Tag: Goals

Being Intentional

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It’s the start of a new year. We always intend to set intentions. We mean to manifest our destiny. Yet the day to day sweeps away our focus. We’ve all read the statistics on how quickly new year resolutions fade. But what if 2022 could be a different? There are lot of ways to set goals and intentions. It’s less about the tool or the process. It’s all about time and truth. My plan for 2022 is to focus on a wheel, how I want to feel, and committing to seal the deal.

Start Your Roll with a Wheel:  The Wheel of Intention is a visual that helps you think about each segment of your life independently. You can find a variety of templates online – find the one that speaks to you. I broke my wheel into Self Care, Career, Travel, Family, Friends, and Community. There are no right or wrong areas of focus. Under each of the areas of focus, answer the following questions:

  • What is currently working well in this area of my life?
  • What would I like more of/to improve?
  • What would l like less of/to eliminate?
  • A year from now, what will have I done?

Find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted an allow yourself time for honest reflection and write down everything that comes in your head. 

Fuel Momentum with Feeling: Once you’ve identified your areas of focus and goals, ask yourself, How will I feel when I am living this life?  Write down as many words as you can for each segment of your wheel. My words included strong, grateful, refueled, balanced, and joy. Again, there are no right answers. Write from your heart not your head and let every word onto the page.

Commit Seal the Deal: After about an hour of reflection I have a nice wheel, complete with reflections and aspirations. But I’m not done- I’ve just started. I went back through the list of words that I had listed and noted that fulfillment was a theme. I thought about what fulfillment means to me and landed on building habits that lead to joy. Boom. This year I will commit to prioritizing and fueling fulfillment. This means looking at my home and work calendar and if it’s not a hell yes, saying no.  It means being fully present with my team and my family. It means scheduling my priorities not squeezing them in. And it means doing this for a full year.

It’s easy to make a resolution on January 1st.  The secret is making sure you’ve focused on something close to your heart. A wheel of intention can get you started with the “what.” Tapping into feelings can help you connect to “why,” and reflection can give you a path to “how.” Let’s roll into 2022 with strong intentions. Who’s with me?

Setting Goals for your 2020 Vision

advertising business calculator commercial

It’s January 27th , so according to the New York Post article, most New Year’s resolutions died two weeks ago. That’s right. Strava, a social media network for athletes, analyzed 31.5 million online resolutions, and January 12th is the date when most resolutions drop off. This same article states that just 8% of people achieve the goals they set at the beginning of the year. Given these gloomy statistics, how can you ensure a clear vision for your team in 2020? The key, according to Forbes magazine’s article, Does Your Goal Setting Have 2020 Vision, is focusing on inspiration. This year try a new process to goal setting. Instead of a full day offsite on goal cascades, look for passion, see what matters, and observe what gives you energy.

To Do vs. Can’t Wait to Do: Too often, goal setting is a left-brained exercise. It is the list of items we’ve already committed to on our to do list, that we roll up into elegant phrases on a PowerPoint. But just like a resolution, what is the shelf life of the work I have to do vs. tapping into how I can impact our overall strategy? For example, at Blue Cross Blue Shield, our mission is to Inspire Change, Transform Care, and Improve Health for the people we serve.  Instead of a functional focus on our to do list, what if you asked your team if we were to be recognized on stage for helping to move the mission forward this year, what would we hear? Who would be there? What would they say? By building a vision of success as the starting point, you shift the discussion and thinking beyond block and tackle tasks and tap into what motivates and inspires your team. Once you have a shared aspiration, you can shift to a discussion around what you should do more of or less of in order to achieve this aspiration. That helps us identify areas of focus and actions for the upcoming year.
More Meaning than Meetings: A great concept in the Forbes article is, we don’t become creative because we’re inspired; we become inspired when we tap into new, intrinsically interesting and valuable things. At some point your team will have to leave that safe haven you created in your goal setting session and enter back into the daily world of work. But this year you want to help them work differently. Challenge your team to have at least 10% of their time “On the work” instead of spending all their time “in the work.” This means allowing space and time to stay focused on the stage you’ve created and keeping your creativity fueled by reading articles, attending classes, meeting with others,
and/or making room for interesting and valuable things in your workday. Allowing space in our busy day to keep our eye on the horizon is key to keeping our goals alive.

