Do your puzzle pieces all fit together?
Goal setting is an annual routine in many businesses, yet often the results don’t translate to improvement in the business as a whole. Worse still, improvements in one area actually make things worse for another one. It’s like putting together a jigsaw and finding that the pieces have got mixed up and you have parts of several pictures or that some pieces are missing. Somehow the whole is less than the sum of the parts.
Why is this? Over the years, I’ve seen a number of common mistakes that organisations make in their annual business planning cycle.
One common mistake I see organisations make, in their annual business planning cycle, is to respond to whatever has happened in the current year by moving straight into goal setting for the next one. While it is reasonable to want to use goals to drive change, it is important to maintain the clarity a good vision provides and ensure that goals are not accidentally isolated from the long–term direction that vision provides.
Setting goals in isolation can have two negative effects. Firstly, they might be about improvements, but potentially not in the direction of travel of your “North Star”. And, secondly, if your goals are not directly connected to purpose, this will confuse your teams and may even be intrinsically less engaging. Worse still, setting goals in isolation can introduce an imbalance with your vision.
Another related mistake would be to miss the opportunity to include all levels of your organisation in the process, something which you took care to do when you first developed your vision. Something which allowed you to ensure your core purpose was engaging for all your stakeholders.
So, what can you do that will significantly improve your chances of creating the kind of change your business needs this year?
Well, two things spring to mind. First you can make sure your “vision” works hard for you by engaging your people, customers, investors and all your stakeholders; that it is infused with purpose. Secondly, you can ensure that your “vision” translates well into meaningful plans (goals and resources, tactics and actions) that are perfectly aligned with your purpose, ensuring maximum engagement with all stakeholders.
When working on your vision, the creative “fuel” will be purpose and how it delivers on the expectations of your employees, customers, investors, communities and even the environment.
From there you can move on to set those “breakthrough goals” – the ones that close the gap between the current version of your organisation and the one you are aiming to create (your vision). As you work, you ensure your plans are rooted in delivering on your sense of purpose. We know that when organisational purpose is well aligned with stakeholder purpose they become more fully engaged.
Done well, everyone in the business understands how the long-term vision and breakthrough goals relate to their team and their job, with a “local vision” and clear goals for the team and themselves that link clearly to the organisation’s goals. More than that, they will know that they have contributed to the setting of the vision and goals for the wider context. The vision and goal setting process truly becomes “bottom up” as well as “top down”
Making all of that happen is about using an effective process, both to create vision and to translate it into well worked plans that deliver what matters most. One which involves people at all levels in the organisation, with a clear and logical structure and which is ideally led by a facilitator and using a method such as Hoshin Kanri.
You can find more information on this topic in previous articles:
What’s the real reason your organisation’s annual goals are missed?
Don’t start at the beginning, start at the end!
Plotting your unique route to excellence