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Author: Josh

Manager, Manage Thyself: SMART Goals

Published by Josh on September 12, 2023

What makes a good goal?1I’ll begin by noting that I’m not breaking particularly new ground here. SMART goals are not a thing I invented, nor did my former employer. However, there’s something to be said for finding a voice that resonates with you, so here’s mine on the topic.

Many managers, seeking to be effective, or at least not be seen as ineffective, arbitrary, or worse, start looking to set goals for their employees. Last time we covered why we’re better off focusing on one goal at a time. This time, we’re going discuss how to not only choose the right goal, but craft that goal in the right way to both achieve a result and not waste anyone’s time in doing so.

If you’re a veteran manager, you’ve likely heard of some form of these before, but for those still early in their journey of management, what the hell is a SMART goal? And why do I keep capitalizing it like that?

Well, imagined audience, that’s because it’s an acronym2Not an initialism, (meaning, not an Ess Emm Ay Arr Tee goal), but an acronym, a “smart” goal.. SMART goals are goals that include and utilize the following five attributes:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable3Some folks use “achievable”, but you’re getting them the way I learned ’em.
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

Let’s break each of these down, not just in the abstract, but tied to a real-world example. Let’s say you’ve got an employee named Josh. Josh is friendly with customers but gets a bit long-winded, with the highest Average Handle Time on your team.4Friendly and long-winded is my life’s story. You want to see that handle time come down by 20%, to bring him more in line with the rest of the customer service team.

So, let’s set him a goal: “Be faster on calls.” Naturally he’ll just do that and be great, right?

If only.

A goal like “be faster” naturally raises questions like How? When? and even Why?

Let’s run through each facet of our SMART framework and see if we can make the goal a better one, answer those questions, and leave you in a position to set a good, useful, smart goal.

Specific

A specific goal is one that is clear and unmistakeable in its construction. There is no worse feeling than getting halfway through a month and realizing that your advisor doesn’t actually understand what you’re asking them to do. Compare:

“Make a sandwich”

vs

“Make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with crunchy peanut butter, grape jelly, on wheat bread, cut on the diagonal.”

With the second, you know exactly what you’re going to get. With the first, hell, you might get a hot dog.

Let’s rewrite our goal to be more specific. Instead of “Be faster on calls” let’s try “Take less than twenty minutes per call.”

Not great, but definitely more specific!

Measurable

A goal being measurable means that we can know, in a Boolean fashion, whether or not it was accomplished. We should be able to tell with complete certainty whether or not our goal we set with the advisor has been achieved in each instance of time we’re measuring (typically a single customer interaction, though more longitudinal goals might have a measure that incorporates an entire customer/advisor interaction.

To understand why this is important, let’s empathize with our advisor. No employee wants to be bad at their job. They may not have the motivation or capacity to be great at it, but everyone that does a job wants, at a minimum, to achieve at a satisfactory level.

Our job as managers is to help that employee to achieve that level of success and to continually strive for improvement. If that employee doesn’t understand how their success is being measured, how will they have any way to know if they are doing well or poorly? For that matter, how will you?

You likely have a database full of various OKRs or KPIs or other performance metrics. If you don’t understand what these numbers mean or measure, they’re useless as tools. We should set our own goals to the same standards, and require that not only is it clear what our expectations are, but that we know for certain whether or not we’ve achieved them.

Our original formulation — “Be faster on calls” — is at best vague in its formulation. Our first pass at editing adds a level of measurement in that we’re now defining success as nothing over 20 minutes.

Let’s keep this measurability in mind as we progress to our next aspect of SMART goals.

Attainable

This piece of the SMART model can be deceptive. Many managers will simply ask themselves “Can they do it?” and assume “Yes, they can” and move on. Things are rarely this simple.

The first consideration is “Is this within my advisor’s power to affect?”

