To Those of You Who Think Goal Setting is Overrated:

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Life, Techknow

I know a lot of people find goal setting to be overrated. It’s often a struggle for some people and teams to set goals. However, unpacking those challenges is extremely valuable. Why?

  • The challenges regularly unearth core misalignment within an organization
  • A common challenge is that “leadership” is just going to change their mind. Addressing that disenfranchisement is incredibly important.
  • Cross-team misalignment is also extremely common, and ignoring competing commitments is not a successful path forward.

Another side-effect of problematic goal-setting is to reduce the cadence at which goals are set. Some will set half annual goals, annual goals or even longer. A more frequent cadence allows teams and individuals to more easily adapt to change and adopt new findings. Yes, we can still have high level, company-wide annual goals as a company theme.

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Solving Complex Problems Without Reintroducing Solved Problems

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Design + Photography, Techknow

One of the toughest challenges in improving a process is understanding what challenges are solved by the current process. It’s really easy to see what might be working with a current approach, but it’s much more difficult to see the problems that are no longer occurring due to the existing process.

This is a common challenge with meetings. I’ve seen teams work together to create effective standing meetings, only to have a new exec decide standing meetings are bad and require they all be removed. All of the problems that were solved by those meetings became problems again and the entire company came to a halt for several weeks and slowly worked its way back to a semblance of productivity after a couple of months (through the returning of standing meetings.)

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Hiring Managers: Provide Feedback to Finalists You Don’t Hire. It’s The Least You Can Do.

Posted on by Forrest Corbett — Posted in Life, Techknow

Many companies aren’t willing to do this, but I spent some time this afternoon emailing candidates we didn’t hire. Since they made it through the final interviews, I wanted to give them specific feedback.

Designers often spend many hours preparing case studies, researching prospective employers and interviewing. At the end of it all when they’re not selected, the typical response is something like “we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates.” I get that this reduces risk and those canned responses reduce employer effort. However, people deserve better.

We were fortunate enough to have some incredibly great candidates. In the end, almost all of the feedback I could give was simply what they did well. It’s not that hard to give that kind of feedback. In some cases, I also gave some specific feedback which should help them on future interviews. Sure that might introduce some risk, but I would rather take a little risk being helpful to someone than simply turn a cold shoulder to someone with no explanation.