Leadership: How were your first 90 days?

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Dear Reader,

Easter is past and, just as in Christianity Easter marks the end of Lent, many other cultures celebrate with their own festival the approach of spring. Just the right time to consider an important date – March 31st. On March 31st, 2010, the first 90 days of 2010 ended.

How were your first 90 days?

Many studies confirm a fact that most people know. After the first 90 days of a new year at the latest over 80 percent of people have “thrown” their New Year‘s resolutions “overboard” again. I‘m sure that you as an active reader don‘t belong to this group – nevertheless, please allow me to ask here what has become of your goals for 2010.

How often did cast a glance at your goals during the first 90 days of the New Year? How often did you check your own progress? Which of the goals you set have turned out to be “only achievable with difficulty” or “not interesting enough to pursue”?

My first coach always said to me:

“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in 5 or 10 years.”

If you think about this proposition for a moment, it appears completely logical and comprehensible – and precisely there lies the danger! People read this proposition just as they also read other thoughts and lessons and tell themselves: “That‘s really logical and isn‘t really anything new.” But what do you learn from this proposition or other similar propositions? Do you perhaps check off the proposition without absorbing and implementing the knowledge it contains?

Assume for a moment that you didn‘t check this proposition off. Then the question is posed what lessons and thus what actions can be deduced from it. And it was precisely this question that I was confronted with in discussion with my first coach.

What does this proposition mean and what effects does it have on your life?

The effects are even more far-reaching and it is these that we want to look at more closely today. Many people consider their goals as a definite unalterable fixed point in the future. Basically there is nothing to criticize in this approach; however, in practice it appears that as a result of this assumption most people quickly lose their desire for goals. Because when you set off on the road towards achieving a particular goal, you‘ll notice that at the beginning of your trip there were some points that you didn‘t know, couldn‘t guess or predict and also couldn‘t weigh up. And as a result of this changed information the road to the goal also changes.

You can compare this with a car journey from City A to City B: No matter how well you plan, there will be unforeseen events that you may encounter on the way. Things like other people‘s accidents, your own accidents, bad or good weather, construction sites or roadblocks, to name but a few. But what do we do if we‘re on the road and we‘re unable to keep to the route originally planned? Now, most people will seek a detour in order to reach their destination anyway. Only very few people would come up with the idea of simply turning back or possibly staying where they are in the middle of the journey and not moving anymore

And what do most people do as far as their goals are concerned?

Precisely for this reason the first 90 days are so important, because it is precisely in this period that you set off and create important new habits in order to be able to achieve a goal. My coach demonstrated that this first period is always the most important. Not for nothing do the media attribute particular importance to the first 100 days after a president, a chancellor or a prime minister takes office. You can make this knowledge particularly useful by learning to divide your year into such “90-day” segments. They help you to make a counter-check four times a year in order to see whether you‘re still “on the course” you wanted to take. But they also help you to check whether you still want to remain on the course you‘ve taken. This is important since many people set a goal very quickly without really understanding what consequences and results achieving this goal will have and what changes will occur in their lives as a result. Mostly people tend to set a goal for themselves because it‘s “in” or “fashionable” to set it or to strive for it. You don‘t believe me? Well then, just go into a store selling magazines and take a look at what ideal of the new spring/summer figure is being suggested to you there. Do you think the magazines would be full of diets if there weren‘t a large number of people following precisely this image?

Therefore it‘s important that you make their goals yours and never let them rule you. Goals should help you take a particular direction and move towards a fixed point if you consider it to be desirable. But they should also help you to check them – the goals – regularly and also to call them into question. Questions such as, for example: “Do I really want to achieve this goal?” or “Do I want to achieve this goal myself or who do I want to achieve it for?”

If you allow your goals to rule you, then you‘ll always act under duress and always react under pressure. Please understand me properly here: Some people require this pressure and other people require goals as a fixed point. But just a much as is the case when, while on the way from City A to City B, we sometimes have to change the route originally planned in order to react to particular circumstances, we‘ll first have to see and discover many things after we‘ve started out on the journey to our goal.