Consider the following goals:

– Have a Customer Satisfaction of 90% or above

– Resolve 90% of customer issues on the first call

– Take less than twenty minutes per call (our example goal)

Are these within your advisor’s control? Let’s consider the issues with each:

“Have a Customer Satisfaction of 90% or above.” How are we measuring satisfaction? Via customer survey? Do the advisors have any control over whether the happy customers leave surveys? Whether there are any issues with the surveying system? Whether they get enough volume of surveys to make this a statistically significant sample? There are many aspects related to a purely numerical goal that are outside the control of the advisor.

“Resolve 90% of customer issues on the first call.” Similar to the above, how are we measuring resolution? Customer surveys? Do customers understand that their issues are resolved or do they answer “No” because they’re waiting until later in the day (after they got surveyed) to confirm the issue was resolved? What if there’s a network outage affecting the whole system? Can your people resolve that for each caller themselves?

“Take less than twenty minutes per call.” This is a sneakier goal regarding achievability, in that, if a single call in the month goes over twenty minutes, they’ve failed. Is that the intent of your goal? What if your advisor hung up on every caller after 19 minutes. Would they have achieved the goal?

Incentives are important to keep in mind, and poorly written goals create poor incentives to achieve. Instead, we should write our goals seeking outcomes that the advisor has direct, demonstrable control over and can achieve through their efforts. By doing so, we’re asking something of them that they are able to achieve, that is attainable for them.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t easy! If it were, you wouldn’t be hundreds of words deep into an article explaining the difficulties of writing good goals.

Consider the following constructions:

– Rather than “Have a Customer Satisfaction of 90% or above” try “For each survey rated 3 out of 5 or below, review the call notes and indicate what steps we could have taken to improve the customer’s experience.”

– Instead of “Resolve 90% of customer issues on the first call” what if we asked “At the conclusion of each call, ask the customer if we have resolved the issue they called in for help with.”

– And our example: “Take less than twenty minutes per call” could instead be addressed as “Within the first two minutes of each call, confirm with the customer that you have a clear understanding of the issue they are asking for help in resolving.”

Each of these new formulations moves away from measuring a goal’s success in terms of a reported number and toward a specific action your person is taking, that can be directly observed and measured. The goals are Specific, Measurable, and Attainable, and there isn’t any ambiguity as to what is being asked of the employee to accomplish.

We can enhance the goal even further, if needed, by adding even more specificity to it, addressing what to do if they cannot Gain Agreement with the customer on what is being addressed on the call, adding: “If your understanding of their issue does not match the customer’s, ask additional probing questions to confirm and agree upon the issue they are seeking assistance in resolving. Do not progress further on the call until confirming you and the customer agree on what issue will be assisted with during the call.”

Relevant

Relevancy tends to be a little more obvious than achievability, but it’s an important aspect to consider carefully. 

Credit to my old boss Greg for this analogy: If I set a goal of “Each workday morning for the next three weeks, stop by the local gas station, buy a copy of the local newspaper, cut out the headline of the top article on the front page, and place it on my desk.” that goal is very specific, can be measured in its achievement, and is attainable (as well as time-bound, which we’ll touch on in a moment). 

Does it have anything to do with your employees job?

Probably not.

It’s important to set goals that are important to your people, to the successful functioning of the business, and to the overall performance of both. There are many goals that can be set that don’t have direct relevance to your person’s job role or your company’s core functionality, that can nevertheless be “good” goals.

Relevance should act as a filter check. Are you setting the right goal, for this person, at this time? Or are you just setting the same goal for everyone, regardless of whether it’s specific to this employee’s opportunities and needs?

Does this goal align with the business’s overall direction and reflect any coming changes or growth you’re working within? Or is it ignorant of what the business cares about or is trying to drive?

Do we expect this goal to address a specific need or achieve a specific outcome? How?

For our example, by requiring the advisor to gain agreement with the customer on what issue is being addressed on the call, we avoid wasting time (and increasing Average Handle Time to no productive end) trying to fix the wrong thing, as well as help the advisor to find the right resources to fix this specific issue in a more timely manner.

Take a beat at the R of SMART to ask yourself if you’re setting the right goal, for the right person, at the right time, for the right reasons. If you’re not sure, maybe there’s a better goal to set for now?

