Page 80 - Hard Goals

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In the early 1990s, Sears assigned its auto repair staff a rev-
enue quota of $147 per hour. Pretty specifi c, right? Well it turns
out it wasn’t specifi c enough because staff members started
overcharging for work and doing unnecessary repairs. Then-
chairman Edward Brennan acknowledged that Sears’ “goal set-
ting process for service advisers created an environment where
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mistakes did occur.”
American Airlines has had a reputation for specifi c goals,
right down to the departmental—and even the individual—
level. If a plane is late, American wants to know whose fault it
is. So when a plane is late, what’s the employees’ reaction? They
make sure they don’t get blamed for failing to hit their goal. Oh
sure, the plane may sit on the tarmac for a while, making your
life miserable as a passenger, but that gate agent hit his or her
specifi c goal. Woo-hoo! By contrast, an airline like Southwest
Airlines thinks about a “team delay.” They don’t care too much
about attributing a delay to an individual; instead they care
about getting the plane in the air for the customers and then
fi guring out how to prevent delays in the future.
If somebody picks a number without fi rst creating a picture,
it’s a cop-out. It’s not specifi c. Being specifi c is when you can
tell me every little nuance of what that number translates into
out in the real world. I can pick numbers out of thin air all day
long, but they don’t tell me a darn thing unless I know what
they mean. Think about it. Which airline truly has more specifi c
goals? The one with numbers assigned to every individual? Or
the one with fewer numbers but a very clear picture of what the
customer should be experiencing?
I call this the “illusion of specifi city.” It’s when we’ve got
numbers assigned to our goals, but we don’t know what the