Objective setting should be seen as an integral part of your business. Having well-structured objectives helps to give your workforce and it’s managers clear targets which have been defined to ensure everyone is pulling in the same way. From a governance perspective most business owners deploy goals and having clearly defined objectives helps them structure the plans of the business ensuring a co-ordinated approach to acheive them.
Objective setting is not, however, all plain sailing there can be various challenges from establishing them in the first place through to tracking performance against them. In this article, we list our 5 key issues with setting objectives
1/ Buy-in
While objectives are clearly important getting buy-in that the objectives you’ve selected are correct is vital to thier success. Of course, it’s pointless setting objectives that don’t deliver against the top level strategic plan but corporations can be funny places. Perhaps your objectives don’t dovetail with those of colleagues and that might equate to them not being accepted by the business overall. Perhaps your objectives are not understood by your workforce and the resultant lack of buy-in will hamper performance. Without buy-in you’ll struggle to get your objectives off the ground.
2/ Learn from previous failures
You set objectives last year right? Well, what worked and what didn’t? Have you learned from last years objectives when setting this years? If not why not! Continuous improvement rocks and that includes when its used in objective setting. Ask yourself what worked, what didn’t’ and if it failed why did it fail. How do you incorporate this learning into this year’s objectives?
3/ Set goals that are aligned with top-level objectives
Your business is likely to have a top-level set of objectives. these are usually cascaded down through organizational departments – for example, the top level objective might be to increase sales by 10% – this might get flowed down to supply chain by way of improving customer service i.e. improving on-time delivery adherence. If your objectives don’t feed up to the top level strategy then you’re probably heading wide of the mark.
4/ Document Objectives and ensure you have a review cycle
I know it seems obvious but if you don’t document your objectives chances are you won’t’ remember them and won’t track them. Your objectives should be owned, documented with progress reviewed regularly. As part of the documentation, it’s always good to consider how you’ll measure the performance against the objective, i.e. what metric you’ll deploy to monitor progress.
5/ Set objectives that are achievable
My objective is to design a car that will drive 1,000,000 miles an hour. Clearly, an objective like that is not going to work. Having unachievable objectives can disenfranchise workers and quite frankly are a pointless exercise. This is different from having challenging objectives that require a push to be achived, in this instance, it’s probably worth breaking the objective down into subsets or milestones in order that progress can be tracked more effectively.
6/ Discuss with colleagues
Finally – Objectives are for sharing. Again, in a corporate environment, you’re tracking your objectives against top-level corporate goals. Sharing your objectives with your colleagues helps everyone see their place in the grander scheme. If you’re running a team this is especially important so that you avoid issues such as those discussed in point 1.
So there are our 6 points to consider when setting objectives – have your own thoughts? We’d love to hear them in our comments section below.