How To Reach Your Strategic Goals
Setting strategic goals for your business is often much easier than achieving them or attempting to do so. Here are 6 tips that may help you as a leader ensure your team works better together to achieve the identified strategic goals.
1. Assign Responsibility
While this may seem like an obvious statement, it cannot be overemphasised. Assigning specific tasks to specific individuals creates a level of accountability that works to ensure individuals complete the tasks or goals assigned to them. Additionally, including (the completion of) these goals as part of a staff member's measures of performance (MOP), shifts the responsibility of the goal to said staff member, increasing their likelihood of achieving their assigned goals.
2. Make Note Of The Intended Output
Basically, know and make a record of the end-goal or the result you expect to have once all of the related goals have been achieved. Having these end-goals and outputs written out not only helps you to formulate the correct goals initially, but also to helps you measure your progress against that end-goal.
3. Allocate Resources
Appropriate and mindful resource allocation is an integral part of ensuring strategic goals are achieved. While one individual may be best suited to begin a task, they may not have the capacity to complete it. It is your job to be aware of this fact, and allocate resources (human and otherwise) accordingly.
4. Give Feedback Regularly
Strategic goals should always be seen as important and all staff members should constantly be aware of the progress (or lack thereof) made towards it. This can be done by making the progress towards the goals a standing agenda of every management and related meeting. This reiterates the importance and provides a regular opportunity for challenges, questions, and deviations to be addressed.
5. Amend Your Goals If Necessary
The context in which you first create a goal will not necessarily remain the same throughout the pursuit of the goal. As such, it may become necessary to amend your goals, certain aspects of them, or the steps you have identified to reach them if the original context surrounding them has changed. In fact, upon later reflection, you may find that a goal you have made is not viable or unrealistic given new circumstances. Do not be afraid to remove this goal or tweak it until it becomes more viable and realistic.
6. Reward Exceptional Work
Rewards act as a good incentive for staff members to complete tasks related to the overarching strategic goals. They are also considered good business practice when staff members perform exceptionally well or exceed your expectations. The reward should be commensurate with the performance of the employee and outcome of their actions.
Strategic goals play an integral role in ensuring your business reaches the levels of success that you envision. However, they lose their validity and usefulness when they are not planned and pursued correctly. Give yourself and your business the chance of achieving the best possible outcome by setting goals that are clearly defined,assigned, adequately resourced, and monitored.
The ideas in this article are based on an article titled Ensure that you reach the strategic goals of your business, which was originally posted on The Small Business Site, and written by Jannie Rossouw, Head: Sanlam Business Market.
