Getting FASTER, not SMARTER

    

One of life’s greatest pleasures is learning new things.  In the chaos of today’s business world, we are smart-fast-coachingdeluged by infinite gigs of information, ideas, emails, books, articles, and new concepts… 24/7. It’s hard to judge what’s good and what’s not, which is why I trust my colleague from Singapore who I co-delivered a powerful GROW Coaching business simulation program with this week in China.

As we were preparing for the session, I shared that I was going to close the program with our traditional SMART Action Planning worksheet that we’ve been using for at least a decade.

In his very polite way, he didn’t comment and put his head down.  I’ve known this gentleman for more than 25 years, so I knew that he wanted to say something but felt uncomfortable saying it for fear of embarrassing me.

“What?” I asked him with a big smile on my face.

“Well, in Asia, nobody is using SMART anymore…everyone is using FAST.”

Hmmm, I thought to myself. I haven’t heard of FAST, so I of course asked for the story. My colleague spent the next few minutes sharing the concept and I thought.

SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-based has become dated.

FAST, which stands for Frequently Discussed, Ambitious, Specific, and Transparent sounds fresher and more relevant for today’s leader who is moving faster than ever before.  It raises the interesting philosophical question; is being FAST better than being SMART?

I am writing this blog as an exercise to see if I can make a convincing argument for myself so we can start using it as the primary follow-up action plan in 2020.

I spent some time on the flight home from China researching and exploring the concepts of FAST to see how they could fit into standard Advantexe Learning journeys in the areas of Business Acumen, Business Leadership, and Strategic Business Selling that typically includes pre-work, simulation-centric learning, content, and action planning.

Here’s what I discovered:

 

Definition

Application to New Skills

Frequently Discussed

Like any good coaching dialogue, goals and objectives should be embedded in continuous discussions to align to strategy, allocate resources, and review progress.

  •  Can be the basis for coaching dialogues
  • Can tie performance feedback to specific goals
  • By discussing frequently can keep people focused on top priorities
  • Can be part of a continuous improvement cycle

Ambitious

The goal shouldn’t be easily attained. Rather, there needs to be some “stretch” that pushes extra work that the competition can’t easily replicate.

  • Drives innovative thinking
  • Reduces risk that employees are too easily satisfied with their 37.5-hour weeks
  • Stretch goals drives increased and innovative performance

Specific
(This is also on SMART)

Provides distinct clarity for the goals and how they can be translated into measurable results.

  • Reduces risk of ambiguous goals or goals that aren’t aligned across functions
  • Is obvious and measurable which means if FAST isn’t working, it can change and evolve.

Transparent

Goals and objectives are clear, open, and available to everyone. Great organizations define open goals and don’t keep secrets.

  • Is openly aligned to strategy
  • Creates peer-to-peer accountability and cooperation.
  • Helps to define the big picture and where everything and everyone fits.

 

Sample Application

To convince myself, I need to apply the FAST framework to a situation or instance that is part of a follow-up to some sort of training.  One of the participants from this week’s session has volunteered to help me (on the condition of anonymity) to see it will work.  Here’s an outline of what we discussed from the FAST perspective regarding his action plan to implement his new GROW Coaching skills:

Frequent – “I am committing to twice a month, one on one GROW coaching dialogues with my 5 direct reports to provide feedforward.

Ambitious – “Based on my GROW coaching dialogues, I am going to be more aggressive terminating poorly performing people. Right now, I take the easy way out.

Specific – “I have already booked the next six months on all of our calendars and have included a meeting agenda and overview of the process for best preparation.”

Transparent – “I am going to do a much better job of letting my team know how the company is doing from a financial perspective and how the individual is doing with his Objectives and Key Results in support of the company goals.

Summary

I think FAST has some promise. The one thing I’m struggling with is the lack of explicit measurement of success. I’m not quite yet convinced, so let me see how a few more managers of this pilot do with it and I will report back in the New Year.

why-does-leadership-matter-infographic

Robert Brodo

About The Author

Robert Brodo is co-founder of Advantexe. He has more than 20 years of training and business simulation experience.