Sessions with System & Soul

Free Tools: From Overwhelmed to On Track With Just One Tool

• Benj Miller, McKenzie Decker • Season 1 • Episode 24

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Most leadership teams are busy. But are they aligned? 

In this Free Tools episode of Sessions with System & Soul, Benj and McKenzie share the one tool every founder, COO, and growth-stage leader needs to create clarity, focus, and execution. 

You'll learn how to set 90-day objectives that align your team, build real accountability, and drive business transformation—not just activity. 

If your strategy feels scattered or your team is stuck in the weeds, this episode is your reset. 

🎯 Download the free Objective Builder at systemandsoul.com/tools 

Sessions is hosted by Benj Miller and McKenzie Decker

The best businesses aren’t just built on strategy, they’re built on soul.

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McKenzie Decker:

Guys, welcome back to Sessions with System and Soul. I'm Mackenzie Decker. I'm here with Benj Miller, and today we have a free tool for you. The reason that we do this is so often, and I can't even tell you how often, probably at least two, three times a week I've talked to someone, a business owner or a team member of a, of a leadership team, and there's just things that no one ever teaches you how to do when it comes to running a business. It's, uh, a lot of times when I have those conversations, people are like, man, this is, this is so simple. I, you know, I wish I had done this years and years ago. Um, the thing is though, you don't get that instruction day one when you start a business or you step into a role. So these tools are all about really equipping you with the things that. Are gonna make your job easier, are gonna give your team more of a pace, more of a cadence, more of a common language, and really align everyone around what our top priorities are, what our, our top behaviors and habits are. So today's tool is gonna be all about upsetting objectives and. Objectives, our 90 day goals. We're gonna get into it. We're gonna break it down for you on how to set that on, what not to do on, you know, how it looks when we work with clients. Um, before we do that, I wanna thank our sponsor and producer. Fist Bumps. Fist Bumps helps us put this show on for you and bring it to you live every week. If you want help getting your message out and sharing the amazing tools that you have in your business, then they are a great partner for that. Hey, Benj. Oh,

Benj Miller:

hey.

McKenzie Decker:

I've been talking for almost two straight minutes. Um, you are

Benj Miller:

ready to go.

McKenzie Decker:

I'm ready. I'm ready to talk about this. This is one of my favorite things that we do.

Benj Miller:

It is, and you're a master at it.

McKenzie Decker:

Well, tell me from your perspective, as you see, you're walking into rooms all the time with different leadership teams and you're helping them understand this concept and execute it. Why do you think they don't do this in the first place? And like what do you think some of the barriers are to. Getting this kind of system in place for how they run their goals and the, the things that they give their time to.

Benj Miller:

I, I think most organizations, um, get into kind of the bad habit of just going heads down and they always know the next thing to do. So what this is, is. Taking the time to think big picture to make sure the next thing we do is the most important thing that we do to take us to where we want to go. So if we don't really know where we want to go, then we don't know the right next thing to do. Uh, the other thing that we talk about a lot is that we have to have the confidence as a leadership team that our team can execute on whatever we say these priorities are. And so this is one of the ways, one of the tools that we use to start to make that happen and build the confidence that we can transform this company into what we want it to be. So we have four tools for confident execution in our toolbox. Today. We're going over one of them. This one is really specifically. Around transforming the organization. So while we have our tools for performing in the organization, what do we need to do today to perform? What do we need to transform? Because hopefully we're not the same company a year from now, 10 years from now. And so let's be really intentional about what that looks like. So I think just getting in that mindset, and there's lots of ways to go about this. You know, we call 'em quarterly objectives. Tim Dora called 'em OKRs. Uh, people call 'em rocks. Rockefeller habits, the big things. That we need to focus on as an organization to transform to who we wanna be tomorrow.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah. I think one of the things that I've noticed over the years and all the teams I've been on is, you know, everyone is busy. I don't know if I've ever met someone working in a business who is like, no, I have, uh, I don't have enough to do. Everyone is busy, but very few people are effective with their time. And I think often, um, especially when you've got a large organization, multiple departments, high growth there, lots of opportunities. Describes probably everyone listening to this. Like there's, there's any number of things that are gonna come up as, oh, we should do that. Oh, that's important. Oh, let's make sure we fit this in. So we've gotta figure out what to do with all that. Um, 'cause otherwise you end up kind of on the hamster wheel. Exhausted, worn out, running in 50 directions and probably not getting very far very fast. So

Benj Miller:

the other side of that can happen as well, where teams don't, you know, if you're not a team with a lot of innovation, a lot of ideation, you're just gonna stay heads down and be performing all the time, and then realize one day that you're strategically behind.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah. Yeah. By the way, if you're listening to this. Um, you, maybe you can't stick around for the whole session today. We are gonna give you a PDF guide that you can download that'll give you some questions and kind of outline for you how to do this with your own team. Um, this work is you can do it on your own, and I highly recommend giving it a try. It can be hard to do it, um, facilitate these kind of conversations with a team, but I highly encourage like get started and then, you know, system and SOUL is here for, for helping with these kind of things. We'll talk about another way that you can get some real feedback on objectives, um, before we go today. So Benj

Benj Miller:

Mackenzie,

McKenzie Decker:

lay it out for us. What is an objective? And what is it not? And how do we cite good ones?

Benj Miller:

An objective is another word for our priorities for the quarter, but when we're saying priority, it's usually more of a project than a goal. If that makes sense. Uh, because we're getting strategic about how we're gonna go about hitting that goal. What is the effort that we're gonna put in, what are the resources that we're gonna put to it? What is not? Oh, that I, we could talk a long time about that. Maybe we'll do that at the end, but it's not doing your day job because that's performing, you know? And then, um, there's a lot of ways to go bad. Uh, but I think you're gonna cover those as we go through how to build a good one.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah, so I binge mentioned this, but John Doer, he came up with this concept of objectives and key results. It's like, if you wanna masterclass and learning how to make really, really detailed objectives, I highly recommend looking at his work. Um, what we've done is take the basics of that concept and skimmed, skimmed the stuff off the top. And we are, we've made it really, really simple for a team, um, to use some of the basics of the OKR method. And really make sure that those 90 day objectives go from day one to day 90, and they're highly effective and, and detailed out. Um, so there's, there's a couple things that we wanna keep in mind. As we work on objectives, and again, like binge said, we're thi we wanna think about things that don't just help us perform as a business, but transform the things that are gonna take us, you know, 10, 20, 30% of growth down the road, whatever that is for your business, your objectives should be tied to those longer term initiatives. You're. We really wanna be, uh, we wanna double the next two years. We want to increase our, um, I don't know, we wanna increase our customer base by 300%. Whatever those things are, we want our objectives to be tied to that. Big, big growth. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of like read these out for you. Binge interrupt me if you have some color commentary to add. But these are things that we wanna do as we, as we, as we build objectives and work on the business. First, we wanna have a lot of focus with this. So less is more. If you have 10 things, you're probably gonna get 'em 10% when you could have one thing and get it hundred percent right. We would rather, instead of having a laundry list of things that we're aiming for, we wanna have, we wanna be able to get to, you know, 80, 90, a hundred percent on some of these things. And that often means that we pick up fewer things in order to get there. Next, uh, I kind of mentioned this, but we wanna have alignment. So alignment means we're creating a visible connection between the vision and strategy for the organization with these. So we should be able to see how these objectives tie to the bigger picture. The third thing, and this one's like really, really hard. I think for, for teams, we go, we drive into the ditch a little bit on this one. Um, it's commitment. And commitment means that we say 90 days, oftentimes 90 days. It could be a little bit less, a little bit more depending. Um, but saying it's gonna be 90 days, we're gonna get it done. Here's the. We're gonna aim for this. So that's usually a struggle for, for some teams is, is being able to define it well enough and really put a stake in the ground and take that active, those active steps and make that active progress in that time. One way to kind of help with that commitment is the next thing here. It's called tracking. So tracking. Setting milestones that help us see progress in a really tangible way, helps us know if we're on track or off track and really be able to like visualize and present what it is that we're doing that help, that is helping us get where we wanna go

Benj Miller:

on commitment. There's a couple ways that I see this practically go off and we think about commitment, like, oh, we weren't committed, but part of commitment is. Understanding the commitment that we're making. So, uh, one of the ways that we see go off the rails is unclear definitions of success. So when we get to the end of the quarter, we're back in the room and somebody goes, I'm not really sure what we meant by that, or, we kind of got it done as we said, but that's not really what we were trying to do. It's like it, it goes to the definition. But the commitment, it's like the devil's in the detail. So if we don't get really clear on what we're trying to do and why, then it can, that commitment can slip really, really quick. The other thing you hear is just like, I didn't prioritize it, which is a failure of leadership or something came up in the market with a customer, an employee situation, and that took precedent. That one you gotta watch carefully because that can be a very, it is a very real thing. Yeah. And. Can we do it anyway? Are we making an excuse or is that a very legitimate reason that this should have been sidelined? And when it comes to that, then the encouragement is just to have that conversation in the room when it happens, not at the end of the quarter when it's supposed to be done.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, part of this whole, this whole practice, after you do, it'll make sense. But part of doing this practice is really, it's almost like it raises awareness around the things that we aren't great at doing. It often like challenges our commitment. If we struggle with commitment, it challenges our focus if we struggle with focus. And so there's a a long time where it feels like, gosh, we really suck at this.

Benj Miller:

Like,

McKenzie Decker:

I, I, I had a, literally right before this, I had a call with one of our clients, um. They're one of our largest software clients, and I was getting some feedback from him. And, um, and he was just saying how, like he said several times, like, well, we started this process, we started this objectives process, and we were so bad at it. We were like unbelievably bad at it. And part of it is, it's like, you probably weren't that bad at it, but it, it, you became aware of how disorganized or unfocused uncommitted. Those that, that you are. So, um, we hear that a lot. It feels that way over time, but you're learning a new skill of stretching a new muscle.

Benj Miller:

It's not abnormal for a client in the journey to get, you know, somewhere between three and 15 months in and have like a come to Jesus meeting internally and go like, Hey guys, like, do we realize that we're a. 50% performing team, like this is not a high performing team, do we, like we got half of our objectives done for the quarter, our commitments, is that the kind of team we want to be on and is that the kind of person on that team that we want to be? And they like, that's a shocking question. And they have to get there on their own. As the coach, I can ask that question, but it's not until they feel that pain deeply and and desire change, that change will actually happen. And so, but coming to that realization that like, Hey, we're. We got three fourths of these done. Great. That's a 75%. Is that okay? Is that good for this room or do we wanna be more, because a high performing team, they're gonna knock these out.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah, absolutely. So to recap, focus less is more. Oftentimes the other, the other thing we should say about focus, oftentimes when we say less is more we're talking about like if you've got, we kinda weigh out the number of objectives a team should have based on the number of people on their leadership team. So like, if you have four people on your leadership team, probably not gonna be well equipped to take on like six or seven objectives, like really evaluate. How much time and energy is there, um, that, that's a good measure as well. So we've got focus, alignment, alignment to the overall strategy commitment. So we're saying it's, it's happening on this date. 90 days we're gonna end on this date, we're gonna get it done. Uh, tracking. So we want these things to be things that we can demonstrate that we're making progress. We don't wanna start on day one and get to day 90 and then be like, wait, what? What were we talking like, what did we agree to? Like, oh, actually I didn't do any of that. Um, so what that looks like oftentimes is we do this kind of like show and tell. So. Over a 90 day period at the 30 day mark and the 60 day mark, you wanna show up to our weekly team meeting and be like, Hey guys, this is what I've done on my objective. You know, whatever it may be. It's like, I wanna show you the new rebrand, or I wanna show you the new, um, app software application that we're building in the wire frame. Or I wanna show you my new outline for this new service line that we plan on launching at the end of the quarter. So those are all examples of like. Just bringing something to literally show the team. It's a bit of an accountability step, but also don't be freaked out by the accountability word. It's accountability, but it's also a way to create a moment of celebration and awareness. Like how many times have we worked on something huge and nobody on the team really knows about it. And it also, so it's celebration awareness. It's also like helps us, uh, bring up some roadblocks or questions, um, of how these team, how other people's. Departments or other people's work is gonna overlap us. It kind of helps us talk about it in a way that I think if it's outta sight, outta mind, we don't often think to discuss some of the things along the way. So that's tracking.

Benj Miller:

You just brought up two things that are probably hold other subjects for another episode. But why do we feel a gut reaction negatively to accountability and then the real implica implications of cross-departmental needs when it comes to these objectives? Those are two those. Really big topics, but we're not gonna get sidetracked.

McKenzie Decker:

There's, there's three more things that we wanna keep in mind when we're setting objectives. The next thing is stretching. So we wanna remain realistic, but we wanna be pushing ourselves like somewhere between 10 and 30% more. I really like that you said like high performing teams don't get 50% things done. Also, high performing teams don't sandbag goals, so we wanna really think about how are we pushing ourselves to not just. Again, not just perform, but really transform and do everything that we possibly can in that timeframe. Um, the next one is massive. It's ownership. Uh, ownership is, ownership is really hard for, and it's, let me just back up. Ownership is one person who's got their name on the objective, and they are care. They're gonna carry it from day one to day 90. And it doesn't mean, what it doesn't mean is that they're gonna do all of the work necessarily, but it does mean that they're responsible for reporting on it. They're responsible for. Really designing the, the details and the understanding of what exactly we're trying to accomplish, and then really making sure that work is getting done on that objective throughout the quarter. So having one owner makes it really, really clear, you know, who is the decision maker? Who's carrying the ball, who's asking the questions, all that good stuff. I do have an example. Um, I was working with a team last week. We were setting some objectives and. They realized, and this is a bit of that cross-departmental thing that you brought up, they realized that, so their objective was to, um, really they ended up, it's more than 90 days a little bit, but they are gonna be launching a new. A new product inside of their organization. And so launching that new product was the objective. And they realized like there's one component that lies with one leader in that organization and another component that lies with another one. And then somebody else on another team had like a small piece. So they really had to decide like who has the whole picture in mind and who can carry it? And then that leader would be. You know, delegating the pieces and checking in with those other departmental leaders to make sure that it's getting done. Um, but it was really important that they established that so that they knew who was gonna be carrying the ball forward in that conversation.

