An important organizational part of goal setting is to work well with other teams. This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many companies don’t think this through. Here is the way that goals should be determined.
Start with Organizational Goals
First, you have the organizational goals for the year (or 3 or 5 years, however you look at the timeline). Normally these are higher level goals that are broad enough to cover the larger initiatives within a company. They can take the form of financial goals (revenue, profit, margin, expense management etc.), customer-related, product-or service-related, employee focused or process heavy. Our purpose here isn’t to write the goals of your company but to illustrate an all-too-common issue that occurs.
Let’s say that your company has some sort of higher-level organizational goals, and they share them with the employees. Normally then the departments/teams figure out how they can impact these organizational goals. Usually, your department has some way of getting everyone involved in interpreting the work that the company is doing and how the team will support it.
Team and Department Goals
Then the individuals within the team will look at the department goals and determine how they will help the organization achieve the goals. This way everything is linked up and we are all focusing on the same items.
Often, one of the items that I have heard is it isn’t easy to come up with the correct individual goals more than a year in advance. Business can change quickly so there are times when these items need to get adapted, which is why it is important as a manager to consistently review these with your staff so you can make sure that everyone’s on track and if something goes awry, you’re both on top of it and have another idea of how to participate in getting the goal met.
Are Department Goals in Alignment or Competition with Each Other?
But there is a more insidious issue that I have seen. Even if you are fully participating in the corporate/team/individual goals which all integrate and ladder up, you can have another problem. You can have departments in the same company with competing goals. Let’s try an example so that this is easier to understand.
Let’s say the sales team has a much larger than normal goal for this fiscal year. They have the same number of representatives, and the marketing budget hasn’t been increased. When asked how they are supposed to sell so much more, the answer from the C-suite, is “get creative.” This would be hard enough but what is also occurring is a mandate that each department needs to cut 20% of the workforce and expenses.
While the sales team is doing their best to come up with innovative ways to get in front of more customers and increase their close rate, the other departments they work with and depend on are going through all their expenses with a fine-tooth comb trying to find any fat left in the budget.
Without knowing the backstory (was the former goal artificially low? was the company overstaffed before?), at the face of it, you can see that all the teams at this organization will NOT all be on the same page. Will staff goals complement or compete?
Missed Opportunity
Many times, the reality of what occurs isn’t as simplistic as this description but if you think about it, employees don’t really understand each other’s goals, nor have they been coached to care much about it. Often, we are just racing to get our performance objectives completed in the right timeframe. This is a missed opportunity to get the most important part of the strategy right – how we can have every employee in an organization individually contribute to strategic goals.