Session 13 – SIMPLE Vision – Huge Goals

Action Steps

1. Write out as many Huge Goals as you can.

2. Circle the ONE.

Post your response to this question in the GU Leader Community by clicking here. Share one of your new Actions and ask for feedback.

Session Transcript

Welcome to a new session of Guidestone University. We’ve been talking about, “How to Create Vision” and we’ve got a couple of resources for you that you should be using as you work along and create your vision. You should be able to download the book, and each one of the session for sure in the module, and you also should be able to download the tool that we’re using to work through vision.

We’ve already covered Non-negotiables, the first component of vision. We’ve covered in our last session, we covered purpose. In this session, we’re going to look at or going to begin looking at the Future: What we want things to look like and specifically to focus on huge goals.

So, the future for our work and for our organization, involves both what the organization will build and what it will become in the future. Because when the future is clear, then we will be able to form plans that can make it happen. In fact, that’s where we learn in our course, on the simple one page business plan, that’s the next step after we create our vision. So, when the future is clear, when you understand where you’re headed with vision, then you can make daily, weekly, monthly, yearly plans to make that vision happen, to fulfill that vision on a regular basis. So what are we building? Who are we becoming as a result of showing up to our work every single day? Where are we headed?

Future consists of two parts. I want to make sure you have a grasp on this and then we’re going to talk about the first one. Number one is huge goals. The question that we ask with huge goals is, “What are we building?” or “What do we want to build?” The second part of future, as we look at future, is details. What will it look like to achieve the goal, or what are we becoming? What do we want to become as a company, or what do we want to become in our work, or what do we want to become together? So, huge goals and details.

As a leader, you are inviting people on a journey. You are taking them to the base of Mt. Everest. You’re pointing to the summit, and you’re inviting them to go with you. For other people to decide they want to go with you, they need to know what the journey is going to look like. So what are we going to build? Now, look here for a few minutes at huge goals. There’s a fundamental difference between, merely having a goal and committing to a huge daunting challenge. What we’re talking about are this huge daunting challenges. In their business classic, their book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins calls this big hairy audacious goals, has become a business acronym – BHAG, Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Huge goals are clear and compelling and they serve as unifying focal points of effort. They act as a catalyst for team spirit. They have a clear finish line, so we, as leaders and the team can know when we’ve achieved these goals. They’re tangible, they’re energizing and they’re highly focused.

So we think about huge goals, and all of us have set goals before we work, but we want to give you a few questions like we have in the other session. We’ll give you a few questions that will help you to craft, not just goals, but to help you craft this huge daunting challenges that you’re going to go after, to create excitement and energy in your work with your team and with your organization.

Here are the following questions that we can ask to determine our huge goals, and you can work through this again as you look through the work book, or in the vision tool itself if you downloaded those.

Number one: first question is, “What are we building?” or, “What do we want to build?”

Number two: Where do we want to go? Where do I want to go? Where do we want to go together? If you’re working with this, if you’re working through vision with your team, you can change the wording of the questions and you definitely want to get input from the team. In fact, you may want them to engage with this far more than you are in that open session, because your fingerprints are going to be all over it as the leader anyway. You want them engaging in the process fully and completely, so that their work can be exciting and compelling to them. So, where do we want to go?

Number three: What will we be the best at, or what can we be the best at? With the people that have come to this organization; with the people that we have currently at our team. Even if it’s just a small business, with a small team, what can we be the best at? What is our unique market position? Then as you develop these goals, there are three questions that you can ask to ensure that they’re huge, they’re compelling, they’re clear and they’re actionable.

Three questions that you can ask: is it specific, is it measurable, is it time sensitive? When will we achieve it, how will we know that we’ve achieved it? So is it specific, is it measurable, is it time-sensitive? How will we know that we’ve achieved it?

Here’s I want you to do: I want you to pause this session and work on this action step. I want you to write your huge goals, and what you may want to do is write 8 or 9 or 10 or 20 of them on a page. As you write them, write as many as you can and come back and pick the one that seems the most challenging, the most compelling to you personally and as a team.

Let me read some huge goals to you. Some big hairy audacious goals to you.

In 1990, Walmart had the goal to become a hundred and twenty-five billion dollar company by the year 2000. in 2016, Walmart is worth more than two-hundred fifty billion dollars. Nike in 1960, their goal in 1960 was simple, to crush Adidas. Honda in 1970, their goal, “We will destroy Yamaha.” I’m not sure if this is the type of goal that you want to have in your company, but one thing is for sure, the people that are within these companies, when they look out at the competition – just like as the football team, or professional football team or soccer team or basketball team, depending on where you are in the world – just as these teams look at the competitor and they’ll say, “We want to win! We want to win in the compelling passion. We want to crush the competition,” they had these big huge goals.

