Mastering Company Rocks: Essential Tips for Self-Implementing Teams

What's up, guys? In this episode, we're going to help you level up your rocks if you use that goal setting framework. This is specifically for companies that are self implementing systems like the entrepreneurial operating system. Pinnacle uses fast rocks. There's several other systems that also use rocks. I'm not affiliated with any of these guys. None of them pay me. I'm giving you the perspectives I have from rolling out goal setting systems at work for for more than 70,000 people over the decades I've been doing this and all the different approaches I've been able to see, experiment with and iterate on. One thing I've seen again and again is this is a superpower for you, for your teams, for your entire company. When you develop this skill and get it right, if you do it wrong, especially when you're trying to roll out some kind of process improvement or new system like the entrepreneurial operating system, you can lose momentum from people who could truly become a players very quickly if they just leveled up their skills a little bit. So we want you guys to get that momentum, get things done and grow profitably. That's what we're all about here at Result Maps. I'm Scott. I'm the CEO and founder of Result Maps and we bring you these videos every single week. So make sure that you hit the subscribe button so you'll be notified and go ahead and hit that like button if this is useful to you. If you stick around to the end, we've got a free bonus for you. Dive into those mistakes. The first one is wish lists. When people go to set goals of any kind, but in particular I see this with rocks. They end up with three and then five and then 12, and suddenly you don't have a set of priorities anymore. You have a wish list. Now, the entire concept of a rock comes from a talk that Stephen Covey gave. We can link to that later. The point I want you to understand is that a rock is there to become your most important priority. That one thing that is incredibly important, and the idea behind the whole rocks metaphor, is if you were trying to get the big thing, the rock, along with the little things like sand and pebbles, into a jar, and that jar represents all the time you have, you're going to be able to fit it all in if you start with the big rock first. But if you try to put all the little things in first and you focus there first, that big thing will never fit in and most of the other things won't fit in either. What that means though is we have to make decisions about what is most important and we have to choose what is most important. Don't create a wish list of rocks. You can work using some of the exercises. We have to distill a rock that is really powerful, really results oriented, and we'll talk about more of that in a minute. If you really want to be great at setting rocks, limit yourself to 1, at most 2. Resist the urge to get that third one. Resist that urge so that you can focus on aligning milestones to that small number of high priority rocks and, and you can align everyone's work directly to those rocks. That brings me to the next mistake, which is cascades. Oh, dear heaven. When I see a cascade of rocks or objectives, I know failure rate is going to be high. It is incredibly difficult to have cascading plans that work. These are based on a planning methodology from the 1920s that was purely for financial planning. And it was evolved at a time at this point 100 years ago where the world just changed far more slowly and was also evolved for a physical model. So if you're in a knowledge based work environment, something where you're on computers and technology impacts you, it's a little bit different time. And I could go into all the different ways this has been proven to be a fallacy. It is a great project planning approach when you have to budget a physical output like a building or a rocket ship or for road. But if you're working in any sort of digital medium or where there's a technology element involved, these cascades typically don't work. That's why the whole agile methodology set came out. And even in agile, people still fall into this trap far too much. So don't try to cascade your rocks. We can talk about what to do instead. We've got another video on that, so get on our list and we can send you those tips. Another tip, kind of controversial, is that size matters. Size really matters when you are building out your rocks. In this case, the size I'm talking about is the size of uncertainty in your marketplace. And that can come from being in a lot of geopolitical uncertainty, technological uncertainty. We can check both of those boxes here at this point in time as I'm recording. And then in particular, if you're an earlier stage company and you're lower on the growth curve, you're, you're more susceptible to changes. And so uncertainty really impacts you. And when that's the case, it's very important to understand that you set your rocks differently than you would if you were an established company in an established market with less uncertainty. The next mistake I see is that people will get lost in the acronym of smart when it comes to rocks. Now if you're not familiar with smart, specific, measurable, attainable, slash, achievable, depending on who you ask, realistic and time bound. And you see different derivations of that. This is like a, at this point, 30, at least a 30 year old concept. So I've seen this one since the 90s or at least the early 2000s. It's an old concept. It's where I'm going. And the idea was to really try to make any goal you set something that you can measure success on. However, you can get lost in the specific and attainable