Do not put your limitations to what a team can achieve

How do you set goals for your teams?

For years I was setting yearly goals based on previous year results, adding 5% to 10% improvement in sales and all performance sub-indicators.  I now realize that doing so, I was limiting team performance and contribution.  How would I know?  Results were good, we kept achieving our goals. We were competitive and well regarded in marketplace. Why ask for more ?  I was proud of our track record of improving our team results year over year. Our clients were getting better served, our costs were trending down, my “team” was taking responsibility and becoming more accountable for their results.

And one day, our markets collapsed, clients stopped buying.  Why ? Because their sales had collapsed also, consequence of the financial crisis.  The few clients that were buying were very selective, demanding and price sensitive.

What to do?

• Find out what clients were ready to buy, what were the new demands and requirements. Then comes the word “impossible”: “these clients are asking for the impossible, what they want is impossible”.  How do you erase this word from the vocabulary of your business?  Teamwork helped us do it.
• Structure teams to find possible solutions to consistently achieve the impossible.
• Validate this impossible, achieved by the team, is good enough for the demanding clients.
• Then launch with everyone on board, from sales to manufacturing to shipping to accounting all working as one team to deliver the impossible to clients every day. Track, measure, involve teams in the daily making of the “miracle”.

The results ?

As a result, orders overflowed our current capacity, we had to hire and add production shifts, while our competitors were cutting shifts and shutting down plants in USA and elsewhere in Canada.

I previously asked “Why ask for more?”.  And if I asked you now “Why wait?”.  Why wait for a crisis to take action? Isn’t it better to take the lead, to attack the markets and to create the crisis by setting your offer to clients a world apart you’re your competitors? By setting the bar so high that your competitors can’t follow ?

You would like to test the impossible with your teams? With your enterprise?  We offer 2 first consultation / coaching conversations for free. This is not an offer to receive a sales pitch! You decide the agenda, the points/ topics you want to cover. We will support you with a coaching follow up call/ meeting as needed, to improve your chances of success on your own.  Contact us to coordinate our schedules : agardner@org-coaching.com

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