Get Your Team to Do What It Says It’s Going to Do by Heidi Grant Halvorson

Say you’re in the early stages of planning your department’s budget for the next fiscal year. Your management team meets to establish short-term priorities and starts to think about longer-term resource allocation. You identify next steps and decide to reconvene in a week—but when you do, you find that very little progress has been made. What’s the holdup? Your to-dos probably look something like this:
Step 1: Develop a tentative budget for continuing operations.
Step 2: Clarify the department’s role in upcoming corporate initiatives.
Those steps may be logical, but they’re ineffective because they omit essential details. Even the first one, which is relatively straightforward, raises more questions than it answers. What data must the team gather to estimate requirements for continuing operations? Who will run the reports, and when? Which managers can shed additional light on resource needs? Who will talk to them and reconcile their feedback with what the numbers say? When will that happen? Who will assess competing priorities and decide which trade-offs to make? When?
Creating goals that teams and organizations will actually accomplish isn’t just a matter of defining what needs doing; you also have to spell out the specifics of getting it done, because you can’t assume that everyone involved will know how to move from concept to delivery. By using what motivational scientists call if-then planning to express and implement your group’s intentions, you can significantly improve execution.
If-then plans work because contingencies are built into our neurological wiring. Humans are very good at encoding information in “If x, then y” terms and using those connections (often unconsciously) to guide their behavior. When people decide exactly when, where, and how they will fulfill their