As I sit here with raging tooth ache I have naturally been thinking of my dentist and am doing my best to associate him with pain relief along with some welcome pain killers that I’m taking. However, in-between spasms of pain and lucid thinking I remember him telling me during one of my half year check ups about government target setting in the dental industry.

I should point out to my overseas readers that our government here in the UK have set numerous targets for the public sector which have achieved some amazing results. Please digest the phrase - amazing results - with a large slice of sarcasm. I should also point out that my evidence of these results is all anecdotal, but nonetheless I am sure my evidence is not that far from the truth.

The dental industry has gone through quite a bit of change and getting hold of a National Health Service (NHS) dentist has for a time been very difficult as most practices won’t take on new patients. Therefore the only alternative was to go private which costs more. However, 12 months or so ago something changed and a number of NHS dentists opened their doors to new patients and there were floods of people wanting to register. This made national news as there were long queues of people waiting in the streets. This apparently caused some embarrassment to our then Prime Minister and so Tony gave instructions not to let this happen again and set a target of zero queues. However, a few days later it did happen again and national news showed long queues of people waiting to register as new patients. Embarrassing was apparently not strong enough to express Tony’s frustration with the problem of having so many people being seen to need to register for an NHS dentist. As his ministers could not solve the problem of the queues he took charge of the matter personally. He wanted to ensure people did not have to wait in long queues anymore to register. His solution… people could no longer register in person; they had now to register by phone! He hit his target of reducing the queues, but exacerbated the problem of registering as phones went into melt down.

NHS hospitals have also been set numerous targets. Waiting lists have been singled out as it has been unacceptable how long some people have had to wait for treatment. The solution to this problem… people are not added to waiting lists until nearer the time of their treatment and thus reducing the time on the list. Therefore, there had to be a list to get on to the waiting list, but these new lists were not targeted and so that’s ok. Time on the official waiting list was reduced – target met.

Along the same lines are targets for waiting time in the Accident & Emergency department of hospitals. Patients have to be seen within a certain time period – unfortunately, nothing about being treated, just seen. So, people come in, get seen by someone and then back in the waiting room waiting for treatment. So, target met, patients seen within the time stipulated.

Schools are also targeted. Pupils have to reach a certain level of academic achievement. A few years ago my daughter was moving up from her primary school to secondary school. Before they leave primary school they have to sit some tests that I believe are designed to measure the effectiveness of the teaching at the school. It is fair to say that my daughter is not at the top of the class for academic achievement. Therefore when she sat her test her teacher apparently helped her with ‘teacher’s magic pencil’. My daughter was lucky to be in a small class, but even more luckily for the teacher was the magic pencil because if it had not come out the average test score for the class would be lower and we can’t have school teachers missing their targets now can we! The consequence of the magic pencil was that in her new school my daughter was put in to classes of academic achievement above her ability and it took 6 months to correct as teachers were puzzled why she was not performing at the level shown in her last tests.

The amount of effort and resources that go into hitting these targets is considerable. The targets themselves are ridiculous and do nothing what so ever to improve the situation. People are pressurised to hit targets otherwise their careers and jobs are in jeopardy. The behaviours we see are a direct result of these pressures and if we want the right behaviours we need the right targets.

I think our government have been taking lessons from the sales industry as I also see many ridiculous targets being set for sales. These targets are often the result of poor management. Sales are not producing the results and so let’s target them in different ways. If sales are down, it must be a result of not enough sales calls, so let’s target people on the number of meetings… Sales then spend time making sure meeting targets are met, any customer meeting just to get the target achieved.

Another reason for poor sales must be because there is not enough in the pipeline and so let’s dictate that we need more deals in the pipeline and so in come the deals, any deals, just to make the numbers stack up. Quality will be low, many will be fictitious in that they should have been qualified out… however, target met.

Managers have to report numbers up the chain and they go to extraordinary lengths to make sure the numbers are reported. I was with a newly promoted manager recently who demonstrated with pride his spreadsheet that can collate numbers from various sources and present a consolidated view of the numbers for his team. Members of his team dive in on a shared drive at various times to update the latest numbers. He was managing what he has been asked to do – report numbers, but he was not managing sales.

I don’t think it’s just me questioning inappropriate targets and so this reminds me of the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln… You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time… fooling is over, we know what you are up to… Perhaps these targets are put in place because government and managers cannot achieve the real result and so at least they can point at the target and say – look we are achieving something, we are making progress, aren’t we good!

So what results do we want…

Dentist = Anyone can register with an NHS dentist within acceptable timescales – nothing about reducing queues.

Hospital = People treated within acceptable timescales. - nothing to do with reducing waiting time or time on waiting lists.

School = Individual pupils showing improvement in their grades – not all pupils achieving high grades.

Sales = Achieve target – surely it’s the only target that is worth focusing on. If you have to micro manage the team by giving out meeting targets, phone time targets, appointment targets, size of pipeline targets, etc, etc then, in my opinion, something is wrong with either management or staff, one or both need help.

The only real thing you need your individual sales members to do is… to show you how they are going to make their number. They have to name the deals that are going to close. If they are going to miss then they need to show what they are doing about closing the gap. For the deals that they forecast, you need to check the quality. It’s actually rather simple and both sales professional and manager are focused on the one thing that matters – hitting the number… and that could be a novel approach for many people!

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