See? Destroying all your well-defined goals can be fun!
When I finished up my last quarterly planning session, I was crystal-clear on what we needed to shift by the end of the quarter. I had my objectives and key results (OKRs) defined. We finalized them together as a team to make sure they were clear.
WE. WERE. READY.
And so we barreled off into the quarter, ready to accomplish our ambitious mission. But there was one problem. About two weeks in, it was clear things were … shifting. And not just in a minor way. We’re talking BIG, monumental shifts in the way our business will operate in 2022 and beyond.
I couldn’t have predicted the shift back when I was making my Q4 plans, but here we were.
What’s a CEO to do when something big happens in your business that impacts all of your beautifully-defined quarterly objectives!?
This is a question I get asked all the time by my clients. It’s usually asked with some amount of worry that if they change their objectives, they’ll somehow be doing strategic planning all wrong. After all, they spent all that time creating them and vetting them with the team and maybe even started implementing them. And now they’re going to throw all that work away?!
The truth is, we’re talking about sunk costs. Seth Godin has written a lot about these, but I think my favorite is this:
Part of what it means to be a creative artist is to dive willingly into work that might not work. And the other part, the part that's just as important, is to openly admit when you've gone the wrong direction, and eagerly walk away, even (especially) when it's personal.
It’s the “eagerly” walk away part that really gets me. When circumstances change, when you understand more clearly where you want to go, it’s time to act. To change course and start heading where you need to go next as quickly as possible. The work you did to get to this point was a gift to your current self who now is so much wiser and ready to kick some ass.
All of these systems and frameworks I teach my clients are just that … frameworks. They’re not laws and they’re certainly not set in stone. They’re just meant to give you a nice, repeatable process that (usually) works so you don’t have to re-figure things out every quarter. Hold goal-setting systems loosely and adjust them to fit your team’s needs, as needed.
And so, in case I wasn’t clear with all of the words above …
Yes, it’s ok to adjust your quarterly goals and objectives before the quarter is over.
No, that doesn’t mean you should flit around and keep changing your mind, because that will annoy and exhaust your team and get you exactly nowhere. But if you’re mid-quarter and realize your direction truly needs to change, then do it. The alternative is to keep moving forward with poorly-fitting objectives or to ignore that you have them at all!
Make the change. Help your team understand why it’s necessary. Get them excited about the new objectives. And then make the most out of the time you have left. By making and communicating the change that needs to happen, you’ve accomplished far more than you would’ve if you’d have just “muscled through” the wrong goals all quarter. Not bad for a day’s work.