How does an employee understand each day they arrive at work if they are winning or losing?
How are these employees able to track each day where they are moving towards their annual goals?
Below are a few examples of annual goals that organizations published for individual sales professionals.
Achieve sales revenue of $44.0 million collectively as an organization
Achieve net new business of $50 million for 2023 for business unit
Manage travel and expense to AOP levels
Too many large organizations cast out annual goals for employees that are very difficult to understand. Some goals are collective goals that is very difficult for an individual to know if he/she is winning. Others are downright confusing. Where does the go to review their collective goals? How would you know where to look to see how you are doing in the above examples?
Instead of this vague approach to goal setting why not keep it simple?
Organizations like that of Dave Ramsey that use Key Results Area or KRA’s for short show what “winning” looks like to the individual and their position. These KRA’s are reviewed with the employee and the manager to make sure that the employee truly understands what winning looks like. The individual employee can take this KRA sheet and review it each day, week, or month to know where they are standing in achieving a high-performance level.
These KRA’s really make it easy for both the employee and the manager to point to any specific areas where the employee is killing it and where attention might be needed to help the employee succeed. When employees obtain vague goals, it is hard for them to understand if they are actually winning. This is an ingredient in a disengaged work environment.
People want to know if they are winning or losing at work so they can do better. No one shows up to work and actively wants to do a bad job. They want to feel like they matter and that they are doing something to make impact. Take that away and hope goes along with it slowly killing the spirit. This results in people doing the grind Monday through Friday in hopes that they have a fun weekend.
Your top performers want to know quite often how well they are doing. Sales professionals especially want to know if they are winning, or not. It’s healthy to want to know how we are doing so we can improve. Why not give them something that they can use to gauge against and know often how they are doing.
Dave Ramsey is mostly known for Financial Peace University for helping people get their finances straight, but for business owners they have created Entreleadership which started as a book and now has its own podcast as well as coaching and summits. They do a fantastic job at creating an environment for their teams and customers to thrive in any environment. If you are looking for something to learn more about leadership in business or finances, these two are the top places I recommend people going.
Disclaimer: I make no money from referring my readers to Dave Ramsey items. This is just knowledge that I am passing along that has helped me.
The examples on Dave Ramsey’s site allow you to see examples of these KRA’s when you head into goal setting with your teams. I hope it helps your teams really make greater strides and achieve better results.
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom