This January I had the pleasure of working with fellow Vistage Chair and author of several fantastic leadership books including “Thats a Great Question”, Greg Bustin. We took a workshop to fellow Vistage Chairs from around the world at our Global “Chairworld” Conference in Orlando exploring the value and process of helping CEOs going much deeper in their annual (and longer term) goal setting.
The power of a Peer Group in shaping Goals
Vistage Peer Group members join because they want to be the best version of themselves, so this allows them :
To have conversations they would not normally have
To be vulnerable, to be brave, to show uncertainty.
To push themselves deeper in an environment of complete safety
To invite challenge and curiosity from their peers
To commit to stretching themselves out of their comfort zone
Why BusinesS leaders don’t go deep enough
Often leaders ignore their personal goals and specifically how they intend to show up as a leader. The excuses are obvious; they are totally stretched and don’t feel they have the time to focus on themselves. They are fighting fires so don’t feel they can look down the road. This can lead to:
Myopia / Narrowness. They set their goals and how they share them by focusing on too narrow a measure. In the busyness of their work they don’t truly find the underlying purpose.
Discomfort / Fear. Maybe they are too comfortable in how they lead right now and are scared of the consequences of taking potentially riskier action.
The real damage is they can’t share fully what they are trying to achieve. Its hidden inside somewhere; the consequences? Those close (personal relationships or senior executive teams) can’t help as much as they could if they fully understood the objectives.
““You must ask, “What do we mean by great results?”
Your goals don’t have to be quantifiable, but they do have to be describable. Some leaders try to insist, “The only acceptable goals are measurable”, but that’s an undisciplined statement.
Lots of goals – beauty, quality, life change, love – are worthy but not quantifiable. But you do have to be able to tell if you’re making progress.”
”
Greg and I focused on how the Chair facilitates these conversations. We challenged our fellow chairs to reflect on their own goals for their Chair Practice for the coming year. We used the thinking of Michael Bungay-Stanier, author of the goal setting book “How to Begin”. In this book, Michael asks us to define a “Worthy Goal”. In his words a worthy goal must be:
Thrilling - exciting for the goal setter
Important - contribute in some way to the world
Daunting - moves the goal setter out of their comfort zone into stretch.
In just 20 minutes, selected Chairs had shared their first cut objectives, invited discussion on those three dimensions and received feedback on how they might make the objective more Thrilling, Important and Daunting. Just think if every CEO and Senior Executive took their most important objective for the year and invited others to help them hone it to be a worthy goal!
Goal setting does not have to be done at the beginning of a year; new year resolutions are usually lightweight and transitory anyway. You can set objectives on how you are going to show up as a leader at any time. Maybe a peer group would work for you?
