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All too often, people working in operational roles see strategy as something that doesn’t affect them; they are just there to do their jobs. But how do organizations know that everyone is working towards the same overall goals? How do you, as a manager, make sure that everybody’s contribution counts? The answer lies in making sure there is a clear line of sight between an individual’s performance objectives and the organization’s strategic plan, so that everyone can see how their contribution affects the success of an organization.
Managing performance through personal objectives is by no means a new concept, and you may be familiar with the use of SMART (specific, measurable, achieveable, relevant, and time-bound) objectives. However, you may not take the next step of linking objectives to organizational goals. The effect of this is that your team members may not see the connection between their activities and the success of the organization. The result may be that they lack commitment, or they may not work conscientiously.
Man on the Moon Thinking
A story goes that a cleaner sweeping a floor at NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) was once asked what he did for a living. He explained that he put men on the moon. He realized that although his job played only a small part in the whole, it was nevertheless a necessary part and that if he failed to do it properly, others would be affected.
Start With the Strategy
The first place to start when considering personal objectives is your organization’s strategy. Does it aim to develop new products or services, or perhaps to enter new markets? Is your organization in a climate of growth, consolidation or decline?
For example, suppose you worked for an organization which sold mobile telephones and telephone services. As so many people already have mobile telephones, organizations like the one you work for need to persuade customers to upgrade their handsets and contracts regularly. Your organization’s strategy is therefore to bring new products and services to a (largely) existing market.
Your organization’s strategy should then be translated into a number of department goals and objectives in order to help the various parts of the organization focus on their necessary contributions. Because keeping existing customers is important, all of the departments in your organization should help maintain and improve customer satisfaction. For example:
- your IT department might have objectives to improve the technology that you use so that you can offer a wider and more reliable service than your competitors
- your HR department might have objectives relating to training employees in giving customer advice on the new services
- your research and development department might have objectives to design and create new products and services aimed at specific customers in your market, for example, the under 25 year-olds.
- client service teams might have objectives to improve customer service by providing a faster service with fewer errors
Linking Objectives
In our example, you might manage a team in a client services area, with responsibility for answering telephone queries from clients experiencing billing problems. Your team might have objectives to resolve a number of complaints, to the customers’ satisfaction, within a fixed timescale.
Your department manager might have an objective like this:
- ‘to reduce billing errors by 15% within 12 months’
The purpose of your manager’s objective is to improve customer service. This meets the department’s overall goal and contributes to customer satisfaction and customer retention.
Your own objective should support your department manager’s objective and might read like this:
- ‘to produce accurate reports on billing errors, monthly, quarterly and annually, to identify trends and improve billing efficiency’
Then, when you set objectives for your team members, you should write them to support your own objectives as well as those of your department. So, for example, one of your team members might have an individual objective which reads like this:
- ‘to resolve billing errors, to 100% accuracy, within two days of identifying the problem and to maintain accurate statistical records of the nature of the problem’
You should consider making the link between the objectives explicit, by recording in the objective which departmental and organizational targets it supports. By applying this link to all objectives, you can align everyone’s performance towards the overall goal and your team members will have a clearer understanding of their contribution to the organization’s strategic objectives.