Let me read a couple of the huge goals that we wrote out years ago, for our work, so that you can put a little bit of context as you think through these things. The biggest goal that we had was to become the model process and center for coaching and counseling. That’s something that we work out everyday. It’s something that I don’t know that we ever – as we talked about the last session – we never fully accomplished it, but it’s something that we can work toward fulfilling every single day.

Another huge goal for us, we wrote out 7, 8, or 9 years ago, was to develop 50 to 100 acre, nationally known retreat center that’s equipped with 20 to 50 spacious self-sufficient rooms, in which coaching and counseling clients are able to focus, relax, heal and re-energize.

In fact, a friend of mine, Mike Hyatt, posted something a couple of months ago, where he said, that he had read somewhere, “That the act of us writing down a goal, a goal written down, is 52 percent more likely to be accomplished, then if we didn’t write it down.” And so, there is something powerful and energizing about writing these goals down and accomplishing them. So, once you write your goals, then we have four questions that we want to ask.

Number one: Does it stretch you and does it stretch your team or your organizations? Your huge goals should be appropriate for you and for your team, for your organization. These aren’t necessarily personal goals; I mean this isn’t, “I want to make a million dollars a year,” or, “I want to build the biggest house in my community.” That’s not going to excite people jumping on board that goal with you, unless you are going to let them come and live with you. These aren’t necessarily your personal goals; you want to write the goals in a way that they will not only inspire you and your team or your organization, but they’ll inspire the market place to engage with you. The best companies, the companies that are growing fastest, have figured out how to help their customers, their clients, how to enable and empower their customers and their clients to get involved in spreading their message. So will it stretch you and your team?

The second question that I want to ask after we’ve written our goals is, will it take a long-term commitment? Goals that require short term commitments are not huge goals. Does it inspire a long term commitment to the adventure? We’re not talking about solving problems in the market place. Life in our work are not problems to be solved; they’re adventures to be lived. So, do your huge goals require a long-term commitment?

The third question that I want to ask once you write your goals, I want to go back and review and evaluate them to ensure that they are huge goals. Number three: Will some doubt you or your team or your organization’s ability to accomplish it? Your goals should attract some cynics, some naysayers, some critics, because what you’re doing and what you’re going to become is huge; it’s way bigger than you. Otherwise, it is probably not worth doing and so they’re right. You cannot get there, not on your own. But as a team and as you connect with other people, and you move forward and you take one step after another, you can get there.

The way to have a great tomorrow is to have a lot of great today’s. So you’re going to set incremental steps, and you’re going to take incremental steps. One day you’ll turn around and you’ll say, “We’re almost there. We’ve almost accomplished this year’s goal.” Or, “I never understood fully how we would ever accomplish these goals as we first wrote it out, but we’ve done it.”

The fourth question that I want to ask is, is it clear? Can I show this to anybody and everybody, and then understand it?

Nike’s goal to crush Adidas is pretty clear. Our goal to develop 50 to 100 acre nationally known retreat center and focuses in helping leaders—that’s pretty clear. Anybody can understand, “Hey! I get exactly what you want to do.” They can even read into it and understand why that we might want to do something like that. Is it clear?

Fuzzy leaders or fuzzier followers; fuzzy goals or fuzzier team members? What you want to do is make sure that your huge goals are clear, they’re actionable. That they require long term commitment; that even people doubt your ability to accomplish it; that it stretches you, your team, or your organization.

Earlier you wrote out your goals. You’ve now thought through them, you’ve gone back and tweaked it. Here’s what the second action step for this session is: I want you to go back now and read through your goals; now that you’ve tweaked it, you’ve worked through them after you get them, wordsmith the way that you want them. We want you to circle the one. Circle the one that is your Mt. Everest summit. It’s the biggest challenge that you think you could ever accomplish, that you think you could ever conquer. What does the top of the mountain look like for you and for your team?

Earlier, I told you that for us, it was to become the model process and center for coaching. There are a lot of organizations out there, have a lot of great content, have a lot of great processes. For us, we want to think through the real challenges that leaders are facing today, and we want to develop a proven process and model that can help every single one of them. Okay? So, in this session, you’re writing out your goals; you’re going to tweak them, modify them, finalize them and then you’re going to circle the one. Circle the one that has the huge goal for you. Then we will see you in the next session as we look at details.[/text_block]