“Your accountable”. Okay, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this or not but… have you ever been ask to set your own objectives at you place of employment? Well in a past position I was. As I recall I was ask to put a number on how much I could increase the number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers that the company versus the number they already had. It was my job to basically handle all the companies social media – so at first blush, setting a number for doing my job seems very fair = put your money where your mouth is – right? Well yeah, I agree except for one little issue.
In order to increase the companies social media presence – I put together a plan. The plan involved contests, promotions, lots of interaction, a bunch of fun and of course numbers. Here’s where it gets interesting – my boss at the time – said to me “I need you to tell me an exact number of how many more followers you are going to get in with in 5 months” – which is a typical businessman’s response – “just the numbers kid, just the numbers.” Here’s the rub, my bonus was based on how I did against the numbers I set BUT it was likely that the plan I proposed to get the numbers was likely to remain in limbo on my bosses desk or his bosses desk for the 5 months.
So if you put two and two together you’ll see that I was accountable for the numbers but even after 5 re-submissions of my plan (by the want not revisions, re-submissions of the same plan) later and I still hadn’t received the go ahead to start or any feedback about my plan.
By now I guess you can guess what happen – my employee review came up and I was ask “Why didn’t you reach YOUR set objective?”, “YOU stated that YOU would increase the followers by X amount”, “That’s not something that reflects well on YOUR review”. I stated that I submitted my plan 5 times and I had a very large email trail of my requests to proceed with my plan to gain followers but it fell on death ears. You see I didn’t reach my stated numbers…
Side note: When I created my required objective I brought the problem of giving set numbers without approval to use the plan that my numbers were based on – to my boss – but my boss smiled and shrugged “It’s YOUR required objective.”