24. Keep Asking Yourself:
25
How realistic are the plans?
Is anything harder or taking
longer than expected?
Are there steps that the team
didn’t plan for?
27. For Discussion
28
• Are you leading or participating in
a team that is struggling to meet an
important goal?
• How would you break it down into
concrete subgoals?
• What specific next steps and
responsibilities need to be addressed?
• What would your if / then statement
look like?
• How will you ensure that you regularly
revisit and update your if / then plan?
For Discussion
For Discussion
28. 29
Read the full article, originally published in the
May 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review:
“Get Your Team to Do What It Says It’s
Going to Do.”
Heidi Grant is the associate director of
Columbia Business School’s Motivation Science
Center and the author of Nine Things
Successful People Do Differently (Harvard
Business Review Press, 2011).
About This Article
29. 30
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Editor's Notes
Today we’re going to talk about if / then planning on teams, the topic of this HBR article by social psychologist Heidi Grant.
If / then planning has been proven to help individuals stick to their goals.
New research suggests that it is also an effective tool for sharpening a team’s focus and helping members get things done.
Note to presenter: At the end of this deck, you’ll find information about an online tool that allows you to create if / then plans individually or as a team.
Whether we’re trying to finish projects at work, save for retirement, or lose weight, researchers have found that we follow through on our commitments only about 50% of the time.
And that estimate is optimistic.
Even when we truly want and intend to achieve a goal, somehow it still doesn’t happen.
Why do we so often fail to achieve our goals?
For lots of reasons, actually.
We miss opportunities to act because we’re just too busy.
We lose confidence, so we push projects onto the back burner.
And we allow competing goals, motivations, or temptations to interfere.
The problem multiplies when people come together to work on teams.
As individuals struggle to execute, group performance suffers.
See if this scenario sounds familiar:
You’re in the early stages of budget planning for your department.
Your team meets to set priorities and think about resource allocation for the next fiscal year.
You plan to reconvene in a week.
But when you meet again, you find that very little progress has been made.
What’s the holdup?
Chances are, people aren’t clear on next steps or who is responsible for what.
The team’s goal—to develop an operating budget—may seem straightforward, but it leaves out essential details, raising more questions than it answers.
For instance, what data does the team need?
Who will run the reports, and when?
Luckily, there is a solution.
A simple technique, called if / then planning, can help individuals and teams close the gap between intention and action.
By using this tool first to clearly express your group’s goals and then to create a trigger for execution, you can significantly improve follow through on commitments.
Research reveals the power of if / then planning, both at work and in our personal lives.
In one study, participants who created if / then plans submitted weekly reports 6.5 hours earlier, on average, than nonplanners.
The power of if / then plans is that they work in concert with our neurological wiring.
They create a link in our brains between a certain situation or cue— “If X happens”—and the behavior that should follow—“then I will do Y.”
Phrasing your goals in this way establishes powerful triggers for action.
How does this work in the real world?
Suppose your employees routinely forget to submit weekly progress reports.
They’re busy, and they just don’t get around to it.
Ask each of them to make an if / then plan: “If it’s 2 PM on Friday, then I will e-mail Susan my report.”
Now the cue “2 PM on Friday” is directly wired in your employees’ brains to the action “e-mail my report to Susan.”
Your employees unconsciously start to look for the cue, even when they’re busy doing other things.
When the clock hits 2 on Friday afternoon, their hands automatically reach for the keyboard.
So how do you harness the power of if / then statements to translate intention into a detailed plan for action?
It involves 4 steps.
The first is to establish a high-level goal that your team or organization wants to tackle.
Although this is an important part of the process, all too often, teams stop here and expect results.
Let’s go back to our budgeting example.
You’ll recall that the team had established its goal—to develop next year’s operating budget—but very little progress was being made.
That goal is just too vague.
Teams often use sweeping, abstract language to set goals but fail to work out how they will produce results.
Step 2 is about breaking down the overarching goal into manageable chunks, or subgoals.
You can’t assume that everyone on the budgeting team will know how to move from concept to execution, so you need to spell out the specifics of getting the work done.
The team needs to collect data, consult with managers, and assess priorities so that it can decide what trade-offs to make.
By clearly defining specific subgoals team members get a clear picture of what’s involved in achieving the goal.
Once the subgoals have been established, the next step is to fill in the details.
For each subgoal, teams need to identify the specific actions required, who will carry them out, and when.
Let’s look at just one of the budgeting team’s subgoals: collecting data.
The team outlines the specific action item for that subgoal: Run reports detailing current expenses for personnel, contractors, and travel.
The members decide that Jane will perform this task on Monday morning.
Next they specify who is responsible for each of the other subgoals and when those tasks should be done.
Everyone now knows who is accountable for what, and there’s less room for confusion that bogs down the process.
The last step in the process is to convert the action items into clear if / then statements.
The budgeting team’s first if / then statement would look like this: “If it’s Monday morning, then Jane will submit details on our current expenses for personnel, contractors, and travel.”
This ensures that expectations are understood by everyone, and for Jane, it establishes a mental trigger for the required action.
The syntax of the if / then statement may seem awkward at first—and that’s OK.
It makes people more aware and deliberate in their planning, strengthens the power of the trigger, and helps create what one prominent psychologist calls an “instant habit.”
It’s important to note that if / then planning is an ongoing process, not a onetime exercise.
As circumstances change, your plans need to change, too—or they won’t have the desired impact.
Keep asking yourself and the team questions such as:
How realistic are the plans?
Is anything harder or taking longer than expected?
Are there steps that the team didn’t plan for?
Regularly reviewing plans with team members reinforces the if / then link and amplifies its effectiveness.
Over time, if / then planning will become second nature—and your team will undoubtedly see results.
In fact, research suggests that if / then planners are three times as likely than others to reach their goals—which represents a significant opportunity.
Think about the enormous amounts of time, money, thought, and talent that companies squander in pursuit of poorly expressed goals.
By using the simple technique of if / then planning to build a bridge between intention and reality, groups do more of what they mean to—and do it better.
Note to presenter: We recommend walking through the whole presentation with your team before distributing this link and creating your own if / then plans. Once you’ve completed the slide deck, use the tool to identify a team goal and build a plan together.
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