Goal setting and aligning and tracking those goals through actions and results are critical to greater business execution and, as a result, greater success. Most organizations see a dramatic increase in employee and business performance when they effectively set goals and closely tie them to the company’s overall strategy.

“All businesses share a primary goal: Success.”

How To Set Goals

Whether writing long- or short-term goals, the most widely-used framework for setting goals is S-M-A-R-T. All goals should be:

• Specific. Well-defined to inform employees exactly what is expected, when, and how much. With specific goals, managers can easily measure progress toward goal completion.
• Measurable. Provide milestones to track progress and motivate employees toward achievement.
• Attainable. Success needs to be achievable with effort by an average employee, not too high or too low.
• Relevant. You should focus on the greatest impact to the overall company strategy.
• Time-bound. Establish enough time to achieve the goal, but not too much time to undermine performance. Goals without deadlines tend to be overtaken by the day-to-day crises.

Involve The Team

It can be advantageous to have other team members and resources involved in the goal setting process. It is one thing to set them on your own. It is another to have everyone involved and debating the key goals to set, why one goal is more important than another and so on. Not only do you set your goals, but when people participate you get a higher level of buy in to the plan than when you just foist goals on someone. And if you are saying to yourself, “it is just me”, it is still important to set goals and to involve any other resources that might be at your disposal (part-timers, advisors, board members).

Aligning Goals

Goal alignment is critical for business success. It ensures that each person within your organization can see the direction for the business and know how their job fits in with the big picture. To achieve goal alignment in your organization, you must first clearly communicate your strategic business objectives across the entire company. By allowing managers to access and view the goals of other departments, your organization can greatly reduce redundancy while finding better ways to support each other. With everyone working together toward the same objectives, your company can execute strategy faster, with more flexibility and adaptability. Essentially, goal alignment strengthens your leadership and creates organizational agility by allowing managers to:

• Focus employees’ efforts on your company’s most important goals;
• Understand more clearly all responsibilities associated with specific goals; and
• Strengthen accountability by assigning measurable, articulated goals visible company-wide.

Tracking Goals

Once you’ve established your company-wide and individual goals, the next step is tracking progress on those goals. It’s important for employees to track their progress on goals because they need to have the information available during the all-important review process. Additionally, managers need to be aware of progress on goals to step in with assistance or resources when it appears that goal targets will possibly be missed. Here are a few tips for tracking goals:

• Integrate Into or Create a Regular Process. Goal should be tracked on a regular and consistent basis. To do this, integrate goals into your regular processes like weekly management or department meetings. If these processes don’t exist, create one.Review your goals at least once a week or month to clarify your focus and use this information as a basis for goal performance discussions with your manager. You can use the opportunity to review the progress and adjust timelines or request additional resources if necessary or expand the goal once more information is gathered from other sources.
• Create a Dashboard Document or Source. Create a single document that houses all goals across the company. This one pager should show the goals and periodic progress and act as a dashboard for how the company is doing. Tracking your goals in a centralized location helps you stay on track in several ways:
  • Organize, manage and reassess your goals frequently
  • Create action plans with milestones for larger goals
  • Track your time to make sure your daily efforts are focused on meaningful tasks
  • Goals can be cascaded from the top down and made visible to all; everyone within the company is now fully armed with the information necessary when setting goals. They can create individual goals that support company goals and link to others if the success of their goal is dependent upon the actions of a co-worker or manager in another department or location.

Goal setting is not a nice to have – it is a fundamental behavior that has to drive your company behavior.