My regular readers know I am a big fan of Stephen Covey and his very famous 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The world is far less familiar with what I think is his real masterpiece – The 8th Habit, from Effectiveness to Greatness. The 8th habit is finding your voice and helping others find theirs. This column is about graduating to the 8th habit, which I argue requires us to advance from traditional goals to grand vision.

 We have spent countless articles on the subject of goals. After all, how do you get where you’re going if you don’t know where you want to go? How do you know if you are on the right track along the way? How do you get others to follow you or help you get there? You cannot get a bank loan without a business plan, all business startup training begins with the goal question, your trainer at the gym starts by asking about your goals, your physician talks about your health goals and even the law of attraction books tell you to be very specific in setting goals.  This article is for people who have achieved some successes and have mastered the ability to set a goal, stick to it, and repeatedly produce predictable outcomes. If that sounds like you, by all means, read on.

What if goals are really getting in your way?!  In the immortal words of Scooby Doo “ruh-roh”!  Thanks to goal-setting, I started with nothing and now have everything I want. Also thanks to goal-setting, I have held myself back from far bigger accomplishments.

I have the great fortune of being exactly where I want to be in life. Goals are future oriented, so if I ask myself if I am the perfect me for the future, I admit that who and what I am today, will not be who and what I want to be tomorrow. This is why we have goals.

If we commit to a specific, time-bound goal, as we are rightly taught to do in business, are we closing off the possibilities of even better outcomes?  Are we so committed to what our ego wants that we cannot grow to accept the good fortune that is all around us? We set the goal based on what we knew at the time, and if we are constantly learning along the way, we are no longer the person we were when we set the goals in the first place. It is as if we are committed to someone else’s goal. After achieving a few goals, we learn there is no such thing as success or failure, only feedback. How do we benefit from the feedback if we are not flexible in our paths? How flexible should we be to not become wishy-washy?

If this sounds like you, I suggest it may be time to move beyond goals; let us move on to vision. In creating a vision, we imagine a bigger picture that is more philosophical in nature, more general in description, yet still very specific in the areas that matter most. The areas that matter however, are not driven by the ego, as they often are in goal-setting. They are not driven for extrinsic rewards, societal norms and pressures, or old definitions of what we thought success would look like. Visions are driven by our own highest vision of ourselves. We create visions of contribution and service, based on principles. We commit to the principles and intended outcomes, instead of committing to the specific step-by-step goals along the path.  By this point in our journey, we know what we are willing to do, what we are not willing to do, what parameters are strict rules and which are general guidelines in our life. You have the
resources to graduate from effectiveness to greatness. External greatness might be considered simply a higher level of effectiveness.  Someone becomes great at what he or she does, because they operate at a very high level of
effectiveness. Effectiveness and greatness are as different as goals and visions. To me, goals, as we usually talk about them anyway, are about what we want for ourselves, celebrating our uniqueness and what separates us from
others. Visions are about what we want for others, celebrating our commonality, community and what joins us as the same. 
 
Vision may inspire us to change what we do, but mostly, it is about changing our intentions, changing why we do what we do. Our human desire for meaning and achievement comes together for a higher purpose.  Effectiveness requires goals. Greatness requires vision. Vision is harder to create than goals, because of the fear of not knowing how it will ever become reality. However, when you are ready to graduate to vision, it reveals itself and becomes easy, because you know that strategy does not present itself until after you have a clear vision. One must let go of the how. Vision precedes strategy.  People who do not believe this will easily prove themselves to be correct. People who do believe this, will also easily prove themselves correct. When the vision is clear and in alignment with your purpose, a strategy always presents itself.  Greatness requires courage and confidence to let go of goals and expected outcomes on which we have built our previous success. This is far too frightening and risky for most people. The journey to internal greatness will require great faith that the path will continue to present itself as we forge ahead through the fog. Let us put on our headlamps, go into the fog and see what we can do.