Benj Miller:

I think the word owner works for the idea of who's carrying the responsibility. But practically, I like to think about like sometimes it's just who's gonna project manage this? Yeah. When it's cross-departmental and there's a lot of people and a lot of moving parts, somebody's gotta project manage this 90 day objective and that that's really what we're looking for in that ownership.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah. Last thing here is. That an objective is not your job. It is not your roles and responsibilities. It is not getting tasks done that are part of, you know, every year, every week, every month of your job. It's, it's

Benj Miller:

not hitting your sales quota.

McKenzie Decker:

It's, it's beyond normal roles and responsibilities in the organization.'cause again, this is to help us transform the business. Anything to add on how we set great objectives before we No, you did

Benj Miller:

great. I mean, a lot of this comes from repetition, so it's gonna feel a little awkward in the beginning. You're gonna make a few mistakes, which is gonna be better than what you were doing before. Mm-hmm. And then you're gonna get better and better as a team. And part of it is that evaluation of how did we do? Did we pick the right things? Did we prioritize the right things? Did we define them well? And did we execute?

McKenzie Decker:

Well, why don't we go ahead and give them, like, here are the, if you wanna know the how of setting a great objective. There's a couple of steps for not just naming, here are the three or four things we're gonna run after in the next 90 days. There's a lot of detail to it that we wanna add to really make sure that we. Understand what we're committing to and can make sure that it's clear when done is, you know, done. You wanna walk us through it, coach?

Benj Miller:

Uh, no. You're, you're on a roll. Go. I mean, you, you kind of just named, you kind of named a lot of it, like in, in how we set it up, but, you know, who's gonna own this thing? How do we, how do we name it? Which is a funny thing, but, um. There's energy in words. And so we say, Hey, we're gonna implement a new CRM. Like, great, but nobody actually wants a new CRM. Like, we want to get smarter with our customer intelligence. Ooh, okay. I wanna be smarter with, I do want to be smarter with my customer intelligence. So now even the phrasing of things can bring energy to the objective. So if we can kind of reframe what we're trying to do in the, in adding the why into it. Like adding a CRM has no why. But increasing our customer intelligence has a why. Right? That is the why. That's what we're trying to do. So then, uh, the key results, well, we select a vendor, get the contract, uh, get all of our data ported in, implement it. We're gonna do a training. So we, we've got, now we've got five bullet points. Those are our key results. It's also like the checklist that if we can check all of those, then it is how we define it. One of my pet peeves is like. When people actually do their OKRs and, and do check all those check boxes, and then they downplay like, well, there's more work to do. Of course there's more work to do. Of course you want to integrate it with your, you know, accounting software and, and get this running. But there's always more work to do. Give yourself credit because we did what we said we were gonna do. Uh, and that's where we go into what does it look like in the milestones 30 day, 60 day. That way we can have the show and tell, like Mackenzie said. Um, so in that example, I just rattled off, we might wanna have a vendor selected and a contract in 30 days. That's something I can demonstrate that was done. Uh, and we can have a clarity and agreement that it's on track, like we defined it. Uh, and then at the end we like to ask the magic question, which is, are there any decisions that we can make right now? They would greatly accelerate the success of this project. So do we already know what CRM we're gonna pick? Do we already, uh, have the contract and we just need to sign it? Like it cuts out some of the, um, noise of, and just cuts it down to this is what we need to decide, this is what we need to do. Uh, that's not, there's not always, there's actually not often an answer to that question. But when there is, it can save. Weeks of work.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah. And it just gives you the freedom to think, Hey, we just created the world's most perfect plan. Is there something obvious to us that we could adjust?

Benj Miller:

Yep.

McKenzie Decker:

So my suggestion for anyone listening to this today is go try this out. You may already have a project you're working on. Go try to lay it out in this format. Who's the owner? How do you wanna state that objective as a, as a really clear like outcome and mission. What are the key results? What milestones are you gonna be able to show and tell? And then what decisions could you maybe make that would speed it up? Um, we have a workshop series coming up this fall whenever this, um, gets to you. It may be December 1st, and we're already starting our workshop series. I don't know, but we're running a workshop series in October through January and one, this, what we just talked through today is gonna be one of the workshops. So we're gonna sit down with everybody on. Um, our virtual workshop call and we're gonna have you build an objective while you're there and get some feedback. So if this is something you're really interested in but you want a little bit more hands-on guidance, we're gonna totally have that for you. And we'll put a link in the show notes for you to hop on that workshop this fall. I wanna thank our sponsor fist bumps again for bringing this show to you and for helping us. Um, articulate all that we do. Um, get fist bumps.com binge. As always, great to see you.

Benj Miller:

Hey, you as well.

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Benj Miller

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McKenzie Decker

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