VIDEO: The 3-Year Highly Achievable Goal: Where Do I Start?

Developing a Functional Organizational Chart

Before you can begin mapping out your 3 Year Highly Achievable Goal, you need to stop and take stock of where your organization is at internally. The best place to begin? With your people. In this video, I walk you through developing a functional organizational chart.

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Transcript

So, your question is: when starting the 3 Year Highly Achievable Goal plan, and looking at internal analysis internally inside your company, what's the best place to start my answer? 

People - but not with the traditional organization chart. Rather, a functional organization chart. Pull your leadership team together and do an exercise, and the exercise is where everybody would list the major functions on their own in the organization. 

So you'd have the head of the company, let's say sales marketing development, manufacturing, finance, HR, etc., whatever the functions are. Then, on their own, everybody writes down in the next column what's the name of the person that's accountable for that function, then to the right of that, put what's the key result that we need out of each function. 

I'll use sales as an example. The key result is typically revenue, or set, or bookings, or whatever you might call it, then to the right of that and the next column put what's the key leading indicator. Using sales as an example, a key leading indicator to revenue typically is something to do with the pipeline, the sales pipeline, and then finally the last column would be, do you have a scorecard for this function.

Now, the scorecard is not a job description. The scorecard is typically made up of two things: first is productivity. What are the productivity metrics that we need out of this function, whether it be on a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. And the second important thing of the the scorecard is the capabilities. What are the key capabilities that we need out of this function? Well first, you'll list your core values, but using sales as an example, a key capability would be listening skills. 

Now when you have all this information, engage in a conversation with your team - do you align on the functions? If not, get alignment. Do you align on the people that are accountable for those functions? Do you have two people, for example, in a particular function? If so, that typically causes confusion. Do you have a key function where there isn't anybody? Well, that's a problem. And then what about a situation if you had anybody that's listed three or more times? Rule of thumb is that person's stretched too thin, and then you didn't need to listen to this video blog to find that out. They already knew that, so have that conversation about all the information that I that I just discussed and get alignment on it. 

And now once you have alignment on your functional chart for today, go build it for three years out because again, this is all about where do we want to be in three years? A key component is the internal analysis of "What do we need to look like functionally in order to achieve our three year goal?" And then once you've done it for where you want to be in three years, do it for two years. Now you have three functional charts: the current year two years out, and three years out. 

My recommendation is that on a quarterly basis, get together, so whether it's in a quarterly review meeting or a quarterly planning session, get together and make sure that you're0 making progress to where you need to be in three years. 

So if you have any questions, or if you would like some help in creating your functional org chart, please let me know.

Thank you.