Making vs Taking Energy:  It requires energy to fuel our vision, and tapping into our passion creates energy instead of sapping energy. For example , we can all be committed to the goal of putting the customer first, and we can achieve it by leveraging the team’s various skills and passions. Let Mary redesign the website and have Bill populate it with data. Chris would be best at collecting customer data and Sue most interested in finding themes. The more we can leverage our collective strengths the more passion and creativity we will get in our results. When people do have tasks/projects that aren’t aligned to their passion, ask them to bring that vision to the work. For example, I don’t love merit planning. But I am passionate about equity and investing in talent. So making this more about the people than the numbers helps give me energy to pursue this task and brings a different perspective to this project.

Project plans and tracking tools have their time and place. As we know, a goal without a plan is only a dream. But dreams can die under the weight of process and practicality. The key in 2020 is for you to create an inspirational vision to meet with your team and look for passion, see what matters, and observe what give you energy.

 

 

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Spring Your Goals Forward

 

beautiful beauty bloom blooming
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Looking outside my Minnesota window today, it does not look like spring has arrived. Yet here we are- snow and all. We are officially a quarter into 2019. So how can we spring into action and make sure our annual goals stay on track? There are a number of good tips and lessons from spring that can help our goals blossom.

Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed. George Henry Lewes
Big things take time. Sometimes our goals will take time to mature. The key is making sure we give it the time and nourishment required to flower. We are working on cultural transformation at my organization. It won’t be fast, and if we do it right, it won’t always be flashy. But over time, people should see it growing and see how the branches of this initiative are connected, as well as the benefits it can provide them. We want to be sure we grow deep roots so we are taking time to be thoughtful and intentional every step of the way.

Spring: a lovely reminder of how beautiful change can truly be. Unknown
Almost all of our goals involve creating some kind of change. Usually when we start  working on a change initiative our first instincts are often to think about how we manage the change: analyzing the cost, mitigating risks, and creating lots of project plans. But do we ever ask ourselves what will be more beautiful after this change? How can we help people see a sunny future? What will they need to bloom? We are also working on redesigning our customer service model. Our goals for this project will be  SMART, and our work will have milestones and measures. But success will be increasing both our customer and employee engagement by being thoughtful about how each will flourish in the future model.

All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today. Unknown

Sometimes the hardest thing about a goal is just getting started. How in the world can we ____? Who has time to ___? But more often than not, we have the elements we need to succeed right in front of us, we just need to spend some time both fertilizing and weeding. The most powerful thing we can do when goal planning is to pause. Step back and be on the work, not in the work. What are we trying to solve? What will success look like? Why does this matter? If we can answer these questions, then we want to dig in and nourish them. We also want to look at weeding. What do we need to stop doing? Do differently? Do later? We need to create space for this new goal to grow, so we will have to be sure other less important but perhaps more embedded things don’t crowd our goal out. We are also looking at our team structure, our team focus, and our team’s priorities. We are planting some new ideas and weeding some old practices out. Not every one of them may grow, but we know that we are excited to watch these new ideas bloom.

In the spring we spring the clock forward – and often wake up surprised that the year is already a quarter over. But spring also is the season of new beginnings and the perfect time for new ideas and goals to blossom. So take heart and take some lessons from Mother Nature to help you keep your goals growing.

Set a New Year Revolution vs Resolution

athlete bike black and white cycle
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At the start of the year many of us set our new year’s resolutions. According to the  article, Ten Interesting Facts New Year’s Resolutions, the most common resolution made is to exercise more (almost 40%!)  Unfortunately, about 22% of resolutions fail after about a week, 40% after a month, and 50% after 3 months. So why do we get back on the same hamster wheel year after year? Perhaps it’s time for a new cycle- a revolution vs a resolution. The word revolution has several definitions: (1) the action of going round in an orbit (2) the completion of a course (3) a sudden, radical, or complete change. Send 2019 into a new orbit with your own revolution.

