Answers to Questions from LinkedIn

I am looking for an academic definition of GOAL-SETTING.

1. They need to make something specific easier to understand, clarify it, AND open this specific thing to experimental manipulation of some kind. So, for instance, when at EvolvingSuccess we define "corporate culture" to be "the entire catalog of habitual behaviors through which an organization conducts its business," we have a relatively objective definition that gives us something to measure, i.e., business and workplace behaviors.

2. The definition has to be useful enough that a substantial part of the community needing the definition uses it IN THE SAME WAY. I have been reading a lot of papers lately, particularly in the evolving systems and the complex systems communities where writers are using the same terms in their work, but are obviously not using the same meanings. In fact, most of their diatribes against one another have to do with the other guy's "mis-understanding" of the meaning of the word. In fact, no one is mis-understanding anything: they are all operating with their individual definitions, and not coming to a consensus that will let them work together on the issues of study.

I offer you these thoughts because definitions are so important, not because I have specific information on "goal-setting" itself. These kinds of definitions don't come from God, or even worse, Plato. New definitions come out of a need to clarify something that's not received careful, systematic consideration before.

UNLESS...the term was coined by a marketer doing "business-speak" in an attempt to build a perception of expertise, frequently in the consulting industry. These marketeering terms (and I am not trying to be too cynical here) are designed to sound imposing (implying special knowledge on the part of the marketer not available to the rest of the world) while delivering little concrete meaning (thereby avoiding anything measurable AS WELL AS avoiding anything resembling a promise to deliver). Over time, a decade's worth of marketing terms delivered as if they were real business terms representing measurable, objective business processes creates a business vocabulary with little objective meaning. This is a vocabulary which creates confusion within a business that might not have the intellectual capacity to see through the difference between definitions designed to help an organization build operational value, and definitions that are designed only to sell an idea (usually the idea being "we're smarter than the other guys...trust us and our big, difficult-to-understand words").

All that being said...

What do YOU think "the motivational impact of being involved in setting performance goals for the work role an individual occupies," means?

I think...

"motivation impact" means "motivational impact." You could perhaps use "goal-setting" in a communal sense to achieve buy in, but goal-setting is a planning tool (I think) as opposed to a motivational tool.

I think...

"being involved in setting performance goals" means "being involved..." You can BE INVOLVED IN goal-setting, but you haven't said what goal-setting is just because someone can be involved in it.

Suppose right now you and I actually attempt to create a metrics-based definition that the rest of the OD community might buy into. Suppose...

Goal-setting: A process for determining the priority of accomplishing a specific task by a specific time. Such a process could be used by an individual, or by a group, to plan the completion of a single task, or to map out the relationship and timeline of a set of related tasks to accomplish more complex outcomes.

What is the role of corporate culture and leadership in creating empowered organizations?

The person occupying the position "at the top" of the organization is usually the person who shapes the corporate culture. If that individual bases their personal operations in a more or less emotion-driven competitive mode, then the corporate culture will also likely generate a lot of competitive behavior within the ranks. There is usually little actual design work needed from the person at the top to obtain an internally competitive culture in an organization.

If the person "at the top" tends toward a solution-seeking, collaborative approach in his or her personal style, they will likely want to spread collaborative habits throughout the organization. This, however, will require a quite a bit of culture design, or what we at EvolvingSuccess call corporate culture architecture, to accomplish. Corporate culture itself is best understood (we have found) as the system of habitual behaviors in actual operation within an organization. This behavior-based definition makes measuring things like individual performance as well as cultural change much more easy (though it still isn't simple).

For a practical manual melding leadership, systems-level thinking, and corporate culture architecture, pick up our book "Optimizing Luck" (Meylan and Teays, Davies-Black Pub., 2007). We also have two papers published in the Quarterly Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences on understanding the interactions between leaders and other individuals in the formation of corporate culture.

Any good change management books/resources to recommend?

Leading change effectively - Personality or Process?

The book describes the inter-relationships between leadership, process definition, and corporate culture engineering to optimize you and your organization's ability to respond effectively to any change of circumstances, good or bad. This makes "change management" as it is usually discussed obsolete, because your organization becomes used to the shifting and adjusting it takes to become a top player in a market segment or industry sector.

Which are more difficult to find... great leaders or great followers?

In some group settings, though, collaboration becomes a significant group habit. In a collaborative group everyone contributes what they can. The person best equipped to coordinate those contributions is a leader. An alpha climber wants a group full of blind followers. A leader rises naturally out of a group of collaborative contributors.

The most powerful leaders understand this two-sided aspect of human nature and can optimize performance by balancing competive tendencies with collaborative ideals. For details see the PDF linked to this answer.

The Inner Game: P=p-i. Performance = potential-interference. What do you think? How how do you make work work for U?

Our research shows that at an information processing systems level, the mind is the product of no less than four separate information processing systems. While, via evolution, they are all trying to help you avoid or eliminate pain, they all go about it in vastly different ways. This creates the potential for MUCH internal conflict in the mind (interference)...and I'm sure we've all experienced some of that!

