Fostering Cooperation LO21539

John Gunkler (jgunkler@sprintmail.com)
Fri, 7 May 1999 11:03:48 -0500

Replying to LO21524 --

Eugene Taurman claims:
>In my plants I have found that people will strive for an impossible goal
>...
and states two conditions.

Eugene, I'm not trying to be picky here -- just provide useful
information. I'd be willing to bet (because the empirical evidence is
pretty strong) that what you called an "impossible goal" would turn out to
be (if you asked the people working toward them) goals that they only felt
about 50% confident that they could reach. People think such goals are
"impossible" or "stretch" goals. Goals that people feel less than 50%
confidence in reaching soon become quite demotivating.

In addition to the laboratory and field research on this (by others), I
once worked with a brilliant life insurance agency manager whose first
name was Sidney. In his agency's goal setting process, Sidney took an
interesting role. That is, he let people tell his financial officer what
sales they expected to achieve in the coming year. The financial officer
took these estimates, reduced them by a fudge factor (to allow for
salespeople's natural optimism), and used the numbers to create forecasts
and spending guidelines, etc.

But Sidney never discussed those numbers with the salespeople. Rather, he
worked with the salespeople on the basis of entirely different numbers.
He pushed them to set S.I.D. goals, working with them to put "stretch" in
their goals. [S.I.D. stood for "Sidney's Impossible Dream."] Once those
goals were set, they were the only numbers Sidney ever asked about -- he
never paid any attention to the "official" forecast; he only talked about
the S.I.D. numbers.

Here's the interesting thing. When I analyzed the performance of his
salespeople over the preceding five years, I discovered that just about
half of them (in each year) achieved their S.I.D. goals! Remarkably, they
had about a 50% chance of achieving those goals. But everyone was highly
motivated by this approach, and overall the agency outperformed every
other agency in the company, and most agencies in the entire industry!

-- 

"John Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>

Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>