Do Rallying Cries Work?
In last week’s Muse, I talked about how establishing clarity through rigorous goal setting can help improve morale and engagement in your business. Today, I’d like to address a common component of the goals rollout process and recommend caution in its use. Specifically, I’m referring to the rallying cry.
“Innovate to Scale!” “Invest to Grow!” “Operational Excellence!” These are hypothetical samplings of corporate rallying cries that typically accompany the rollout of new goals and initiatives as the calendar turns from the previous year into the new year. These statements are meant to convey optimism, create excitement for the future, and encapsulate the upcoming year’s objectives into a single pithy statement. To state the obvious, rallying cries are designed to get teams rallied around a common goal or theme.
When these statements tightly align with well-crafted high level goals and/or a substantive organizational pivot, I’ve seen them work well in doing their intended job of building and maintaining excitement for a change in organizational direction. However, I’ve also seen them fall flat, create confusion, and even drive team dissatisfaction. To explain how rallying cries can go wrong, let’s take a brief step back into an important part of goal setting that we didn’t get to last week—the after action review and analysis of goal attainment.
Many times, goals are set with the best of intentions and there is an elaborate new year kickoff of new initiatives. After this initial flurry of activity, everyone settles back into their routines and the status quo takes over during the doldrums of the first quarter. It’s likely that goals from last year were not fully achieved, and teams are still scrambling to complete the goals that were “carried over.” Excitement fades and it’s back to business as usual.
The front-line team members who are responsible for keeping the wheels on the bus begin to lament about how they’re going to make the time to work on all these fancy new initiatives when last year’s goals never got completed. “How do you expect me to do new things when we didn’t even accomplish what we set out to do last year?” Front-line and middle managers are literally stuck in the middle—encouraging their teams to pull double duty finishing last year’s to-do list and preparing them to shift gears to accommodate new workflows and to learn new skills.
The point I’m driving at is that while you as a leader may do just fine with the ambiguity of unfinished goals—simultaneously cleaning up last year’s mess and rolling out shiny new initiatives, many of your people detest loose ends, unfinished business, and incomplete goals. To protect against these negative effects of the goal setting process, make sure that you build time into the annual calendar for proper after action reviews and goal attainment conversations to provide teams with a sense of closure and the organizational permission to move on to the “what’s next” if goals were not fully completed.
Also, be sure to recognize the emotional attachment that certain teams may have for legacy initiatives that are no longer integral to organizational success. Be transparent and answer the why behind the decision to either leave loose ends or abandon previous initiatives.
So back to the rallying cry. It’s likely that HR and/or internal marketing has created all manner of flashy graphics where the rallying cry serves as the headline. If you and your leadership team have not closed the book on the previous year and haven’t provided clear rationale for new goals and a shift in direction, every time a team member who’s still cleaning up last year’s overflow sees the rallying cry, their eyes will roll into the back of their head and they’ll mutter something like “yea right, that’s never going to happen!”
My advice—be realistic. Don’t try to fit ten pounds of stuff into a five pound sack. Be judicious with the use of rallying cries. They should be reserved for large organizational pivots. Folks tune out when corporate messaging gets too jargony and is clearly out of step with the reality of what’s really happening on the proverbial, or actual, factory floor.