Get wrapped around the axle. A common challenge with resolutions is that we don’t stop with just “exercise more.” We decide our real goal should be exercise more, be faster, get stronger, look better, and wear cuter exercise clothes. Sometimes the power of simplicity can power a goal to the end line. Pick one thing you want to improve on. Keep narrowing in on that idea until it is finite, measurable, and doable. Refine your “exercise more” goal to “I want to ride my bike 3 times a week for 45 minutes.” Now make that your thing.  Schedule around it. Post about it. Track the # of times you ride and for how long. No need to add miles or speed… just focus on the goal. Maybe your thing is to read one leadership book a month. Great! Same steps apply… and so can great results.

Complete a course. You may decide your course is a spin class or maybe it’s an online certificate. In either case building your goal around something with a clear beginning, middle, and end can be helpful.  A lack of timeline in the “exercise more” resolution is part of its downfall. How much is more? For how long? When have I achieved that goal? A key word here is complete. It’s ok to take six months to complete six online sessions. It’s also ok to knock through the same sessions in six weeks. The only right answer is what is right and realistic for you so that you can see it to completion. Then mark that completion with a celebration. Reward yourself for your hard work once you break through that ribbon at the end.

Change your perspective. Another definition of revolution is a fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something. This may be the way you think about exercise (Who would spin? Why would I get up that early? I just can’t do it), or the way you think about leadership (Who would believe that? Why would people follow her? I just don’t get why they don’t get it). Changing our paradigm is critical to achieving our goal. Franklin Covey has some fantastic resources on paradigm shifts. I love the quote they shared from Thomas Kuhn.  “All the significant breakthroughs were break-withs old ways on thinking.”  Challenging assumptions, listening and talking to people with different perspectives, and jumping in and trying something new are all steps we need to take to create our revolution.

In 2018 I set a goal to ride or run 2018 miles. I achieved that in December. I focused on my revolution. I completed all the class challenges at #addiction cycle, my spin studio. I got over myself and got up and did it. So what will be your 2019 revolution? Whatever it is, if you make it your central focus, commit to completing it, and are open for a change, you can meet whatever goal you set.

Spring Clean Your Mind

Spring cleaning

April usually brings thoughts of spring and renewal. Many of us have a ritual of spring cleaning – donating clothes the kids have outgrown and admitting we don’t need 6.5 pairs of scissors in one drawer. Spring is also a great time to bring a renewal mindset to our work. In the article Three Easy Ways to Spring Clean Your Work Life author Zameena Mejia says that we take in about 64B of information a day. This makes our brains feel like our hall closet- stuffed the the gills, no longer organized, and hard to open. It also makes it hard to be productive at work when we are in overload mode. Take the time to spring clean your mind by clearing clutter, creating focus, and having free space.

Clearing Clutter. Clutter can be both physical and mental. Start with the stuff that’s easy to see. Take a step back and think about how you would like to organize your work space. Give yourself permission to give away or throw away the books, papers, and even mementos you really don’t need anymore. Once you’ve made a dent in your office space try something radical – delete all emails over 30 days old from your inbox, sent, and deleted folders. Just do it. Freeing up that space is very liberating – and helps you to focus on the current tasks at hand. Learn some of the simple but awesome Microsoft Outlook rules to help you manage incoming emails more effectively. Now for the hard part. Clear the clutter from your mind. That project that didn’t go as well as you hoped. The nagging feeling you have that Pam in Payroll is upset with you. Make a list of the worries that are gnawing at you. Then crumple up the list and throw it away. Those worries are in the past. The question is, how do you want to move forward? You can choose to set up a meeting to check in with Pam. But if you don’t, then let it go. That issue no longer has a worry hanger in your mental closet.