Time-bound

Goals, to be effective, need to be achieved. If we set a perpetual outcome for a person to work at, we’ve created a directive, not a goal. In order to know if we’ve achieved a goal, at some point, we have to check and see that we’ve done it.

This isn’t to say that one size fits all here. Some goals may be simple to implement and only need a short period to put in place. Others might be difficult and require consistent, regular effort over the course of two or three months of effort.

Regardless of how long we’re assigning to the goal, we should put it in place with a clearly set timeframe to achieve the outcome. At the end of this agreed-upon period, you and your employee can reconvene and review their efforts, to determine whether the goal has been achieved or needs to be addressed in a different way.

There’s a quote that’s falsely attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry5Ostensibly in The Little Prince per the misquoters, or Citadelle, but, per Wikipedia, first found in 50 Ways to Lose Ten Pounds (1995) by Joan Horbiak, but is, as many misattributed quotes, helpful and true, that “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Similarly, a plan without a deadline is a suggestion. Agree upon a timeframe, then work with your advisor to put the plan into action.

For our example call, let’s add a time-bound piece to the goal: “During calls this period, within the first two minutes of the beginning of the call, confirm with the customer that you have a clear understanding of the issue they are asking for help in resolving. If your understanding of their issue does not match the customer’s, ask additional probing questions to confirm and agree upon the issue they are seeking assistance in resolving. Do not progress further on the call until confirming you and the customer agree on what issue will be assisted with during the call.”

Does that mean after the period concludes, we don’t care any longer whether they do this activity or not?

Absolutely not! We’re trying to create a new habit; our intent is that the goal we’re setting is focused on heavily during the implementation period before becoming a natural aspect of how the advisor handles phone calls moving forward. We’re merely setting a time period during which we will measure this action specifically and expect a result tied to the goal.

Conclusions

So, we started with:

“Be faster on calls.”

and finished with

“During calls this period, within the first two minutes of the beginning of the call, confirm with the customer that you have a clear understanding of the issue they are asking for help in resolving. If your understanding of their issue does not match the customer’s, ask additional probing questions to confirm and agree upon the issue they are seeking assistance in resolving. Do not progress further on the call until confirming you and the customer agree on what issue will be assisted with during the call.”

To be fair, we intentionally chose a rather vague goal, but it’s not far off from some goals I’ve seen managers set for employees. Does this new formulation meet our checklist?

  • Specific – It’s MUCH more specific now, both in what to do and what not to do.
  • Measurable – We can clearly measure whether the advisor takes the step we’re requesting.
  • Attainable – We’re setting a specific goal within their power to achieve.
  • Relevant – Presuming as we are that this person struggles with Handle Time, this goal is relevant to reducing the amount of time taken per call.
  • Time-bound – We’ve set a request period of “During this period.”

Well, alright! We’ve set a SMART goal!

But, ah, what if it doesn’t work?

Our supposition as managers is that taking these actions will result in a number moving. However, is our definition of success that the number moved?

No, it is not.

Our definition of success is that the person consistently demonstrated the action we’ve prescribed for them.

But what if the KPI didn’t move the way we hoped?

If the person achieves the goal we’ve set with them and the number does not change in a favorable direction, instead it means we’ve not found the best way to address the specific issue or set of issues that are creating that undesirable numerical outcome. We set the wrong goal to achieve that change. And so we’ll work with our employee to generate a new SMART goal.

In the end, however, we will have partnered with our employee on setting a goal that is Specific enough for them to achieve, Measurable enough for us to know whether they achieved it, Attainable for them in the course of their work, Relevant to their job and their specific needs, and bound in Time to a reasonable period to implement.

We’ll have set as good a goal as we can manage, which is all we can ask of ourselves and our people to accomplish.