I don't know if this maps to what Tim Gallwey means, but here goes. Potential is created out of patterns which succeeded for us in the past (and if they didn't get us killed, patterns that didn't work). Some of these patterns come from biologically-rooted instincts and some through our experiences (including systematic education). Our mind (what we call "inner dialog" at EvolvingSUCCESS) collates these patterns for us based on present circumstances. Greater potential is produced if we can also extrapolate from our collated experience to create a new approach for succeeding in what ever new circumstances we encounter.

Interference (noise, chatter, distractions, whatever) also comes from a number of our internal systems, and is added to whatever external distraction is present. Any chemical imbalance in the blood, the brain, as well as sensory perceptions create interference. Interference is also often created because our inner dialog CAN"T collate our experience well...especially if our present conditions are colliding badly with our past experiences AND the current state of our body (hunger, fear, etc).

That's a lot to manage, and get it to fit into P=p-i. No suggestions on simplifications at this point. See the link to the research if interested in further ideas.

Two Questions: "What is Leadership?" and "Leadership and Human Nature..."

"Leading" is the collaborative strategy analog to the competitive strategy of "Alpha Climbing." A group is involved in both strategies. An Alpha Climber will consume the value delivered by the group in order to satisfy his/her drives. A Leader will coordinate the group in order to create greater levels of drive-satisfying value for all involved (including, of course, the Leader).

This model of Leadership allows us at EvolvingSUCCESS to relate all drive satisfaction actions in an organization to the way a corporate culture forms. For details, please download a copy of our research (on Drive Satisfaction Strategies).

How important is a good communication strategy to employee "engagement"?

The most commonly practiced communication strategy in any group or organization is identified by its effect: emotional manipulation. This is a natural outgrowth of our pre-historic, primate roots...we're simply wired both to do it and accept it. And things can be accomplished under this mode because we all attempt to avoid the discomfort of negative emotional manipulation. Instead of using high-information content that could lead to the formation of useful instructions, the communicator uses various forms of pain and threat to direct group activities on the basis of what is not liked, not approved of, or otherwise did NOT work to satisfaction.

By contrast, instruction-rich groups build their instruction sets (such as highly efficient methods and procedures) from a densely filled information network. In the prototypical model for the delivery of information to the network (that is, the network used by the group) one finds the greatest information resources migrating toward leadership and clustering around the person best able to focus that information into action.

We're a long way from fleshing all of this out. We have an extensive list of short MP3 programs out on our work on instructionless groups. We're pretty hard on alpha climbers and emotional manipulation in these programs. We're still working on the instruction-rich side of this. If interested they're located at http://evolvingsuccess.com/WorkingTOGETHER.htm in Unit 7, 2. SUB-UNIT : Moving Way Beyond Instructionless Teams. There are about 10 short programs available for download on this topic there.

What are top-managers doing to gather valuable, reliable information and to convert it into foundations of future business diagnosis, business strategy, and business decisions?

My co-author and I expand on this idea in our book "Optimizing Luck." The information gathered in the field (as well as supplemented by other media) also guides top managers in areas of hiring, delegation, and business system engineering.

Purpose of life? How many of us really have it?

One discipline to keep your head out of trouble-creating modes is to define and construct your OWN purpose for life. People often find fulfillment in creating personal missions to serve other people. This type of discipline helps an individual in a number of ways:

1. It reduces or eliminates the effect of personal expectations on your own mental state.

2. It keeps your mind busy working on solutions on behalf of other people.

3. It forces a certain level of social engagement that creates additional mental health benefits for the person on the mission, or with the self-constructed purpose.

There can certainly be other purposes you define for yourself. The main point is that defining your own purpose in life might be the best form of taking responsibility for yourself. If you define and construct your personal purpose in life, or for life, or however you want to phrase it, you remove yourself from being a burden on others, and, quite likely, a burden to yourself.

How to Build Successful Teams in the Midst of a Transition?

Then there are some organizations (not many) which are innovative at the cultural level. They are either in a mode of constant evolution, or in a mode of very frequent transition. Transition is the nature of work life. People were hired with the required dispositions to optimize opportunities as they present themselves.

This suggests that if you're asking about team building "in the midst of transition," that the organization was put together without acknowledging the realities of constant marketplace evolution. That would be indicative of short-sighted or otherwise inadequately skilled leadership.

Now, given that most organizations ARE put together by fairly short-sighted leadership, we still have to be able to offer solutions for this situation. If there's a transition in the organization's future, then team building needs to start as soon as that glimmer appears. This makes sense for a large number of reasons, not the least of which is the great amount of information the "whole" team holds and the greater number of potential problems solvers that can be applied to the upcoming transition.

In other words, make a break from organizational tradition and pull the widest possible segment of the organization's population into upcoming developments as early as possible. That's where you need the team applied anyway, right?