“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”
– Ron Swanson
There’s a question I typically ask when I start a conversation about setting goals. It’s the lead in to a metaphor, but it’s the sort of thing that only makes sense if there’s a common frame of reference. That question is: “Have you ever seen Charles Barkley swing a golf club?”
Assuming you haven’t, this is what it looked like:
Now, you may not play golf. You may not watch golf. I don’t do a lot of either. But you can probably tell that’s not what that is supposed to look like.
Charles Barkley is a world-class athlete, an NBA Hall of Fame player, and, by all accounts shot in the 70s before his swing turned into, well, that.
What the hell happened?
In the public disaster that is Barkley’s game, there is no definitive black box recording — no single piece of evidence that indicates exactly when all things went to hell.
What there is instead is constant chatter, much of it echoing in Barkley’s head.
“My brain’s got so many voices in it,” Barkley acknowledged earlier this year on GOLF’s Subpar podcast with Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz.
In his own telling, Barkley’s woes began when he moved to Phoenix, and found that every functioning adult, from the barber to the banker, was either a Tour pro or a Tour pro-wannabe. He felt pressure to improve.
“I started taking lessons from every Tom, Dick and Harry,” Barkley told the Subpar hosts.
https://golf.com/news/features/charles-barkley-golf-swing-where-why-it-went-wrong/
Charles got in his own head. You can see it if you watch closely. The little hitches, adjustments, changes in the middle of what should be a smooth motion. Every piece of advice, every lesson or tip, all consciously or subconsciously being attended to and attempted, as he’s doing something that used to come fairly naturally to him. He’s trying to accomplish ten different things and, in doing so, failing at the one thing he’s trying to do more than anything: hit the ball off the tee.
So, why do I bring this up? Because, whether they realize it or not, this is what many managers do to their people.
Typically, a manager will stare at a dashboard or run through some series of KPIs (or more conspicuously, be run through these stats in some form of review with their boss) and find an outlier. They’ve got an employee that isn’t measuring up the same way everyone else is, or is significantly below means or medians in several areas. In some flavors of organization, it might be a stack rank that ranks well below the stack.
“How are we going to fix this?” They’re asked, or ask themselves.
“We’re going to set some goals!” the manager replies, eager to be seen to be doing something to fix it.1We won’t be talking here about how often managers do things to be seen doing things, or so credit can be taken for having done things. That’s a discussion for some other time.
Out come the directives. Raise this, lower that. Hopefully tied to some form of “Why” and “How” as well, though far too often not. (These are a topic we’ll cover next, in discussing what makes a good goal.)
When the employee leaves their 1×1 (and for all that is holy, I hope they’re getting these goals via an individual discussion during a 1×1 meeting and not from an email or a memo or worse), they’ve got three or four or ten new things they’re being asked to do, starting right now, with the implied or outrightly stated add-on of “or else.”
This person, who has been doing their work the same way for months or years, suddenly learns that everything they’re doing has to change, because of some unfavorable columns on a spreadsheet.
How do you think that affects your people? Well, this is what it did to Charles:
A sane person would quit, and Barkley basically did. He went from playing 200 rounds a year to maybe five, all at charity events around Phoenix. “People wanted to pay their money to come see my swing up close. It was miserable,” he says. “It just sucks playing bad golf and constantly getting made fun of. I just got tired of getting my ass kicked.”
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/charles-barkley-stan-utley-fixed-swing-smoking-it
Charles loved to golf. He was good at it. He was doing everything in his power to try and get better at it. And it made him want to quit.
Do your people love their work as much as he loved golf? What do you think their response will be?
Here’s my take: One goal. Assign at most one goal per month to your people, track their progress on that goal, determine if they’ve implemented it, then move on to the next.
Here’s why:
When you’re giving people a goal, you’re asking them to break a habit or build a new habit. Either stop doing things they way they’ve done them hundreds or thousands of times before, or start doing something brand new to them that upsets a pattern of behavior they’ve settled comfortably into.
Trying to do one of these changes is hard. Trying to do three of them, or five of them, or more, is asking something impossible. You’re setting your people up to fail. And that failure isn’t their fault, it’s yours.