Let me clarify with two practical examples that have befallen me in my own life. At some stage or other I‘d noticed that I always become very creative, like to write and make plans with new ideas and projects. From this I formulated at that time my next goal: “I want to get a pilot‘s license some day.” So I formulated the exact point in time I wanted to achieve this by, planned the necessary intermediate steps up to this point and gathered all the information I needed to make exact plans for achieving this goal. Everything was thoroughly planned and prepared to the smallest detail. But then something completely unexpected happened.

In the framework of an outing by a company I was managing at the time all the employees received a sightseeing flight with helicopters over a beautiful landscape. For everybody it was incredible fun and the culmination of a successful beautiful day. They were smaller helicopters where you had the feeling that you were really flying freely. During one of the last flights I was sitting in the front on the right next to the pilot and we were flying over the chains of hills when the pilot suddenly asked me if I‘d like to take over the joystick for a moment and fly the helicopter. Full of enthusiasm I agreed and he explained to me in detail what I should look out for and what I should concentrate on. It was an indescribable experience to be in charge of the helicopter for a few moments and to feel it do everything my movements told it to do. When we had landed and I was running back to the hangar, it hit me like a thunderbolt: If I fly myself, then I‘ll have to concentrate on so many things that I‘ll have absolutely no time to be able to develop my thoughts freely and to work on projects and ideas and to allow my creativity free rein.

The whole goal I‘d set myself and thoroughly planned was called into question from one moment to the next. And now I ask you: What would you have done in my place?

Pursued the goal without question because in the final analysis you also have to achieve a goal once you‘ve set it, or at least try to achieve it? Or would you, on the basis of the new information I‘d received after starting on the road to achieving my goal, have completely dropped the goal?

It‘s precisely here that the burden of goals lies for many people. If the goal had dominated me, I‘d now have had to do everything to achieve this goal anyway, because after all in the final analysis I‘d set it for myself. But if this goal was my servant and was supposed to help me, then it was only consistent to drop this goal since it didn‘t fit in with what I really want to do.

Why should I rapidly climb up a ladder, only to discover when I get to the top that I‘ve leaned the ladder against the wrong wall? On the basis of this experience at that time I changed my goals. More on that later in this issue.

The second example isn‘t onvious at first glance but it‘s a good example of the “pressure” that goals sometimes impose on us. For many years I had the firm goal of working at least 10 to 12 hours a day seven days a week in order to be successful. Basically there‘s nothing objectionable about diligence and commitment and they‘ve certainly helped me in many areas of my life. But at some stage or other I asked myself a really “stupid” question about this. I asked myself: Why do I have to do this? Who says I have to do it? How did these questions come about? Well, at that time, as preparation for a project, I was reading biographies of many successful people. People who by their activities and actions had had an enduring influence on the development of humanity. Among them were inventors, scientists, researchers, writers, entrepreneurs, politicians, military commanders etc. While studying these people closely, I noticed quite quickly that all of them had in the course of their lives suffered from bodily or mental afflictions. Problems that kept them from “working” for 10 to 12 hours a day. But despite these limitations and the lives of in part considerable suffering they led, their achievements were outstanding. This prompted in me the question of what I‘d probably do if as a result of illness or an accident I were no longer as capable as I was used to being.

Through these new questions I began to consider quite consciously how I would probably react in such a situation. At first these were only vague ideas but in the course of time they became more and more concrete. Because I just couldn‘t get this idea out of my head of how it might, nevertheless, be possible to achieve the same or even better results with a fraction of the time I invested myself. As a result of this in the course of the years I developed a different way of working and another form of daily, monthly and annual routine.

Of course, I could have continued to work 10 to 12 hours a day my whole life long down to today. That would‘ve been consistent and “diligent.” But I changed my “working hours” (today I don‘t distinguish between working hours and leisure time – which doesn‘t mean that as a result of eliminating this distinction I work more than I did previously) and began to set myself a limit of 6 hours. Through many difficulties – some of them caused by health problems, others caused merely by emotional problems and yet others caused by economic problems – I‘ve tried to adhere to and implement this arrangement. And I‘ve been astonished by the results.