Creating Focus. April means we are 25% through 2018. Have you accomplished 25% of your goals for the year? If not, how can you create more focus? Now is a good time to take out your annual goals and ask (1) Are these still the right priorities? (2) Am I making progress? (3) Where do I need to focus? One the best leadership tools I’ve picked up comes from the book The 12 Week Year. This book was written way before quarterly reviews became trendy. It challenges us to break our goals down into 12 weeks vs. 12 months. That means each week has more urgency to make progress towards your goals. It introduces a Periodization Plan to help you track and monitor your goals. I have been using this with my teams for the last ten years and it is a great tool to create focus.  Another key to mental focus is taking time to pause. If you are like me and love the idea of meditation but find it really hard to do, check out Buddhify. com. It is a great app for those of us who have a hard time slowing down. This is the most important step in your spring cleaning routine- so be sure to give focus some focus.

Creating Free Space. The only way to keep your spring cleaning stay clean is to ensure you don’t fill it with new clutter. In order for you to be your best self at work you need to have some downtime at home. Downtime is time when you are powered down and present. That may mean not working after dinner. Or not bringing phone in the bedroom. We all need some time of our day to be spent without a screen. We can also create free space by regaining control of our calendar. Instead of multitasking on a conference call, decline it and spend an hour focused on researching a key project. Block time on your calendar to read business and industry news. To be a leader we need time to think, not just do. Another great way to create free space is to work out. It doesn’t matter what you do or what level you are at. Engaging your body physically can unhook your mind and give you time to think about things in a new way.

I encourage you to make a commitment to spring clean your mind this month. It won’t make the MN snow melt, but it will help you with clearing clutter, creating focus, and having free space so you can spring ahead on your 2018 goals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

50 books by 50

reader-tomorrow-a-leader (1)

I have always loved to read. I was “that kid” who took her book with her everywhere –reading on the bus, in the doctors office, at the dinner table. Today I still love to read but struggle to find time to read and feel torn between reading for work and reading for pleasure. Apparently I am not the only one struggling with this. According to a recent LinkedIn post by Amit Somani only .5% of people in the world read more than 3-5 books a year. So I decided to set a goal to read 50 books by age 50. That means I will need to double my reading rate and sustain it for two years. How I am going to do that? Good question! Here are some of the tips I plan to employ -and how it relates to leadership: Decide what supports the goal, learn from others, and follow your passion.

What supports the goal. Most of us have worked at a company with a WIG (wildly important goal) that was something like double sales by 2020 or increase our customer base by 30%. Aspirations are great but without clear plans to support them, won’t be more than a bumper sticker slogan.  With any kind of goal it is helpful to ask questions like these, from the Huffington Post article 5 Leadership Goals:

  • What have we tried to achieve in 2017 that we must accomplish in 2018, and how will that be rewarding to you (and your team)?
  • What targets are we hitting — and which ones are we missing due to our own actions as executives?
  • Is there anything I can do to get out of the way of — and, indeed, accelerate — our success?

These questions are insightful whether you are trying to improve quality, reduce turnover, or increase your reading. In my case, reading is rewarding, so what I will accomplish this year is setting a target of reading at least 20 pages everyday. I will accelerate my success by setting a firm bed time and creating a routine of reading every night before I go to sleep.

Learn from others. Whatever goal we are trying to achieve, we can pick up ideas and insights from others. I currently have over 500 books on my Amazon reading list. So one way to prioritize those books is to see what others recommend as their top reads. President Obama posted his reading list, as did Daniel Pink, Richard Branson, and hundreds of other thought leaders. Pick one or two that you already know and love and challenge yourself to follow the recommendations of someone outside of your normal go to group. Share your challenge internally and find out what your peers/other functions are doing that relates to your goal. My internal inquiries led me to read Lean Turnaround and  Four Disciplines of Execution  as my first two books this year. Ironically by starting with a discussion about Four Disciplines, I am now leading a training session on 5 Choices,  and am collaborating with senior leaders on our shared priority of driving productivity through improved people leadership.

Follow your passion. I love the quote, “If it is important to you, you will find a way. If  not, you will find an excuse.” That definitely applies to me and the goals I set for working out, at work, and now reading. The gap isn’t really time- we all have 24 hours in a day. It’s how we use and prioritize our time. Goals that ignite us are easy – creating a new leadership program, developing the acquisition strategy, defining a new customer segment. Goals that are outside of our expertise and interest are usually the ones that we keep deferring. In my earlier post Improve Through Improv I talked about tapping into- and trusting- the talents of the team to achieve your goals. Leveraging people’s strengths and passions is a natural accelerator.  So in my quest to read 50 books by 50 I give myself permission to pass on the books that don’t fuel my fire, to quit the books that aren’t engaging me, and to seek books that are aligned with my personal and professional passions.