Notes:

  • 1
    I’ll begin by noting that I’m not breaking particularly new ground here. SMART goals are not a thing I invented, nor did my former employer. However, there’s something to be said for finding a voice that resonates with you, so here’s mine on the topic.
  • 2
    Not an initialism, (meaning, not an Ess Emm Ay Arr Tee goal), but an acronym, a “smart” goal.
  • 3
    Some folks use “achievable”, but you’re getting them the way I learned ’em.
  • 4
    Friendly and long-winded is my life’s story.
  • 5
    Ostensibly in The Little Prince per the misquoters, or Citadelle, but, per Wikipedia, first found in 50 Ways to Lose Ten Pounds (1995) by Joan Horbiak

RIGGS! 2 — A numerical review of the Lethal Weapon films

Published by Josh on September 4, 2023

Part 2: Lethal Weapon 2 (Peri-Peri style)

Welcome back to my public hyperfixation, folks! Today we’re diving into the second installment in the Lethal Weapon series, the last written by Shane Black, with a running counter for Danny Glover’s utterances of “Riggs”, among other things. Off we go!

Lethal Weapon 2 continues a pattern for Lethal Weapon films, kicking off with a cold open before stepping into our main plot line, with themes and B stories foreshadowed in the offing.

In our opening car chase, we join Riggs and Murtaugh driving Trish’s station wagon, screaming through a tunnel in hot pursuit of a suspect in a BMW. Trish’s poor car is in for a rough existence and finishes the film barely functional and completely uninsurable.

Screaming out of the tunnel, we intersect with one of our new supporting characters for the film, Detective Tim Cavanaugh (Dean Norris, who had a notable supporting role in Total Recall, but is more recently renowned for his role as Breaking Bad’s Hank Schrader).

We catch our first of many Riggs’s as the suspects they’re after sit up out the window of their car and fire off two shotgun rounds, taking out the station wagon’s windshield. 

After some rough maneuvering through a hotel roundabout, Riggs takes off on foot after a car once again, having learned no lessons from the previous movie. As Murtaugh catches up, he fires off four Riggs’s in quick succession, our first indicator that the rate of Riggsing is set to skyrocket compared to the first film.

Turning to Norris’s chase, the suspects in the second car are cornered at the top of an overpass, where, after some indiscriminate automatic weapons fire, have somehow managed to bring in a helicopter to facilitate their escape. There’s either a surplus of affordable helicopters in Los Angeles or some very lax licensing requirements, as so far, every organization seems to have their mitts on one or more.

Meanwhile, Riggs and Murtaugh corner the suspect in the BMW, who flips his car into a storefront. After a quick Riggs to scold him for his driving, the pair introduce a new trope, disagreeing about whether “On 3” means on 3 or after 3.

Their quarry escaping, they search the area for him, including his trunk, and find a pile of krugerrands. That, combined with a bit of Afrikaans over the radio, is our introduction to a South African flavor to the installment.

Back at the station, Murtaugh and the Captain have a quick walk and gripe before cutting to Riggs showing off his straight jacket escape trick to the Detective pool. As Riggs flails about, we get a quick look at a whole host of character actors as supporting cast, including Meagan Shapiro (Jenette Goldstein, Aliens’ Private Vasquez) and Eddie Esteban (Nestor Serrano, who is a certified “Hey, it’s that guy” actor, with 128 roles in everything from 24 to The Day After Tomorrow to The Money Pit), They think they’re about to collect on a bet that he can’t escape within 5 minutes, before Riggs shows his stupid human trick: That he can dislocate his shoulder at will. I’m sure that won’t come up again later.

After popping his shoulder sickeningly back into the socket, we get a quick visit from series regular (the still unnamed) Stephanie Woods.

Afterwards, we catch a Riggs as reproval, as he spills to the detective pool that Murtaugh’s daughter Rianne will be starring in a commercial. He arrives home to show off the new addition on the house (that surely won’t end up in a shambles later) and chit chat with his carpenter (literally, he just gets “Carpenter” in the billing) (Jack McKee, another veteran character actor with 222 roles from Basic Instinct to Moneyball to episode parts in all three CSIs). He fires off a nailgun, making the detectives jump and ensuring that we see it being placed on the proverbial mantle for later.

Some quick banter indoors before Rianne’s big break, reminding us that in the late 80s we were very concerned with dolphin-safe tuna, and then we see the main event: Seems she’s the new face of Ramses Extra condoms. Roger is…nonplussed.

