Common evolutions of organisational goal-setting

Goal setting in an organisation typically moves through evolutions over time. Here is a run-down of some I have observed.

Photo by Stephen Walker on Unsplash

Goal setting is introduced as a means to communicate projects and to track progress transparently. An organisation typically goes through a number of evolutions. Here is a rough run-down of the evolutions I have observed.

1. No goals.

   Work is about ‘build the thing’ or ‘do the thing’. Teams muddle through.
   

2. Individual goals.
   What I suspect is still the most common situation for organisations. Objectives and behavioural goal setting at the individual employee level. The quality of goals is variable and may align with very broad organisational themes and values.
   

3. Team or project goals.

   To address the misalignment between teams and leaders, goals become the currency of understanding. Lots of misunderstanding remains as the measurement of progress doesn’t correlate to the actual outcome, only to activity e.g. tasks completed etc. Most organisations stop here.
   

4. Outcome-oriented goals.

   Some organisations’ next steps are to graduate from activity-oriented planning to outcome-oriented planning. The use of measurement can now be used to help better understand progress in place of activity measures.
   

5. Org or department goals cascading into team goals.

   Some organisations may skip step 3 — the attraction to activity-focused goals is strong, why this is I cover in other posts. To help connect teams to what the organisation is trying to achieve and to address issues of siloes and incrementalism by establishing a higher-level department or organisation-level set of goals.

   When all of these goals are outcome-focused the explicit relationships between goals are straightforward to illustrate and communicate.

   The instinct for most organisations to attempt alignment through cascading of goals — i.e. publish top-level ones which teams use to set their own goals. This can help address conflict where local optimisation may have led a team away from what was best for the organisation at that point in time because team goals were free from the wider context of the rest of the organisation.
   

6. Goals align vertically and horizontally over time.

   The larger the organisation, the bigger the headaches of trying to cascade and align goals — that teams have more information collectively than the leadership because they are closer to the detail means there will be priorities they have visibility of which are important but not as visible in the macro view.

   The other issue is movement at the head has the effect of whiplash for those gripping on for dear life at the tail — I imagine cartoons where characters cling to the tail of a dragon. The approach to align rather than cascade is for teams to assess goals both horizontal and vertical to form their own goals. Something like ‘We doing x to support the organisation's direction and we are doing y to support our peers to achieve an important customer outcome for which we are a dependency’

I couldn’t find a pic of a dragon but here is Pooh waving around wildly holding Tigga’s tail as he seeks to score a goal.

What approach to goals is your organisation using? What challenges are you facing? What side-effects to your goal approach have you observed? Share in the comments, I am very interested to hear about your experiences.