Communicating Goals to Your Organization

Once you’ve built some great goals, you need to communicate them to the organization. Operating in silos leads to missed opportunities.

Once you’ve built some great goals, you need to communicate them to the organization. People in your department need to understand how their own goals, as well as the goals of their colleagues, tie to the broader organization goals. Operating in silos leads to missed opportunities. Sometimes you’ll find people are working at cross purposes. When communicating goals, provide broader strategic context for why goals were chosen and how they tie to the broader organization success.

I worked with one client that was really focused on changing their business performance. They wanted to improve their gross margins. So they got everybody together and made sure they understood how everybody’s goals tied to this higher-level gross margin goal. The supply chain team was given goals around making their top products more profitable. The marketing team was given a goal of emphasizing the most profitable products in the portfolio. Product teams were given SKU rationalization goals to thin the portfolio and remove less profitable products. The sales team was given the goal of selling the more profitable products.

Everyone in the division knew what everybody else was doing. It prevented arguments, like sales reps demanding low margin products or sales reps yelling at product teams for removing a SKU. All goals were communicated by the business unit president at an all-hands meeting. They all heard the same message at the same time.

For your organization, get your business unit and partner organizations together. Compare goals. Figure out how you’ll communicate it to your entire organization at the same time, so everyone knows and understands the context. Having this clarity at the highest level and making sure that all the goals are aligned is going to reduce conflict in the organization and improve the likelihood that you hit your numbers.

Want to learn more about setting business unit goals? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to set business unit goals. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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