The Key to Setting Goals that Lead to Outstanding Outcomes

The questions you and your leadership team need to ask before you finish your goal-setting process this year

Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

For many organizations, the goal-setting process is fraught with stress, discord, and confusion. When not executed well, team members are left feeling unclear or unmotivated. When things go really awry, different departments may interpret the goals differently or feel at odds with each other.

While the process of goal-setting can be rather complex, the test for whether you have clear, specific goals that will energize your team and clarify priorities is not. Let’s dive in!

A Story

Susan was a division leader who had been charged with turning around a stagnant business. She had been with her company for one year and felt she had a lay of the land. She had built trust with her direct reports and the rest of the executive team. Susan had established her reputation as a strong operator and an inspiring leader. Yet the latest employee engagement survey from her staff indicated a lack of motivation and low morale.

When Susan started to investigate what might be happening, her team shared that the company’s goals each year felt repetitive and like a laundry list of metrics (grow revenue by x, grow profit by y, reduce customer churn by z) and that it didn’t give enough clarity as to what was the focus and so different divisions felt at odds with each other (innovate and scale, grow and increase efficiency, fail fast and reduce risks).

Susan went to her boss, the CEO, to share these insights. Fortunately, her CEO was open to hearing constructive criticism and alongside their CFO, they re-worked their goal-setting process. They instituted a checkpoint using the following questions which they tailored to their company’s needs:

STRONG Goals Framework

• S - Are the goals specific enough so that there isn’t a risk of misinterpretation?

• T - Are the goals trackable? How and when will we know if we are moving in the right direction?

• R - Are the goals relevant to our company’s context at this moment in time?

• O - Have we capitalized on the most important opportunity and not simply addressed the risks?

• N - Will the goals help us navigate key decisions at all levels in the organization and across all functions?

• G - Will these goals galvanize all departments and individuals to work towards the same ends?

As they drafted goals as an executive team, they would use the questions above to check if they were on the right track. In addition, before they finalized their goals, the executives instituted a preview session with their direct reports, the next layer of leadership in the organization. This enabled them to get immediate feedback and to course correct before goals were shared with the entire team.

Preview Sessions with Direct Reports

To facilitate a productive pre-rollout feedback process, all of the executives did the following:

1. Set aside one week to gather feedback:

   1. A one-hour meeting to present to their direct reports.

   2. A one-hour meeting two days later to gather feedback from their direct reports.

   3. Summarized the feedback they received and shared it back with their executive colleagues by the end of the week to review asynchronously before regrouping for a final goal-setting session.

2. Presented the goals in the same way, using the same presentation template and talking points.

3. Set expectations clearly at the outset with their direct reports that while their feedback mattered, this wasn’t a session to complain or make demands. Sharing that feedback was being gathered across the organization so that all departments could provide input.

4. They used their STRONG goals question framework to guide the conversation and to structure the feedback.

After they gathered and reviewed the feedback, the executive team found that there were 3-4 common themes and chose to prioritize addressing two of them in their final pass at company goals. While they didn’t incorporate all of the feedback into the goals, the early feedback helped them craft their messaging strategy so that they could preemptively answer questions and handle objections. It also allowed them to be unified in how they addressed these concerns going forward, avoiding historical issues where one department heard one version of answers and another heard a different version. Lastly, this process allowed them to create buy-in with their next tier of leadership, helping to more effectively cascade messaging throughout the rest of the organization.

When the executive team finished rolling out goals, they surveyed their staff for feedback on the process. What they heard back was overwhelmingly positive, especially in contrast to past years. There was still room for improvement, but they had done a great job of addressing the key issues that surfaced in the employee engagement survey. Susan, in particular, was pleased because her team reported that when they worked with their colleagues in other departments, they felt like they were all working towards the same end.

A Learning (or two)

There were quite a few learnings in this particular story that might be helpful for your organization:

1. Gather feedback throughout your goal-setting process

   1. Leverage intel from various sources including your employee engagement surveys.

   2. Empower your executive team to raise issues.

   3. Incorporate a feedback process with key next-level leaders before you finalize your goals.

2. Build a process based on what your organization needs

   1. Don’t just default to what’s been done in the past or what other organizations do.

   2. Listen to your team and observe where goals are working and where they aren’t.

   3. Don’t get stuck on building the “perfect process” — it doesn’t exist. Test and learn.

   4. Plan to adjust your approach as your organizational and business contexts change. That might be every few years or every 6 months, only you will know.

3. Consider the rollout goals and process from the get-go

   1. Rollout and communications should take up at least 50% of your time and efforts. Goal-setting isn’t complete until every person in your organization understands them and is clear on how the goals will guide their work.

   2. If the rollout is part of your initial process design, you can incorporate steps along the way as Susan’s executive team did, where you’re getting feedback and buy-in earlier in the process. This will make the rollout more successful.

Take Action

Think about one step your team could take to improve your goal-setting process this year. An easy way to start is to just ask one question.

I’d love to hear what you’re experiencing, for example:

If you are feeling ambitious,

• Run a survey across your team to get broader-level feedback.

• Initiate a conversation at your next leadership meeting to see what other executives are feeling.

• Distill the top 3-5 areas that you might want to address and structure a brainstorming session with your leadership team to ideate what changes you might make to your process.

If this is feeling daunting,

• Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to change too many elements of your process at once.

• Start with only one or two changes. By limiting yourself to one to two elements to start, you’ll already be shifting how your organization thinks about goal-setting from a stagnant, difficult process to one that is evolving and agile.

Your Turn

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the Comments section on:

• What do you want to improve in your goal-setting process?

• What has been the best change you’ve made to your goal-setting process? How did you know it worked?

Let’s all make the goal-setting process a little more effective this next go around!

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Additional Resources

• SMART Goals Framework (Tableau)

• OKRs 101 (What Matters)

• Goal Setting: A Scientific Guide to Setting and Achieving Goals (James Clear)

• When Goal Setting Goes Bad (Harvard Business School)