Business Insight Zone

What’s the score?

Part of the reason sports are so appealing to so many people is that they provide us an island of certainty in the sea of uncertainty that we call life. When the game is over, you know who won because someone scored more points, won more sets, took fewer strokes, or scored more runs. Simple.

Everyday life, by stark contrast, often lacks such moments of clarity. If you sell for a living, maybe you know you’ve won when you hit your quote for the month or the quarter. Or you’ll know you’ve won when you land the big contract, complete the merger, close the books for the year. But what about all the other projects we engage in? The ones that get bogged down? The ones that generate interminable meetings and unseemly finger-pointing?

What we need is some kind of measure for success, even when success can’t be put into numbers. We need to know what we’re going after, what the goal is.

Seems simple, eh? But consider how many times you (or your department, or your company) have traveled a long way down a particular path, only to realize that you had wasted too much time on things that didn’t help you attain the goal. Or, worse, you traveled a long way down the path before coming to grips with the fact that you didn’t know what the goal was, either because it wasn’t set out clearly in the first place, or because the press of daily affairs made you lose sight of it along the way.

So take a look around you today: What’s lagging? What seems to be off course? What e-mail has been sitting unanswered in your inbox because you’re not clear about what the successful outcome will look like? What’s been sitting in your “Pending” file the longest?

If you need to, hash things out with your peers, your reports, your bosses. But above all, get clear on what it is you’re trying to do, and how you’ll know when you’ve reached the target.

How will you know when YOU’ve won?

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Previously in this vein:

• The power of naive questions.

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(Photo by AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker.)