic decline in the cost to store massive data – we are experiencing more information, more innovation, more new knowledge and more diversity than imaginable – even 10 years ago.

Yet, it is compelling to note that class valedictorians and acing the SAT are not indicators of successful learners in today’s business world. I’ll talk about what are.

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Leadership

Learning Agility

In my past three posts, I explored organizational agility and sustainability. Today’s post turns that exploration inward, to something each and every one of us can do. In fact, I would say needs to do. Which is to learn. Learn quickly. Learn all the time. To never stop learning.

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