How authentic commitments can drive ambition, innovation and inspiration

Think about your company’s latest annual report. Alongside all the usual summaries of business operations and financial performance, it probably also contains mission goals for the coming months and years. But if you’re really honest, is your team living and breathing these goals, or are they statements on a piece of paper that they’d struggle to recall if pressed?

For many teams in many organisations, goals are something imposed from above that live in a software system. While a skilled leader can navigate their teams towards these aims, if they aren’t internalised, authentic and deeply committed to, they’ll rarely have the transformational impact they could.

In this article, Justin Temblett-Wood explores the difference between ‘goals’ and ‘commitments’, and how challenging conventional thinking around goal setting can deliver breakthroughs in culture and performance.

Breaking conventional thinking

Even the most traditional goal setting (achieving x revenue by y date, for example) can benefit if teams better understand the power of their own contributions, and develop and internalise authentic commitments that can help them get there.

Take an example goal for a pharmaceutical company: ‘All early-stage trials for diagnostic research will have a transparent process for reducing sustainable impact by the end of the year.’

Achieving an ambitious goal like this requires a big element of leadership development and influencing others to change their behaviour. Leaders need to up their game, influence and bring people with them, and handle setbacks along the way. Crucially, they also need to inspire even higher levels of ambition and commitment within their team. We argue that the best way to achieve this is by moving from conventional thinking to breakthrough thinking.

Shifting the culture of a team to encourage individual ambition and commitment

Think about how you currently goal-set as a leader, as a team, and as a wider organisation. More likely than not, you look to past successes (and quite possibly failures), and use these experiences to show whether what you want to accomplish is actually achievable. We call this ‘conventional thinking’. By definition our future is constrained by what we have already achieved in the past.

To achieve a breakthrough in performance or ambition, you will need to surface limiting assumptions – either in the way you think as a leader, the way your team thinks, or in the wider culture of your organisation.

By its very nature, a breakthrough is not predictable purely based on past experience or trajectory (although these are of course important). Laying the groundwork for breakthrough thinking requires changing the environment around a team. It necessitates a shift in culture, what others think is possible, and a shift in how teams work with key stakeholders internally and externally.

Once plans for the future are uncoupled from limiting assumptions that rely purely on past successes and failures, there is space to be more ambitious. Breakthrough thinking can energise teams as it allows them to glimpse beyond their limitations and imagine a future full of new possibilities.

Creating the communication to deliver breakthrough thinking

This, of course, brings us back to commitments. Breakthrough thinking requires teams to commit to audacious targets, unleashed from the limiting perspective of what’s been done and achieved in the past.

Communication is an essential part of this. Bold declarations, or what we sometimes call ‘speech acts’ can help crystalise and internalise breakthrough commitments and shift mindsets to help us get there. Saying out loud what you want, what you think is possible, and what you are authentically committed to has an impact. And, when it comes from a leader, it starts to shift the wider culture.

Goals are no longer just objectives or aims pinned to a wall or lost in company documents. They are authentic, bold commitments that inspire collective ambition and help teams move beyond conventional thought. The empowered, inspired, committed teams that come to life can be harnessed to deliver business goals, challenge ways of working and thinking, and deliver breakthroughs in performance.

This is what Achieve Breakthrough is all about. If you’re looking to inspire and empower teams to push beyond what they currently think is possible, get in touch today. We’d love to hear from you.

Breakthrough thinking in practice:

A major energy firm was looking to bring new products to market at record speeds, establish the new channels and business partners required, fight off competition from new market entrants, all while handling an acquisition. To emerge successful, a challenge to conventional wisdom was required.

Our Breakthrough Thinking programme delivered:

• 200% increase in overall profitability in first year
• 76% increase in collaboration between senior management and the executive
• 95% would ‘definitely recommend’ the Breakthrough Thinking programme to others
• 82% feel significantly more engaged in driving the business strategy and changes necessary for success than ever before
• 40% uplift in leadership behaviours across six chosen metrics, including ‘decision-making’ and ‘collaborative working’