or actionable. Like all that stuff is very subjective. I would go with mat right, measurable, aligned and time bound. And when you're setting rocks on a quarterly cadence, a lot of the folks we work with benefit from just saying by the end of this quarter we shall have this achieved. You don't have to overthink when in the quarter, if you're setting 90 day rocks, then by the next 90 days this shall be done. And you don't have to overthink that part of it. So just keeping it simple this way where it's measurable and then it's aligned with your bigger goals. So if you're running EOS, those are one year goals, whatever system you use, you want your 90 day targets that are represented by your rocks in support of your one year goals. Right? Got it. We'll move on. When people do get caught up in the smart situation, they often ignore the customer to cash journey. And a business is really about optimizing that journey so that if a dollar goes into one end of your machine, $2 or $10 or whatever it is comes out of the other end. And the way that machine works is you have also have customers that moving through a journey that results in you keeping a dollar after you've distributed that cash. That's the oversimplified way of how it works. However, it's really not too much oversimplified. You can represent that journey usually with six to 12 boxes on a page. And we have an exercise for that. Again, let us know if you'd like to get it. Just add a link in the comments or add a comment below. We'll get that to you. But the idea here is if you're not setting rocks around improving that flow through the machine, you're. You're likely not working on the things that are Going to move the needle for your business. You're not enabling profitable growth. It's very important to know how any rock you set connects to that journey. Now, this next item is related and it's. We're not using the word no enough. If you set your rock correctly, you will have to say no quite a lot, because many, many things are going to come up that keep you from focusing on achieving that rock. So. So if you're not able to say no because of that rock, if it's not well supported by everyone and set up in a way that it becomes easy for you to say no, I've got to work on this rock. I have. Or we have. More specifically, if you haven't set it up so we have this rock, this is important for our business. And you can't say no, that's a mistake. The F word is a big word when it comes to rocks. I've already told you, size matters. I'm also going to tell you how important the F word is. Size matters. And the F word is important. By F word I mean failure. Failure is a word that you need to have built in, and it needs to be acceptable within some boundaries. And if you look at the rocks, I'm talking about setting. When you're facing a high level of uncertainty, there can be failures along the way. So long as you hit the major milestones and achieve the rock. And you've got to recognize that that's going to happen. Which is one reason why having the cascades is a bad thing. It gets in the way of that, because when you create a cascade of different rocks, you're saying, I know exactly how this will fit together. And if you're wrong, which there's every likelihood you can be, whenever we talk about predicting the future, you're not going to have enough clarity of direction to recover. And the whole quarter becomes a failure because of one break in that causal link in your beautifully architected cascade. So having F words built in where people can fail and they have safe zones in which they can fail. Great book on this. The. The Other F word, I think it's called. Mark Cooper Smith, a great former CEO and teacher at Berkeley, who, who I've gotten to come work with a little. He's got a great book on how important that is. But make sure your rocks build this in. So the last big mistake when you have all these things in place is you've got to put these things together with a rhythm. Now, if you've gone all the way in on an implementation of a business operating system. Virtually everyone has some sort of weekly rhythm where you're checking in on these things. When you're self implementing, I see a lot of people skip this step. You have to have that weekly checkpoint. It's gotta be on the calendar. Even if there's just two of you there, you've got to have that weekly checkpoint to see how you're doing. And when you have that weekly checkpoint, good things happen. But when you don't have that weekly checkpoint, you're probably only going to end up checking on your rock a couple of times and worst case, four times a year as you reset them and realize whether you got them. Keep them front and center every week, week in, week out, and you'll see better results. So there you go guys. Now as I mentioned, we have a free bonus for you guys for sticking around. You'll find a link in the description to a page where you can sign up to get our free AI Powered rock template that will give you all of these principles plus the best of what we've learned from helping so many different companies, entrepreneurs, founders crush their rocks and achieve profitable. All you need to do is click the link below. Now if this was helpful, please like and subscribe. It means the world to our team and myself. Make sure that whatever approach you take, whatever operating system you're using, whether you've got a professional implementer, you're using a business coach, whatever the case is, take your goal setting and goal achievement discipline seriously. It is the foundation of great execution and it's the way that you can be of most service to the world. So get out there, crush your rocks and we'll see you next time.