In our last column, we discussed the death of carrot and stick motivation. If you missed it, see previous blog below. If old-fashioned reward and punishment don’t work, what is an employer to do?  For that matter, what is an employee to do, to motivate themselves if they work for an employer who is less than enlightened?

I thought you would never ask. Like most things that should be simple, this seems complicated. Also like most things, it is simple once we understand it. Oliver Wendell Holmes might call it the “simplicity on the far side of complexity”.  Most of us cannot figure out what we really want ourselves, much less figure out what other people want. Let’s step back a moment and think about the relationship between employer and employee.

The employer creates a job to produce an outcome to meet the needs of customers. Payroll must always be less than the income they produce, so the company can use the difference to pay overhead and produce some reasonable profit. Fortunately, for both the employee and the employer, once the employee makes a livable wage, money is far from what makes people happy. According to Martin Seligman, Ph.D., professor of psychology at University of PA, five core areas of the human experience allow people to flourish. Flourish is the name of his latest book, a dramatic expansion on his previous study on authentic happiness. Seligman helps us remember the five “pillars” of flourish with the acronym P.E.R.M.A. P for positive emotions, E for engagement, R for relationships, M for meaning and A for achievement. It is simple for an employer to consider what they could contribute to each of these areas in an employee’s life. For example, does the workplace culture focus on what is working and how to do more of that? Does it ask what can we do? Or, does it focus on what goes wrong and what we cannot do? Successful companies and  relationships use more positive language than negative language.   

Engagement is a hot topic relating to employee productivity, and it means more than carrots and sticks to train them
like circus performers. The more we can utilize our natural gifts and strengths, the happier and more successful we will be. Let us not ask the super-creative, outgoing people to do assembly work while the detail-oriented analytic does the art work. I ask everyone to take a simple, free and confidential, twenty minute test online to help identify their top 5 character strengths. Go to www.authentichappiness.org and take the VIA Character Strengths Survey. If you are not using your top strengths now, bring those strengths into any or all aspects of your life and great positive change will come your way. If you are an employer, have the courage to ask your employees to take this test!

Does the boss sit down for a coffee with staff on a regular basis for informal conversations? Is the boss afraid of
learning something or losing status? Does the staff go out for a beer after work occasionally? No, I am not promoting beer specifically; it is just an example of common social gatherings that might indicate positive relationships between
co-workers.

There is meaning in all work. Finding it is harder at some jobs than at others. It helps if every employee understands the idea and company goals behind the work. It helps if the employee has personal goals that their job helps them achieve. Does this sound like your company?

Finally, we value achievement. Most of us do not go home and feel like we had a great day because we got away with doing nothing. Even lazy, unmotivated workers who seem to do as little as possible do not feel good about their work. Yes, it is the employees’ responsibility to motivate themselves to engage and achieve. It is also the employers’ job to find, keep and develop motivated, engaged employees. While we talk about where responsibility lies, we must all accept the responsibility, and that includes helping others become what they can.  
 
My regular readers have also heard me quote Daniel Pink, who, in his book Drive, which explains the gap between what science knows and what business does, says the three things that matter most to people who do creative work are autonomy, mastery and purpose. By creative work, we mean any work that requires cognitive skill. Nearly all there work has been (or soon will be) replaced by machines or outsourced. Any employer should consider how they might, at least to some degree, be able to give employees more autonomy, achieve some level of mastery and find some meaning in their work.

There is a great deal of overlap between the positive psychology experts, the business experts, the self-help gurus and spiritual leaders. The only place the message seems to be lost is at work. Why is the workplace so easy to be cynical, selfish, greedy and unhappy when it is, by design, a place to be creative, productive, giving and happy? Unhappy people either come to work with their personal unhappiness and share it at work, or they go home unhappy and share it with their family. Neither is acceptable and the workplace can help improve both.

It’s always a good time to start or shift our journey in a positive direction, why not use the start of a new year as our
excuse for doing something really positive at work?