Aligning Your Objectives to Your Goals

When you establish your operating plan, you must tie the objectives you set to the overall goals that you have set for the business. With these things aligned, your organization focuses its efforts on the behaviors that drive toward that result.

When you have established your longer term goals for your business, you then set the shorter term objectives to meet that goal. For example, if your “goal” is to get to San Francisco, and your “objective” is to get there in less than two weeks for under $1,000, you can them set your priorities and key performance indicators that align your efforts. Some examples:

  • If you want to increase sales by 25% this year, how many new customers do need per day and how many new leads per day to generate those customers?
  • If one your long-term goals is to reduce costs, you might set the short-term objective of each employee identifying $5,000 of potential savings.

Break down specific actions to be taken by specific people, assigning someone in each department involved to be accountable—and to help motivate employees.

“We WILL help you overcome the struggle.” 

A few other things to keep in mind when setting your long-term goals and your short term objectives:

  • Involve Employees: dictating to employees what their goals and objectives will be is one approach before more effective approach is having them participate in the development of the goals and objectives. This not only spurs conversations about what it will take to achieve these goals and objectives, but facilitate employee buy-in to ultimately what the plan of the company will be.
  • Be Careful About Conflicting Goals: it is not uncommon when you develop your goals to have one or more goals that may conflict with each other. For example you may have revenue goals and customer satisfaction goals but not enough resources to adequately achieve both.
  • Make Sure Your Operations are not Preventing the Achievement of Goals: for example if you want to provide great customer service to consumers as a goal, it would not make sense you make it difficult for customers to talk to a live customer service representative.

Setting your goals and objectives takes time, but is essential to ensuring that you stick to your plan and hold yourself accountable to the goals that you have set especially in light of all the things that comes across your desk as an entrepreneur.

Follow Us on Social Media

Where do you go for answers?

Try It for Free

Our Learning Community is the one stop shop for the intelligence you need. Instead of countless hours searching for answers, we’ve organized what you need to know across all of the business and personal issues you face. You’ll get answers from 100s of learning modules, tools and templates, vendor reviews and a vibrant community of your fellow entrepreneurs. Try it for free!

Share The Lonely Entrepreneur