Subscribe
In most businesses, while high level goals may be set for the organization, employees rarely embrace these or feel any connection to them. Yet this is exactly what your organization needs to be able to execute on its strategy and achieve its goals – an engaged and committed workforce, all pulling in the same direction. So how do you harness the power of your workforce and get everyone contributing to the organization’s success?
Goal alignment.
Now I’m not talking about your traditional model of goal alignment, where goals are cascaded from the top level of the organization down to each successive level of management and finally “dumped” on employees at the bottom of the hierarchy. This is sometimes called the “people-centric” model of goal alignment. This model tends to result in employees who are disengaged, because they are typically not involved in their goal setting process.
Cascading goals takes a long time to setup. Every successive level of management must wait for the previous level to have their goals set, before they receive their own. That can often result in large groups of employees working for weeks or months without clear objectives. And if a manager changes roles in the organization or leaves it altogether, the chain of cascaded goals is broken and must be reestablished.
Another challenge with cascaded goals is they can set up divided loyalties or even apathy. Employees are invested in making their managers successful, rather than the larger organization. This can result in them taking actions or making decisions that help their direct manager, but hurt other parts of the organization. Plus, since there’s no direct link between an employee’s goals and the organization’s high level goals, employees lack a context for their work. This can result in employees who are less accountable and have less ownership for their goals.
What I’m talking about is a model where every employee sets their individual goals in collaboration with their manager, and directly links each of their goals to one of the organization’s high-level goals. This model is called “organizational goal alignment”. This talent management best practice ensures every employee is contributing to the achievement of organizational goals, and feels ownership and accountability for both their goals and the organization’s.
With organizational goal alignment, goal setting can be completed much more quickly, since it is done at the same time, across the organization, as soon as the high level organizational goals are established and communicated. Because high level organizational goals aren’t affected by changes in staffing or organizational structure, the goals links are more stable and enduring.
Organizational goal alignment results in goals that are linked across the organization. This allows for broader, cross-functional contribution and a more detailed understanding of everything involved in achieving the goal. So for example, an organizational goal to improve customer satisfaction can be embraced as the responsibility of everyone in the organization, not just the managers and employees in the customer service department.
This model also gives employees at all levels of the organization clear visibility into how their work impacts organizational success. This typically enhances both their accountability and engagement by giving them an important larger context for their work.
And perhaps most importantly, organizational goal alignment shifts everyone’s focus to organizational success rather than simply individual success – a key ingredient in the recipe of harnessing the power of your workforce!
—