How higher-level goals smooth friction between teams and promote collaboration

One challenge of introducing team-level goals is that it can draw focus to the short-term and local optimisation. Here's where higher-level goals help.

Photo by Kalle Kortelainen on Unsplash

Goals focus almost by definition on step-change i.e. the most significant desirable changes an organisation is seeking to make. This presents a number of challenges:

A focus on step-change can dominate other concerns. This focus can squeeze out important investments which are incremental or have a longer-term pay-off.

Teams often have discipline established for maintaining non-negotiable levels of quality for different aspects (Definition of Done, Application Performance Management, KPIs etc.) but even for highly disciplined organisations, it can be difficult to balance against the juggernaut of a motivating goal with momentum behind it and the allure of a nearer-term benefit, especially where the cost of other concerns are less visible or less immediate.

Time-bound goals can lead to a bias toward shorter-term pay-offs. Most goal frameworks emphasise time-bound which is a very helpful constraint but can over-shadow the nuance that achieving near-term outcomes can support the achievement of future, longer-term goals.

A time constraint is very powerful so I make this point not to discourage the use of time as a constraint but it is important to be aware of the side effects. We must counteract any skew towards short-termism as it’s likely to short-change your longer-term goals.

In the worst cases the consequence of ongoing short-term goal setting, even when achieving those specific goals with great success (oddly this narrow success can make matters worse) is to become a feature factory. Zoning in on delivering solutions that are within the capability of that team because these are easy, concrete, and lead to a predictable output.

Lack of higher-level and / or longer-term goals is not the only factor, of course, but it can be a significant factor in a team declining into an output-focused mode. This is because the “success” is visible (“we just launched another thing”) and the consequence, of low investment now leading to problems later, is invisible.

The approach I have taken to correct the balance is to make sure we have a holistic view of organisational and team goals.

To achieve this takes consistent and thorough planning cadences and the discipline and confidence that the investment is worth it (it is — why will be covered in future posts).

1. Differentiate progress between step-changes and the things that sustain the value the organisation provides and make both visible.

2. Visibility of goals at different timescales/horizons

3. Understand goals and how they relate to each other within the current and also between different timescales (e.g. how does what we are doing now relate to where we want to be in 12 months and 3 years?)

4. Work on step-change objectives is contingent on being in a healthy state for the sustaining objectives.

5. If an aspect is unhealthy it would become a short-term step-change objective / quarterly goal (OKR etc.) to bring it back to health in a way that could be sustained into the future. i.e. solve the problem properly in a resilient way.

We will cover how this was approached in future posts. There is no silver bullet to achieving the balance required but I will look to encapsulate universally useful ideas you can apply to make progress in this challenging area.

Follow this publication to get continuing updates and practical guides to applying these ideas to your own organisation. Please provide your own experiences and feedback on these posts in the comments. Improvements will be applied to these posts as living documentation of immediately useful knowledge for use in better product development.