Off we go to a very turn of the 90s office, in sharp grays with a giant fish tank, before meeting the two villains of this installment, Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland, who, after a long career in Europe, came to prominence in the US with this role, followed by The Mighty Ducks, The Hunt for Red October, and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, where he catches one hell of a melvin.) and Pieter Vorstedt (Derrick O’Connor, for whom this was his largest role, but who also had parts in Brazil, Alias, and the Daredevil movie). 

The subject of our earlier chase scene, Hans (Mark Rolston, who might be most recognized as Andy Dufresne’s nemesis in The Shawshank Redemption), steps over some very conspicuous plastic sheeting on the floor. His reward for losing the million dollars in krugerrands is a bullet to the head and an epitaph from Pieter making a pun about drop cloths.

As Pieter wraps up the body, they discuss their plans to handle an overbearing police presence, specifically our lead detective, Sgt. Murtaugh.

We cut to Riggs and Trish Murtaugh, him making dinner, her parcelling out various plastic bags of medication, and telling us the backstory of how Riggs’ wife died, in a car accident, and its tie-in with a gold pen Trish found in the laundry. It’s a bit of backstory we’ll come back to later. 

Afterwards, Riggs is at home, drinking with Sam the dog, and watching the Three Stooges, which Sam seems to enjoy as much as Riggs does.

Meanwhile, Roger tosses and turns in bed, then wakes to find four balaclavaed men duct-taping he and Trish. Pieter and his crew hover over them, delivering a clear threat to back off the investigation, with some rather racist invective.

Back at the station, after Roger fills his partner in and a fateful detectives’ poker game is organized, they’re assigned to watch an informant waiting on behalf of the FBI. One Leo Getz.

Welcome Joe Pesci to the series! (I’ll not do you the disservice of assuming you don’t know Joe Pesci’s other work, including his album Little Joe Sure Can Sing.)

Leo’s a fixer, a money launderer, and later a real estate agent, and then a private detective. For now, he’s a state’s witness with a nervous tick for the word “Ok”. No, I will not count the Oks, ok? Ok.

“Room service” arrives to deliver the wrong meal and a bullet for desert, before Riggs rushes him and sends them both, plus Leo, out what might be the most easily broken hotel window in history, down somewhere around 7 stories, and into the hotel pool. Shane Black really loves a pool gag.1Later, another detective takes a dive into a pool from the roof of a hotel in a Shane Black movie, The Nice Guys. At least Martin doesn’t have a vision of Richard Nixon.

A little mixup in the water has Riggs punching out Leo’s nose as the assailant makes a getaway. While they catch their breath poolside and Murtaugh catches up, Leo explains just why someone is trying to kill him: he laundered half a billion dollars in drug money. Which, yeah, that’d probably do it.

A quick clip of Rudd and Vorstedt complaining they missed their shot and we head to the Murtaugh residence to watch Riggs and Murtaugh eat cold spaghetti straight from a the container while Leo explains how money laundering works. 

While the modern television viewer has been well informed about money laundering via Breaking Bad, Ozark, and many other crime dramas, viewers in this era might not be clear on the workings. Unfortunately, Leo’s explanation seems a bit muddled and doesn’t cover how any of this avoids KYC laws or deposit limits or whatnot. It is, however, a rather stock method for laundering funds utilizing a lack of knowledge around who the beneficial owner is of the dummy corporation doing the switcheroo. 

Leo explains that he keeps a 2% fee for his trouble, which means he pulled in $10M or so from the standard laundry setup before he skimmed his extra piece off the top. Which, considering how prosperous the work already was, makes one wonder why an extra 10-20 thousand here and there was worth it in the end. I suppose that’s an unfamiliarity with the criminal mindset for you.

Anyhow, Leo shrinks Riggs’ shirt and then recalls the one connection he had to the dealers directly: a house up in the Hollywood Hills and a man named Hans. Hans might be tricky to track down, given we watched him rolled up in a plastic drop cloth fifteen minutes ago, but the house is still standing. For now.

Arriving at the home built into a hillside, Riggs sneaks in pretending to be a pool cleaner (Shane LOVES a pool gag) and finds two besuited men in the middle of counting out bills. They’re interrupted by a third, our fake hotel waiter, who runs off in a tow truck, with Riggs, as always, chasing after on foot.

