Commitment drives results.
That makes sense, doesn’t it? When your team is more engaged, you get better results. But it turns out that the opposite is just as true, if not more so.
Results drive engagement.
When I was producing my hit comedy TV show in Seattle, my team and I would check the ratings every week. It was a source of pride for us to have been number one in our time slot for ten years in a row. Seeing the numbers there in black and white (and right next to our competition’s lower numbers) pushed us to continue to excel.
Were the ratings the only thing that kept our commitment and our chops? Not at all. There was the friendly competition between the staff (we all wanted to make the rest of the team laugh), there was the joy of practicing our arts and crafts, there was the response from the live studio audience each week. Those were all good incentives for commitment.
But the numbers gave us a way to keep score.
We all like to cheer on a winning team. But even more so, we all like to play on a winning team. That was true for my team, and it’s true for yours as well.
But here’s the rub: To be excited (and committed) to playing for a winning team, your team members need to know they’re winning! And to know this, they have to know three things:
1. They have to know what the goal is. In basketball, the goal is to get the ball over the net. Remove the net and you are left with a group of tall people bouncing a ball on a wooden floor. The network provides the goal, the focus. What is the specific goal of your team? And I mean specific. “Do better” is not a specific goal. Improve what? And how much better? When?
2. They have to know what the measure is. Let’s go back to that basketball game and take a look at the scoreboard. There may be a lot of information up there, but at the end of the game, the only measure that really counts is the number of points. In my world, the measure that counted was ratings. In virtually all cases, it all boils down to a number. What is the number you are going to measure? Number of units shipped per week? Revenue increase percentage? Number of sales calls per day? Calculate your number and make sure your team can see it quickly, easily and consistently.
3. They have to know what they are measuring themselves against. If you’re playing on that basketball team and you know your team scored 48 points, is that good or bad? Well, you have no way of knowing, do you? The number 48 is meaningless until you know how many points the other team has. If you have a scoreboard in your workplace that shows your team shipped 5,000 widgets this week, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Depends. Was the goal 4,000 widgets or 10,000 widgets? Your team should be able to tell, at a glance, how they’re doing against the competition (and the competition could be a self-imposed target number).
A committed team produces results. And the results produce a committed team. But only if the team knows the results and what those results mean.