Rachel Anders said, “The journey of a lifetime starts with the turning of a page.” Whether you are reading or on the journey to achieving a different goal, deciding what supports the goal, learning from others, and following your passion will help you get to your destination more quickly, and make it a more enjoyable ride.

Resolve, Go Solve, Absolve

New Years Resolution

Happy 2018! It is that time of year where think about our goals for the new year. We purchase new gear and goodies to help us reach that illustrious goal. Yet despite our initial anticipation, 22% of new years’s resolutions fail after one week, 40% after one month, and 50% after three months. How can you buck the odds this year and make your resolution a reality? There are three actions you’ll need to take: resolve, go solve, and absolve.

Resolve. It’s easy to look at these statistics and think why bother. But the very act of making a resolution matters. Setting a goal means you’ve identified something you want to strive for.  One key to a successful resolution is picking something important to you that are passionate about. You may feel pressure to climb the corporate ladder but if you love your current job, resolve to deepen your skills instead of getting promoted. The next step is to take that goal and make it a plan.  Think about how you will deepen your skills by doing X by Y date. Setting specific, measurable goals makes your resolution more tangible and therefore more achievable.

Go Solve. “Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.” This is a famous quote from Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple executive and entrepreneur. Once you have your idea and your plan, ask yourself, have I gotten this far before? What got in my way? If you resolved last year to deepen your skills by getting your MBA but fell short because you didn’t have the time or money to make it happen, is that the right goal for 2018? Unless your financial or time commitments have shifted the likely answer is no. So how else could you solve for that? Could you take one class online? Could you learn new skills at work? Find a mentor? The specific solution is less important than finding a solution you can implement. Creating realistic momentum helps get you out of the gates and gets that idea into motion.

Absolve. Merriam Webster’s definition of absolve is to “to free from guilt or blame.” This is a crucial part of resolutions. We know that half of resolutions fail in the first six months. Yet we fail to plan for failure.  I love the blog  The Tiny Buddha by Leo Babauta, and in this post Babauta challenges us to relook at our expectations for building a new habit. He wisely says, “What if the problem is our hope that we’ll never have to get disrupted, that things will always go perfectly? This hope is, of course, greatly misguided. Things don’t ever go smoothly, progress is never linear, and we’ll always get disrupted….what we need to do is get good at starting, then starting again.” Absolve yourself from the guilt that you didn’t sign up for that online class yet. Absolve yourself from blame that you haven’t found a mentor. It’s never too late to restart. Just go back to solving again. Take any step- no matter how small- to regain momentum and look forwards, not backwards.

So break out your new 2018 calendar or journal, and think about what goal excites you for this year.  Write down some specific steps you can take to achieve that goal. Start doing – try anything, just start. Then prepare to restart. Approach 2018 with a resolve, go solve, absolve attitude and it will be a very happy new year.

 

Connect the Dots

Connect the dots

For many of us it’s budget season. Time to look at what we want for 2018, realizing what we’ll likely get, and figuring out what we can eliminate and prioritize. Too often in this exercise we cut and copy our current projects, just changing the year and tweaking our plans. This year I encourage you to think about how you can not cut, not copy, but connect the dots in your strategy. Commit to a new kind of new year by creating alignment, setting your focus, and pivoting your team.

Creating alignment. Instead of making functional budget or talent decisions, step back and look at your company’s strategy. What are the big opportunities in your line of business? What is your competition doing? What’s out there that no one is doing? What are your leaders always talking about? Ask them what keeps them up at night. Bring the slides from the last business review and talk to them about the real story you should be telling. Help them by recreating simpler slides that connect the dots for all levels of the organization. Looking in is a great place to start- then don’t forget to look out.  Double the business and industry sites/blogs you follow. Meet with some former leaders who moved into new roles.  Block time on your calendar every day (at least every week!) to stay current on your markets and customers. Knowledge IS power so use your power to create alignment across the organization. Help tell the story. Connect priorities across the business.  Ensure everyone is marching in the same direction.