One more Riggs out of Danny Glover, plus one from Pesci that doesn’t count here, and they’re off in pursuit in Trish’s station wagon once again.

A high-speed chase through the Hollywood Hills has Riggs lose his gun, and then Leo and Murtaugh inexplicably stopping to pick it up from the side of the road. Their vision here is absolutely incredible. They’re speeding down the road, in pursuit of Riggs and the “waiter”, and yet not only see the gun on the side of the road, they stop in time for Leo to run out and retrieve it, before picking up the chase. I can only assume this was thrown in to fix some continuity error later.

Off we go down the road before the wackiest bit of hijinks yet finds the tow-truck at a complete stop, Murtaugh running into the car it’s towing, shooting it up over the lowered flatbed, then THAT car impacting with a truck carrying a surfboard, which flies off back in the opposite direction and kills our “bellhop”. The physics and circumstance here are incredible, for both senses of the word.2Thankfully, Mythbusters took the time to really dive into things in Episode 154, which, as expected, was busted to hell: https://mythresults.com/reverse-engineering

Back at the house on stilts, the entire detective core rushes the house, finding the earlier money men, plus Arjen and Pieter, where Arjen introduces himself to the detectives as the Minister of Diplomatic Affairs for the South African consulate, and explains that everyone there works for the consulate as well. A quick Riggs out of Glover produces a reaction of recognition in Pieter, who confirms he has The Martin Riggs in his presence.

Arjen goes on to explain that “under the Diplomatic Relations Act, no diplomatic agent may be detained or arrested once his identity has been established.” He goes on to threaten to talk with the State Department, and claim that the house is owned by the South African government, and so is South African territory.

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to get deep into the weeds on how this isn’t actually how diplomatic immunity works (for more, go listen to Stuff You Should Know (https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-diplomatic-immunity) or read any of the other explainers on the internet about it). This being a movie, we’re just gonna go with it for the sake of enjoying things. Plus, why ruin the climax?

Upstairs, Riggs literally bumps into another member of the consulate, Rika Van Den Haas (Patsy Kensit, who got her start in The Great Gatsby at 4 years old, per IMDB) for a little meet cute.

A little more exposition at the station and then at Miss Van Den Haas’s apartment, and we get to Arjen making clear more needs to be done about the police issue.

A quick trip to Subway and we get the first of a series of Leo Getz rants about places they fuck you. In this instance, they fuck you at the drive-through. Later installments let us know we also get fucked with the cellphones.

The next day, Martin does some very conspicuous tailing of Rudd, following him back to the consulate where a crowd of protesters is gathered outside, to rally for an end to Apartheid and the freeing of Nelson Mandela.3Interestingly, the movie was released in July of 1989, right around when P.W. Botha, president of South Africa, was meeting with Nelson Mandela directly. Six weeks later, the new South African president, F. W. de Klerk would take power and would, in February of 1990, release Mandela from prison. Upstairs, Rika seems rather charmed by Martin’s antics on the CC TV.

Arriving back at home, Riggs finds Leo cleaning his beach trailer, where he gets a call that Murtaugh hasn’t checked in for the day. Over at the Murtaugh residence, Riggs hears Roger yelling from inside and, upstairs, finds him sitting on the toilet, in what might be the most classic bit from the film.

Riggs explains the situation: that he sat down on the commode the night before for some quiet time, reading about marlin fishing, and found a note on the toilet paper saying “Boom! You’re dead!” 

A little fun wordplay about scaring the shit out of him, then Riggs leans down to find a stack of explosives running to a wire at the back of the toilet.

One quick “Riggs” as Roger begs him to keep it quiet, before we get every emergency service organization in LA out on the front lawn.

