Introduction
Leading a small company with big dreams is exhilarating and fulfilling.
But, it's also exhausting, overwhelming, and frustrating — both for you as the founder and for your leadership team.
What Founders Feel
As a founder, you wish your team would get things done faster. You worry that people are getting sucked into work that doesn’t matter. You wish people would just see what needs to be done, take ownership, and do it. You owe them more coaching and guidance, but it's tough to find the time. Keeping everyone aligned with the latest priorities feels harder than it should be.
What Your Leaders Feel
Leadership teams feel swamped. There are so many strategic priorities that balancing them with daily tasks seems impossible. Bigger picture objectives are too vague to help in decision making. Timelines don’t feel realistic. The founder’s frustration about things moving slowly is demoralizing. The leadership team wants to achieve big things, but they aren’t set up to succeed.
Goals To the Rescue...Right?
Everyone believes that goals keep teams aligned and focused and happy. This belief is supported by extensive research into goals over the last 100 years.
Still, many founders don’t get around to setting them. Or, they have some goals in their mind, but don’t write them down. Or they write them down, but they don’t end up driving meaningful action.
It turns out that goals are hard to do well.
Hence the explosion of goal setting acronyms like OKR and SMART. There’s also MBO, BHAG, HARD, CLEAR, WOOP, PURE, and many more! These frameworks all help people set better goals.
But despite all this confidence that goals help us achieve big things and all this guidance on how to set them correctly, goals are not living up to their promise. The reality on the ground isn’t pretty.
Many founders and leadership teams ultimately experience goals as a negative force. They’re excited at first to have more clarity, but end up disillusioned because they don’t deliver on the promised benefits.
Key projects still drag on forever. Accountability is still low. More and more goals get added because “everything’s a priority”. The team still struggles to stay aligned. Everyone’s still stressed. And, in the end, most goals aren’t achieved by their due date.
People become defensive, discouraged, or cynical.
In theory, people still believe that goals are important. But in practice, they aren’t working.
It turns out that goals are not enough. You need something more.
Goal Execution Habits
Over the last 15 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of leaders who have achieved more than 37,000 goals. I’ve spent thousands of hours in the trenches consulting ambitious companies on their goal program. I’ve observed failures and successes, frustrations and breakthroughs, setbacks and achievements. Nine client companies have been acquired.
Through all this, I observed something crucial: setting clear goals is only half the battle. The other half is adopting the right habits.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear wisely observes, "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."
Goals alone are powerless without a habitualized system of execution.
This handbook is for founders who want to equip their leadership teams with the goal execution habits that work in the trenches. No fluff. No fables. Just battle tested recommendations for how to get your goals done, even though you’re busy.