Now what do you learn from this for yourself? It‘s important to ask yourself helpful questions. Questions that enable you to break out of existing patterns of thought and behavior and to remember that it‘s only knowledge that‘s implemented that makes you really successful and not knowledge that you‘ve accumulated.

From the two examples above I‘ve drawn two important lessons which have an influence on my work and my activity every day:

1.) Subdivision of my goals into three categories

Since my experience with the helicopter I subdivide my goals into three categories: alpha, beta and gamma. Alpha-goals are goals that I have to or want to achieve. With these goals I‘m totally aware that I‘ll do everything humanly possible and impossible to achieve them. I‘m sparing when it comes to setting alpha-goals and in advance I consider very carefully and in detail whether I really want to achieve this. Per year I never set myself more than one alpha-goal (or very rarely two). Whenever I‘ve set myself an alpha-goal, I‘ve also achieved it. This is very important for building up your self-confidence and strengthening your own self-reliance. Therefore I always also consider precisely what the consequences of achieving this alpha-goal are.

Beta-goals are goals I aspire to and would like to achieve. With these goals I do what I can but I‘m totally aware that in the course of the period I won‘t achieve some goals or will also drop some of them. This is the main category of my goals. In this area many people tend to get annoyed about the number of goals not achieved instead of being happy about the number of goals achieved. That‘s a bit like a child who comes home with the school report and has the following grades: 2 grade As, 3 grade Bs, 3 grade Cs and 1 grade E – which grade will probably be discussed longest?

Gamma-goals are goals I don‘t want to lose sight of. They‘re important enough to me that I don‘t put them on my “sometime/somewhere” list, but they aren‘t so important that I‘ll tackle them first. Here I list all the things I can achieve in various periods if I should like to move in this direction. As a result I have a range of goals I can fall back on when, for example; I‘ve achieved all my beta-goals and there‘s enough time left in the year or when I abandon a beta-goal and would like to fill its place again with something else. However, gamma-goals also serve as a pool of ideas to inspire me and, if necessary, to create new beta-goals.

2.) How can I achieve that in just 2 hours a day?

This is a particularly provocative question that builds on the many considerations I thought about when I investigated the working hours of famous men and women in world history. Through a consciously limited time budget that I‘d like to fill with things to do with work, I‘m “forced” to consider creative possibilities of how I can accomplish a new project or a new undertaking in the shortest time possible. Here the basis is Pareto‘s idea that says that 80&% of results are achieved in 20% of the time. Now you can identify for the first time which 20% of your activities these are – but then you have two problems:

Problem No. 1: What do you do with the other 80% of the activities?

Problem No. 2: How do I now maximize this 20% of the activities on my time budget?

And it‘s precisely these two questions that cause many people to fail. Even if you find a further solution for the 80% of the activities, you‘re then faced with the question of how to properly fill the time that‘s been freed up. Here many people tend to argue that, if they now invest 4 times 2 hours, they‘ll then have an result that is 4 times higher or better. At first glance this is mathematically reasonable but daily practice proves that it‘s a fallacy. So not only are the results not 4 times better (often they‘re not even twice as good), but just the amount of work done increases. Because here Pareto come into effect again. And so many people tend not even to try reducing their work to this 20% since they wouldn‘t know what to fill the time with anyway. However, the desire for action isn‘t the highest level of behavioral change but its lowest level. The highest level of behavioral change is developing a new view of your own person (and thus also of your own work) – and to do that you need time.

So I ask myself with everything that I do or start anew (also when I work out and draw up my goals) how I can achieve this within a consciously limited time budget. These two lessons help me to avoid losing sight of the important things, to still enjoy my life and to make myself aware in advance that everything won‘t always work out according to plan and that I ought to consider the other possibilities that exist.

But what applies to you applies even more to your subordinates. In fact, this is true not just for the first 90 days of the New Year, but also precisely for the first 90 days in your business. What happens in these first 90 days? Do you have a precise plan for the first 90 days of each individual subordinate? Remember: For the first 90 days your new subordinate is on the first level of development and needs to be guided directly by you.

Now the first 90 days of the New Year are over. Consult your resolutions and goals at some point and consider again what your next 90 days ought to look like

Most cordially,

Your coach,

Nuno F. Assis