Jarvis Becker from the bomb squad (Kenneth Tigar, who has a long career of TV work and will reunite with Donner and Gibson in Conspiracy Theory) explains how they’ll look to freeze the bomb with liquid nitrogen while Roger dives into the cast iron tub, and here we have our second Mythbusters plot of the movie4Covered in Episode 178: https://mythresults.com/toilet-bomb, this one confirmed! Not only could Riggs have pulled Murtaugh off the toilet in time, but the liquid nitrogen would have stalled the explosion long enough to have worked, as well as the cast iron tub protecting from lethal concussive force from 1 kg of C-4. As outlandish as the situation is, it’s apparently incredibly accurately rendered.

It turns out Murtaugh isn’t too old for this shit (🥁). After some quick clarification this time on whether On 3 means on 3 or ON 3, they share a brief moment between men, then dive for the tub.

The station wagon suffers once again as the toilet is thrown onto its hood, but the boys come through mostly unscathed.

Afterwards, we cut to the Consulate where Leo and Roger kick off a little gag about emigrating to South Africa, as a distraction, while Riggs sneaks upstairs for some snooping.

Up in the fancy 80’s office, Riggs does some light diplomatic threatening before a quick “Hey Moe!” and some violence against the fish tank.5Fish tank abuse comes up again in The Nice Guys. Shane loves a trope!

Downstairs, he runs into Rika again before meeting up with Murtaugh and Getz in the car, showing them a note reading “Alba Varden, Thursday.” But who is Alba Varden?

A quick cut back to the office for us to be sure Rudd and Vorstedt noticed Riggs took the note and we’re off to the supermarket, where Riggs runs into Rika yet again, to give her some advice about grocery shopping in America after a little light stalking. Martin insists on Rika coming to his place for dinner, throws in another Stooges bit, then drags her off to the beach.

Rika and Martin have a conversation about how Arjen is using his credentials to commit crimes, before we see some more of those crimes play out.

Pieter executes one detective in their home, then Shapiro blows up on the diving board of her pool in what must have been a fun day for the stuntwoman. (LOVES a pool gag.)

Martin and Rika start to get friendly, before we see another explosion, this time at Cavanaugh’s house during the planned poker game.

The Captain puts calls out to find the officers who haven’t been killed, and we see Riggs and Rika continuing their fun evening in, then find Murtaugh and Getz holed up at a hotel. Roger realizes where he’d seen Alba Varden before and drags Leo back to his house to review a video he took from his boat to confirm his suspicion (though not before Leo lets us know he’s really enjoying Rianne’s commercial work).

Meanwhile outside, Leo is taken away by some “consulate employees” and Murtaugh fends off an attack from a third, then a fourth, before putting the nail gun to a use almost certainly forbidden in the user manual. “Nailed ‘em both.” is our reward. He stumbles back outside to realize Leo, and the poor, poor station wagon, are gone.

Back at the beach, amid a roll in the sheets, two helicopters come storming in over the ocean and light up the trailer with automatic weapons fire. Under a rain of bullets, Martin and Rika escape out Sam’s door in the floor, then Rika makes a run for the truck as the helicopters land nearby.

Martin, meanwhile, throws in another “Hey Moe!” while taking out two of the South Africans on the beach, then kills three more while spraying bullets from the roof of the trailer.

Martin takes out one more in the other helicopter while they collect Sam and head back to Rika’s apartment. After an extended goodbye, Riggs is ambushed while Rika is collected offscreen.

Down at the dock we find Pieter and a burlap-sacked Riggs having a conversation about their previously untold history together. Pieter explains that Riggs was investigating their organization 4 years prior and they put out a contract on him. Pieter, it turns out, is the one that ran Mrs. Riggs off the road to her death, thinking he was killing Martin. Why we needed to write in more motivation for Riggs is beyond me, but that’s why I don’t make the Shane Black money.

Pieter takes off and his flunkies throw Riggs into the ocean, where he pulls a repeat of his straight-jacket escape. Down at the bottom of the pier, Riggs finds Rika, tied up and drowned.

His vengeance upon coming back to the surface is swift and fierce.

Back on the move, Riggs calls in to the station and gets Murtaugh on the line. He explains that the South Africans came after him, and that they killed both Rika and his wife. Murtaugh tries to explain that there’s more going on. Riggs makes clear that tonight is not about justice, it’s about vengeance. Oh, and we get 10 Riggs’ out of Roger in a 50 second span. Martin tells him he’s heading back to the stilt house. Roger tosses his badge in the desk, then follows after.

