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Janet Pilcher: Hello everyone, welcome to Accelerate Your Performance where we focus on hardwiring excellence to create great places to work, learn, and succeed.

Can you believe it? We’re in the last month of the year. So much life in the year, putting up lights, hearing Christmas and holiday songs, and hearing the sounds of excitement in the air, especially with children.

As we end the year, we also think about starting the year with goals. Maybe some new goals. Maybe some updated goals. What do we think about when we set goals? What’s the underneath, the thinking work? What’s the pre-work for setting goals?

This episode is about how we get to meaningful goals and measures. There’s a lot of pre-work that goes into it. My goal here is to give you a high-level view rather than to be comprehensive.

Let’s give it a go by focusing on the process, determining the strategic vision, creating a bull’s eye, defining organizational priorities, and using that information to develop goals and measures. Again, going to stay high-level, but take you through that process.

So we first build, define, and communicate a strategic vision of our organization. And we talk about that really being done at that executive team level as we set that vision for what we want to become. We talk about what, for example, the market may be asking of our students. How do we create our vision around those needs, those market needs? How do we create an engaged workforce to support this vision? And how do we serve students, parents, and each other to support this vision?

So first out, it’s really knowing where strategically we want to go and the vision that we have for our organization. And from there, as I talk about in Hardwiring Excellence in Education, I love, as you all know, the bull’s eye. It’s a great tool to help us focus on what’s core in our work and where do we want to focus our attention to accelerate growth? So I’m going to just focus first off on those first two rings of the bull’s eye. What’s core to what we’ll do to live out that vision? And then in the second ring, what have we focused on, have evidence that works, and want to do more of to continue to learn and grow as we move toward our strategic vision? How do we grow those processes and actions that we’re learning from and have evidence of that works? So we’re going from vision to being more specific about those focus areas. And from there, we then establish our organizational priorities.

So what are our organizational priorities around to and aligned to our core and those areas where we see we can accelerate growth based on some evidence that we’ve had? Well, in order to set our priorities, we have to know what’s our current state so we know where to determine and focus our attention.

So how? We focus on, and I like to think and look at ways that we focus on trend data. We do a deep dive of the current data trends where we have them around to that strategic direction and what we know we’re focusing on. And if we don’t have that trend data, then we’re creating benchmarks for new measures so we can begin to set the stage for analyzing trends. It’s in analyzing the trends that we understand how we’re making progress, where we’re achieving, and where we have those gaps. And as we begin to look at that trend data, we’re able to see where those gaps are, and wherever we have gaps, we can then establish what our priorities are to focus on.

We don’t want to focus on a hundred things, but what are those three or four or five things across the board that we can focus on as we move into our goal setting? And then we begin to develop our organizational scorecard. So that’s the pre-work that goes into the development of the scorecard.

What does the scorecard consist of? It consists of those measures and strategic actions and ways that we measure our progress so that we can determine how well we’re doing in achieving our priorities aligned to our vision and the focus areas that we are tending to. You know, Frank Smolls presents the ABCs of goals. Let’s talk a little bit more than about goal setting and measures in that goal setting process that makes up our scorecard.

So I go back to what Frank Smoll talks about the ABCs of goals. He says, effective goals are A, achievable, B, believable, and C, committed. I love that. So easy to remember and so significant. So we can also really, really important talk about the types of goals and measures. When we talk about the measures that matter, we’re looking at the types of goals so that we know how to get to those measures that matter that help us make progress and achieve what we’re set out to achieve.

So I’m going to talk about three types of goals and measures. One, we have outcome measures that are aligned to high level accountability measures. So when we look at our state accountability measures, or we look at measures developed by our board, those are outcome measures or our community. Those are outcome measures that we’re striving for. But they’re usually lag in nature, and there’s not much that we can do in order to achieve those per se.