Additionally, psychological research related to habit forming has shown that to reliably create a new habit or break an old one can take between 20-70 days, depending on frequency and attention to the habit. If you’re setting a goal for call center employees, who will be implementing the goal on a dozen or two calls per day, we can probably figure it’ll take around a month to implement and iterate to the point it feels natural.
This gives you time to do the work to reinforce that one goal you’ve set together. You can review their customer interactions to inspect what you expect. You can have a mid-month check-in or two and discuss their progress, listening to calls or reading transcripts together, and making any minor adjustments you might need to implement.
Afterwards, measure the effectiveness of the goal. Did the change have the effect you were hoping for? With that change made, did it make a new opportunity more obvious, or more possible to implement? Take next month and work on that.
Overcorrection and superfluous effort are common issues that come up in many areas. One example I like to point to is canoeing.
If you’ve never been canoeing, there’s a phenomenon that overwhelms new people when they first start to paddle. It happened to me. They become obsessed with going straight.
Canoes, as you can imagine, are not cars. Rather than static roadways, they float through a river of complicated flows, eddies, and currents. Rivers don’t run straight, they don’t flow at the same speeds, and sometimes that means you veer a bit. Additionally, canoes are powered by paddling, which is done on one side of the boat or the other, and due to physical forces, result in the boat turning slightly with each stroke.
Inexperienced paddlers can get a bit distraught at this. They erratically switch sides back and forth every stroke or two, lifting the paddle out, carrying it over the boat, then plunging it back in the other side, all in an effort to keep going straight ahead, to attempt to perfectly correct for these turns and currents. They waste a lot of physical and mental energy on it, all to go slower and get wet.
Instead, all they really need to do is turn the paddle a little at the end of the stroke. It’s called a J-stroke, and it corrects for the little flare out the boat’s nose does with each stroke. It’s easy to implement, a small adjustment to the natural motion of paddling, and has an immediate effect without superfluous effort.
One small change, calmly implemented, repeated consistently, that fixes the problem.
As a manager, implementing this “One Goal” practice takes intent and trust between you and your employee.2And often you and your own manager as well! It requires you to chart a larger path to better results and have the follow-through and patience to make each small change that will culminate in improved performance. Rather than trying to walk the entire trail at once, you’re picking a landmark and walking to that. Then picking another.
Ultimately, the intent is to get from one state of working to another state of working, through the application of small changes, the reaching of visible landmarks, over a period of time. The whole time it will feel like a person being themselves, with one small change they implement until fully absorbed, rather than trying to completely revolutionize what they do in an instant.
Changing someone’s entire structure at once isn’t possible. If it were, everyone would just, y’know, do that. It is, however, entirely possible to change one thing at a time, over time, until what results no longer resembles what it started as.
You can evolve a person’s work towards a better version of what it can be. With patience, partnership, reassurance, and recognition of the effort, you can work with your employee to implement lasting change and achieve the outcomes for which you’ve been working. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.
They’ll come out the other side not only improved, but more enthused to work alongside you to continue achieving their goals and improving their performance, because you demonstrated trust, patience, and commitment to working towards a common goal.
So, how did Barkley fix his swing? He changed one thing.
Stan Utley, who had previously worked with former Masters Champion Sergio Garcia on a similar issue, had Charles show him what he was doing privately, in a 1×1 coaching session. He identified one specific coaching point, then had him make a single change to how he moved his hands relative to his swing motion. Charles wouldn’t work on anything additional with Utley for a year.
One change. For a year.
Barkley didn’t see Utley again until a year later, and when they reunited, the hitch had retreated
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/charles-barkley-stan-utley-fixed-swing-smoking-it
Remember how he looked up top? Here’s how Charles looks now:
Charles went on to explain that all those other points, all the clutter that was in his mind every time at the tee, went away. He was able to simplify, focus, and work on that one thing.
“He kind of unclutters my mind,” Barkley said of Utley. “I’ve had like 100 teachers, and all of them are talking to me at the same time. Now, I only listen to one teacher. Golf is a lot more fun when you listen to one teacher instead of a hundred.”
https://clubhouse.swingu.com/lifestyle/meet-the-teacher-who-fixed-charles-barkleys-golf-swing-stan-utley/
One change, and the patience to make it stick.
Notes:
- 1We won’t be talking here about how often managers do things to be seen doing things, or so credit can be taken for having done things. That’s a discussion for some other time.
- 2And often you and your own manager as well!