Clear Goals Matter

What do your people want (other than more money)? They want clarity, autonomy, empowerment, respect, and organizational accountability. They want to make a difference and do good, meaningful work. They want to know that leadership cares and that everyone in the company is rowing in the same direction with the same commitment and vigor that they apply to their own work.

Do you know what your people don’t want? Rework, clumsy handoffs, confusion, obfuscation, and chaos. They don’t want to have their priorities shift unexpectedly. They don’t want their work to go to waste. There’s not much in the business world that does more to damage an organization’s culture or to drive employee dissatisfaction and disengagement than nonexistent or poorly constructed business objectives.

To illustrate, let’s suppose you’re taking your team to an off-site location for a team building event. What is the essential ingredient for a successful trip? Planning. Lots of planning. Advance notice, accommodations, flights, facilitators, speakers, learning objectives, and evening activities are just a few of the things that must be in place for a good result. Alternatively, if the objectives of the trip are not clear, travel is last-minute, facilitators and speakers are unprepared, and food and board are substandard, then the trip will likely be unproductive and a massive waste of time for everyone involved.

Interestingly, most leaders and managers would move heaven and earth to ensure a positive experience for this hypothetical team building event because the monetary outlay and use of precious resources (time) are obvious, discretionary, and directly measurable. If the trip goes badly, the blame typically falls directly on the leader, so the perceived “stakes” of a bad outcome are high.

Even more interestingly, many of these same leaders and managers do a poor job of clearly defining organizational, team, and individual goals under the flawed rationale that the work needed to do so is “too hard” or “things change too fast in our business to waste time defining goals that will change tomorrow anyway—we just need to get stuff done.”

While the costs of poor goal setting and opacity are seldom obvious, they come in the form of higher employee turnover, employee disengagement, and value streams that lack proper flow. The waste generated from poor organizational flow is measurable and takes the form of wasted motion, transportation, waiting, overproduction, defects, and the other wastes I outline in Chapter 14 of The Balanced Business. However, unlike our team building off-site example, these wastes are hard to pin on one individual or leader, so they’re tolerated more than they should be. Since blame is easily shifted and root cause can be amorphous, accountability for poor goal setting is spread across multiple stakeholders. In this environment, the effects of poor goal setting become woven into the corporate culture and a defeatist mindset slowly sets in. Chaos and lack of clarity eventually becomes the status quo.

So how can leaders give their teams and people what they want? For starters, make the time to establish clear goals and business objectives that align up, down, and across the organization. Monitor, measure, and adjust these goals in the flow of work and avoid “big reveals” and fast, unnecessary, and unexpected changes in course or tack. Your colleagues shouldn’t have to live their work lives with their heads on a swivel—keeping a watchful eye for that next surprise strategy shift that’s going to force them to quickly reengineer their workflow and hope that their colleagues can keep up.

Another key component of the clarity equation is to clearly define how to optimize workflow along the organization’s value streams, but we’ll save this for a future Muse.

No one likes to work through the mud of obfuscation. If you’re reading or watching this in mid-January of 2024 and your team and/or organizational goals for the year are not clear and well-communicated across the entire business, there’s no time like the present. To learn more, pick up a copy of my new book, The Balanced Business, today.