So today, we have to look at then the second type of goal and measure, which are performance measures and set those performance measures that then help us achieve those outcome measures. The performance measures are focused on aligned measures to the highest priorities. It’s not just measures out in left field, but we’ve already established what our highest priorities are by looking at that trend data. And so we’re looking at our highest priorities, looking at that trend data for student success, workforce engagement, service excellence, and financial stewardship. Those are the pillars of our scorecard.

You may have different language work, but those are four areas that are really important to measure our performance. And these are the measures that we do include in our Studer Education scorecard. It’s the performance measures. And as we’re including those performance measures, we also need to know how we’re doing as we’re strategically creating those actions that we’ll; take in order to achieve those measures.

And so the third area of measure that’s important are the progress measures, measures we consistently review as we’re executing our strategic actions and plans for each of the performance outcomes. And when we measure and measure our progress to our performance measures, it helps us achieve those overall accountability measures or those outcome measures. But we’re driving from our performance measures and our progress measures and our strategic actions that align to what we’re doing in order to achieve.

Let me give you an example. I went for my annual health exam over the holidays. Here’s what my physician said: “You’re a 61-year-old woman who has the majority of your blood work like a 20 year old.” Now I’m feeling really good. Feeling really good about what he says and about my health. And then he said, “Now, let me tell you two things you need to work on that are important.” Now I’m seeing it’s not all rosy news today.

And so I’m attentive. He said, “First, you have an extreme, I mean extreme vitamin D deficiency. I’m going to prescribe a high dose of vitamin D. It’s important to get this under control.” And he continues, “Otherwise, it will affect your bone density. And this will be something, the vitamin D will be something you need to do for the rest of your life.” I’m thinking, “Okay, I can do that. A daily vitamin D supplement with a little extra power. No problem. Easy.”

Then he said, “Your blood sugar level is on the low end of not being normal. In other words, it’s a little bit above where it needs to be. It’s not extremely high, but you’re not normal. And you’re out of normal range of where we want to look at it. We want to monitor it. And here’s the news,” he said. He continued with the need for me to control it. He said, “You need to lose 20 pounds with a significance of following a specific diet to get those 20 pounds off.”

Now I’m liking the idea of taking a vitamin a day a lot better than what will be in front of me with this priority and goal. With this situation, here are my three types of measures. The outcome measure is to be at the normal range for my blood sugar level, performance measure is to reduce my weight by 20 pounds and to lower my blood sugar level by eating a defined diet. That’s my performance measure. By doing that, I hopefully will have an opportunity to be at my normal range, my blood sugar level. And the progress measures to the 20 pound loss are daily to weekly weight and weekly sugar measures. And the strategic actions to help me achieve my performance measure of 20 pound loss to get to the outcome that’s most important in the long run is to align my diet to a weekly nutrition plan and achieve my daily steps goals of at least 10,000 steps a day.

Now here’s the situation. If I would have just started with the goal of getting to a normal range for my blood sugar level without putting the performance measures connected then the progress measures and the actions in place, I wouldn’t really know what to do. It would be hard to understand if it’s achievable and believable. And so it would be hard for me to hit that goal.

That’s why the performance measures, the progress measures, and the aligned strategic actions are so critical, again, which is why our Studer Education scorecard, which consists of those three components, is so important.

Now after I hear all of this and see my scorecard, I can ask myself: “Are these goals and measures achievable?” Yes, they are. “Are these goals and measures believable?” Yes, they are. “And am I committed?” The goals and measures are meaningless unless I am committed.

What’s also important is first and foremost, I have to hold myself accountable. It’s also important that I have my coach or physician to hold me accountable and coach me and that I have the support of my team, people who experience life with me, to hold me accountable, recognize my accomplishments. and coach me. That’s what our coaching work at Studer Education is all about. We are grateful for the opportunity to do this work with you.

So think about how your organization defines your outcomes, performance and progress goals, and measures and ask, “Are they achievable? Are they believable? And are you committed?”

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Have a great week, everyone.