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 […]

  Goals can make sense in isolation, but when you add them all up, you may be asking for unrealistic results from your team. Watch out for conflicting goals. It’s important to reality check your goals. Goals can make sense in isolation, but when you add them all up, you may be asking for unrealistic results from your team. You’ll need to evaluate how department goals impact one another. If you set a goal for revenue growth, and another goal for cost cutting, you may have created an impossible situation for the team. They can’t spend money to drive revenue because they’re so focused on cost cutting. It’s this kind of reality checking that leads to more reasonable and achievable results. What I’d suggest is get all your organization’s goals together on a whiteboard. Start with the high-level corporate goals, then lay out your business unit’s or department’s goals. Lay out adjacent business units or functions. Look for dependencies. Look for supporting goals and look for conflicting goals. Go through the same exercise for the teams in your organization. For supporting goals, make sure there’s no overlap. You don’t want people working on redundant things or getting double credit for going after the same work. For places where there are dependencies of goals, make sure the first goal is properly resourced so the follow-on goal can be met. Also lay out for that second goal the risk in hitting it if the first one isn’t achieved. In situations where you have conflicting goals, try to get them aligned. You can eliminate one of the goals or carve out the impact of one goal on another. For example, if you have a cost-reduction goal, lower the revenue goal since you can’t market as much since you’ve decided you’re not going to spend. It’s this kind of reality checking, where you take a step back and look at the overall goals and the behaviors that are driven, that’s going […]

Setting goals for supporting functions helps link people’s roles and the work they do every day to your department’s larger goals. It’s easy to focus on big departmental goals, but not everyone on the team can directly affect those numbers. Setting goals for supporting functions helps link people’s roles and the work they do every day to that broader departmental goal. To do this, it requires you to break those big goals down into component parts. Assess which supporting activities make that big goal possible. With those activities identified, you can proceed to set goals for those supporting groups. That will help them drive departmental alignment around that bigger goal. For example, I know one organization that was trying to reduce their costs by $100 million over a two-year period. Now, not everyone in the organization owned a budget, and they were asking, “How can I contribute to hitting that big number?” Everyone in the organization had to contribute something. They looked at those supporting functions and tried to understand what activities does that function do that drives that higher-level cost number? The supply chain group understood that if they increased their inventory turns and improved their truck fill rate, it would make their operation more efficient, which would then allow the broader organization to take some costs out. The manufacturing team looked at their processes, and they understood that if they cut the line changeover time, it would make their process more efficient, again, contributing to reducing costs. The real estate team even chipped in. They looked at space utilization, and they deferred some new expenses to future years. Every group had a smart goal that linked their work to that higher-level $100 million cost reduction goal. Something I encourage you to do is to take a big goal for your department or your business unit and think about the support […]