Setting your focus. I once worked for a leader who set 64 annual priorities for us. That is more than one a week! When I raised my concern I was told we didn’t have a choice- this was the work that needed to be done. It may be what needs to gets done, but it won’t be able to be done.  Without guidance we leave it up to chance which of those 64 items get done. One of my favorite phrases is, what’s the order of events? If one of our goals is to expand our military hiring strategy, the first order of events may be to roll out interview training. Or maybe given other business priorities, they both need to wait until 2019. Take a step back and look at how you can sequence your goals. Less is more – and a more likely path to success.

Pivoting your team. To do things differently we must do things differently.  A powerful pivot can be the question, “How will we do things differently in 2018?” Test it first in HR. What will you and your team need to stop and start doing to achieve your top business opportunity? What skills will you need to add to or develop in your team to win in this space? What is the change agility of your team? How customer centric is your team? What do internal and external customers say about you? Questions like these can help unlock new discussions and generate momentum for a pivot. It can change what roles and skills you hire for. It can drive you to move work around – or off your team. It can break down silos and create a new mindset of shared outcomes. Starting with why creates buy-in and focus – and keeps us focused on the big dots.

HR is uniquely positioned to help the organization connect the dots. We understand both the business strategy and the people strategy for the organization.  In 2018, I encourage you to use the end of the year to look at what you want to achieve this year. Don’t cut and copy your current projects – be bold, be focused, and help your organization connect the dots by creating alignment, setting your focus, and pivoting your team.

 

 

 

https://hrtrendinstitute.com/2016/11/23/hr_trends_2017/

 

 

Do Less More Often

Do less More

It may be early to be thinking about New Year’s resolutions but as 2017 is winding down, I find myself reflecting on the number of lessons I learned this year. 2017 was a quite year for me. I was laid off from a great job working for a great boss, John Vegas. I also got a great opportunity to shift from designing learning and development content to delivering change management training across the country. I sat on the other side of the “here is your package” table and got to feel firsthand what good and bad acquisition practices look like. I learned to introduce myself as “in transition” at networking events, and to get comfortable with not having a work identity. I gave myself the best gift of all – taking the summer off to spend time with my family, seeing every concert that we could, and taking some fantastic vacations. So what’s my big hairy goal for 2018? I am planning to do less more often. This means embracing JOMO, canceling subscriptions, and better balancing .

Embracing JOMO. I just read this article about embracing the joy of missing out (JOMO). Instead of stressing out that you can’t get it all done or can’t get to both meetings you were invited to, try a new approach. Admit that there is a problem, and acknowledge that the problem is not you. You can’t do it all and that’s ok. So embrace it. Find joy in training someone else to help with your projects. See the joy in your team when you say, I trust you. You can cover this meeting and fill me in. This mindset can allow you to focus on what really matters and do a few things really well, instead of spreading yourself too thin. This will be a challenge for my extroverted, execution-oriented personality but I am convinced it will help me to stay focused and to be more productive.

Cancelling subscriptions.  I volunteered to co-lead my daughter’s brownie troop when she was in first grade. It appears to have an auto-renewal policy until she graduates. I started a list of all the things I find myself still doing just because I started doing them, and am starting to cancel my subscriptions to these commitments. That means prioritizing my networking groups and cancelling some subscriptions so I can focus on others. It means asking myself if there is a different way for me to subscribe my time at work so I can stay focused on my top priorities. It even means stepping down as the troop leader so I can decide if there is a new subscription my daughter and I want to explore.

