Page 134 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Focusing on Results 123

up at a job site that was not ready for them or didn’t have the
right equipment. Based on these inputs, the leader set a stretch
goal for the year of having 95 percent of field sites ready to go
when engineers arrived.
• Predict a possible crisis. At their core, crisis situations are
stretch goals caused by external events such as natural disasters,
competitive surprises, or strikes. Of course, you don’t want this
kind of emergency to actually happen, but you can think about
the possibilities and use them as starting points for stretch goals.
For example, what would you do if a storm knocked out one of
your production lines? You would need a stretch goal of increasing
production on your other factory lines to make up the difference.
Or how would you cope if a major customer suddenly defected to
a competitor? In that case, you might develop a stretch goal of
accelerating your first-discussion-to-close rate by 30 percent to
make up the difference.
Think about your team, department, or unit: what are some possible
stretch goals that you could use to drive the focus on results?

have an almost infinite capacity to take credit for good results, but avoid
responsibility for failure: they are able to give any number of excuses. As
an IT project manager once told us, “We can use one bad weather day for
many months as an excuse for being late with our deliverables.” The
trickiest thing about these rationalizations is that many are indeed true.
Technology changes rapidly, and it’s hard to realize the gains that were
promised from it; competitors make unexpected moves that affect results;
new regulations constrain your people’s ability to take action; economic
ups and downs make it impossible to plan; and the list goes on. The reality
is that stuff happens. Holding your people accountable can feel like blam-
ing them for things that are outside their control.