Issue 12 · Wednesday, 2 September 2009

A personal message from Joan – Happy Anniversary!

Welcome to the September edition of the newsletter. I can hardly believe it but it’s been a year since I wrote my first Ladder newsletter. Crikey, time really has flown. So, to all of you who have been with me for the last year – well done and thank you! For those of you who’ve joined more recently, it’s great to have you on board. To all of you – I’d love to know:

1. What do you think of the newsletters?
2. What suggestions do you have for improvement or topics you’d like me to address?

On the basis that many of you, I’m guessing, will be working hard to deal with the backlog of work that has built up while you were on holiday, I’ve kept this month’s article short. In it I’ve outlined a quick an easy way to approach writing ‘firm’ objectives. As ever, if you’ve any questions or comments, please let me know.

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How to write 'firm' objectives

I’ve written in the past about how to write behavioural, or ‘soft’, performance objectives. Of course, it’s also important to be able to write what I call ‘firm’ objectives. Firm because they relate to the tangible elements of the job that can be measured in terms of quantity, quality or time.

Here’s a quick and easy way to approach writing firm objectives.

Looking at each of the tangible elements of the job, ask the most relevant of the following questions:

1. How much / how many?
2. What’s the quality standard that needs to be achieved?
3. By when?

The key here is to describe specifically what you need the staff member to achieve.

So, for question one, rather than ‘improve sales’ you would write ‘improve sales by £2k per quarter’.

Question two may be about following procedure or guidelines, or related to some contract. So rather than ‘follow procedure’ you would have ‘follow the procedure for processing client requests as described in the client contract’.

For question three, this is about having a clear deadline. For example, ‘by 30th June’ or, if it’s an ongoing task, ‘within 3 days of receipt’.

Here are some more examples:

• To achieve a sales target of £25k each quarter
• To reduce error rates by 2% by 31st March
• To process claims with 100% accuracy
• To follow the data reporting procedure as laid down in the staff handbook
• To process customer requests within 3 days of receipt
• To complete the budget reports within 4 days of the month end

As ever, it’s all about achieving clarity. The clarity that motivates your staff to high performance.

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More articles like these

• Getting started on delegation – the what, the who and the how much
• You want your staff to change the way they work – but how do you tell them?
• Is failing to manage your people impacting your productivity?

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Joan Henshaw publishes her monthly Ladder newsletter for business owners and managers. If you want ideas on how to improve your practical people management practices, get your free tips now at www.ladderconsulting.com.

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