Down at the house in the Hills, we find Leo being tortured by Pieter and his men. After a quick discussion outside, Roger and Martin initiate a plan to go in and rescue Leo while getting some revenge against the South Africans.

Riggs has roped his truck around one of the house’s stilts and proceeds to pull the house off the hillside, as Murtaugh runs in, kills two more, and drags Leo outside.

After some quick reminiscing and a fateful “Give the little fellow a hug, you’ll be lucky if you see him again.”, Riggs and Murtaugh head off for the Alba Varden.

Down below the ship, they get out and investigate a container being guarded by three men. They drag the men off and no gunfire is shown, so I’m going to assume they just got “knocked out”. Inside the container, they realize they’re staring at a car and pallets full of plastic-wrapped stacks of US currency.

Amid a discussion about the ethics of Murtaugh pocketing a stack of thousand dollar bills, Rudd and his men close them up in the container and lift it to put it onboard the Varden.

Apparently they left the keys inside, as the detectives make an escape by throwing the car through the pallets of cash, the container’s door, and into the waters of the port. While the South Africans fire wildly after the car and what they think are our heroes, Murtaugh drops an “I’m too old for this shit” and they repel down from the midair container to the deck below, taking out two of the guards on the way down.

Martin eliminates four more guards down in the storage area, done with enough rolling and shooting to make Police Constable Danny Butterman gaze in awe.

In comes a knife! Riggs takes a dagger to the calf as Pieter emerges from the shadows and starts a series of kicks to Riggs. While upstairs Roger kills a guard, Riggs and Pieter go at it below, in some brutal hand to foot to knife combat, before Riggs overpowers his foe and knifes him in the guts. Then, a knife wound being too easy a way out, he hobbles over and drops the freight container on his head.

Roger, meanwhile, finds Riggs from the deck above, shouts for him, then dives for cover as Arjen starts firing at him with a thematically appropriate Luger.

After Murtaugh draws down on him, Arjen holds up his credentials, leading to this climactic moment:

Three more Riggs’s as Roger runs to his partner, a little Bob Dylan musical fake out with a soundtrack cue of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”, then two more Riggs’s as Roger explains that Riggs isn’t allowed to die until he tells him to.

Riggs asks for his cigarettes, then asks Roger to throw them away, as “those things’ll kill ya” (a callback for our next adventure in Lethal Weapon 3), as we pull away to the credits.

Our scores!

And, with two datapoints to work with, some graphs!

Our overall Riggs! count is nearly quintupled, while Body Count is up slightly, I’m Too Old For This Shits are down considerably, and we have four times the Stooges references.

Murtaugh sees a more significant percentage of the body count here (including one via physics-defying surfboard decapitation.) while Riggs levels off slightly.

Join us next time for Lethal Weapon 3, where Joe Pesci returns with a truly 90’s blonde dye job, we’re introduced to Rene Russo as new series regular Lorna, and we tackle some internecine conflict within the LAPD and the gang violence epidemic.

Notes:

  • 1
    Later, another detective takes a dive into a pool from the roof of a hotel in a Shane Black movie, The Nice Guys. At least Martin doesn’t have a vision of Richard Nixon.
  • 2
    Thankfully, Mythbusters took the time to really dive into things in Episode 154, which, as expected, was busted to hell: https://mythresults.com/reverse-engineering
  • 3
    Interestingly, the movie was released in July of 1989, right around when P.W. Botha, president of South Africa, was meeting with Nelson Mandela directly. Six weeks later, the new South African president, F. W. de Klerk would take power and would, in February of 1990, release Mandela from prison.
  • 4
    Covered in Episode 178: https://mythresults.com/toilet-bomb
  • 5
    Fish tank abuse comes up again in The Nice Guys. Shane loves a trope!

Manager, Manage Thyself: Setting Goal

Published by Josh on August 31, 2023

“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:

  • 1
    We 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.
  • 2
    And often you and your own manager as well!