Better Balancing. Doing less still allows for doing. I also want to increase my workout goals and to read more next year. I want to work on our learning strategy and be available to create on demand training for leaders.  My goal is to have clear priorities and commit to my priorities. Investing time in my family, my health, and my hobbies are my priorities for next year. So now they will be my filter for making decisions. Stephen Covey has a great quote: “Instead of prioritizing our schedule we need to schedule our priorities.” I am learning that one of the priorities I need to include on that list is white space. White space for thinking and planning at work and for unwinding at home is one of the best commitments of time we can make. Finding the balance of doing and being is my biggest challenge- and one I will prioritize working on in 2018.

I read the book Essentialism in 2016 and it really struck a cord with me. In this crazy world of doing, how can we do less more often? 2017 gave me an opportunity to put those ideas into practice and taught me some invaluable life lessons. I have moved through transition into a new great job, with a great boss, doing some great work. But instead of jumping back on the hamster wheel, this time I am being more intentional about embracing JOMO, cancelling subscriptions, and better balancing.

First Build the Foundation

solid-foundations

It is easy to become enamored with the latest HR or business fad. Every where you look these days teams are getting agile, delivering micro learnings, and investing in crowd funding. You don’t want your team/company to be left in the cold, so you pick the buzzword of the day and propose a project around this idea in a meeting, everyone gets excited, and you dive in to kick it off. Great, right? Wrong. Agile, micro learnings, and crowd funding are great solutions– to the right problems, and with the right readiness. In HR we have lots of annual solutions that may or may not solve the right problem at the right time. Just because we’ve always done it, doesn’t mean we ought to do it. And just because we have a full box of Jenga blocks, we don’t have to use them all. Good HR solutions are built on strong foundation. We can test that foundation by asking  three questions: Why does this matter? Who does it matter to? What else matters right now?

Why does this matter?  A favorite HR solution is annual HR talent reviews. Not inherently a bad solution, but why does this matter? If your organization’s goal is to increase global sales by 10%, how does your solution advance this goal? Your answer might be we have to know who our high potentials are so we can retain them. If we can retain them and let them know we value them, we will increase employee engagement. I would say that may be an HR goal but not an organizational goal. Take a step back and ask, why does talent review matter?  Maybe– hold on– it doesn’t matter right now. It is important to be able to separate the sacred cows from the milking cows– what we love vs. what fuels our current goals.  Maybe the foundational step is to do an inventory of the current experience of your global sales leaders, then to gain consensus on what experience we want people to have. Once we have this information, then maybe it makes sense to broaden talent review. Or maybe it doesn’t. Breaking down your approach to talent into pieces and asking yourself at each step why this matters will help you build a strong foundation and scalable solutions.

Who does it matter to? Diversity is another popular HR solution. There are lots of  opportunities connected to diversity.  If you break this down and ask why this matters, you likely can come up with a great reason why diversity can drive sales growth. The next question is, who does this matter to? If you have bricks but no masons, it will be hard to build off that foundation. Who is excited about this? Who do you need as champions? Who can they influence? Maybe before you hit go on your new diversity initiative, the foundational step is to assess your champions. Pull them together and ask them to explain why diversity matters to them and to their business goals. Ask for their ideas on how to make it matter to others across the organization. Ask them if they will be be your champions, and what you need to consider before you hit go. By taking the time to ensure you have this foundation set before creating a change, you have a much better chance of having that change stick.

What else matters right now? Context is key when developing a solution. You might be right that recruiting is a critical issue. But your company is working on another corner of the house, go toward that energy first. In my organization creating a great customer experience is a priority.  In order to deliver that great experience we need to ensure a great employee experience. As we got deeper into our data gathering we realized our current company values our words but are not connected to our employees’ experience. So while recruiting was our top priority, values has jumped to the top of the list. As my boss says, the order of events matters. Values are foundational and once we have values we can integrate them into our learning content, recruiting and talent practices, recognition, and communication. So lets do things in the right order. Let’s be part of the business blueprint. It we have the right timing, the right order, and the right alignment we can make sure our solutions matters.

In HR we love to build things. We see all the opportunities and want to help our teams succeed. However we often forget to step back and look at the leaning tower we’ve created. There is another way. We can start by asking why this matters, who does it matter to, and what else matters right now. By being intentional about what you do,  determining who are your champions, and sequencing how you connect the dots you can build a strong talent foundation for your organization.