Achieving Goals_ Define and Surpass Your High Performance Goals - Kathleen Schienle [10]
On the other hand, when goals are established bottom-up—that is, independently of the rest of the organization by employees at lower levels—there is no guarantee they will meet the needs of senior management and the organization as a whole. Bottom-up processes in general are challenging and time-consuming. Some employees have never been involved in such decisions and don’t even know what a goal looks like. Others have been exposed to the approach but without success; they may hold back for fear that it’s a trick or trap of some sort. On the other end are those eager for a chance to be heard in the workplace and who are likely, at first, to be all over the map with their suggestions and pronouncements.
The only way to ensure that the expectations of leadership, boards, and stockholders are met, and that employees take ownership of them, is participation throughout the company in setting and meeting goals. When all levels of employees—from the CEO’s office to the mail-room—are involved then everyone is aiming for mutual success.
Thus, one of your main responsibilities as a manager is to be clear about the goals of the company and how they might affect individuals and work groups under your supervision. Managers should take an active role in goal-setting from beginning to end, ensuring first that the agreed-upon goal aligns with the corporate, division, or team mission; and second, that everyone involved agrees on the desired outcome.
RESOLVING CONFLICTS IN GOAL-SETTING
What if your company leadership remains unenlightened and sticks to the top-down approach to setting goals? Are you and your team doomed to drudgery? Have you been set up for failure? Even if you didn’t have a role in developing a goal, it is still yours to execute if your manager says it is. How, then, do you get motivated to tackle it, and in turn motivate your staff to help?
First, encourage employees to accept the goal as their own and focus on what they can accomplish at their level of responsibility. Urge them to give the goal all the energy, enthusiasm, time, and commitment they would give a goal that was set with their participation. Then, have them adapt the goal by pinpointing key aspects they can achieve. For example, if you’ve been assigned to bolster your sector’s sales quota, ask each employee to set a goal focused on achieving their part of the sales quota and to keep in mind the bonus you will all reap when the overall projections are attained.
Even when your company’s top managers embrace a collaborative approach to goal-setting, encouraging you and your employees to participate in setting goals that support the company’s strategies, goals might not be synchronized from one department or division to another. Unsynchronized goals can create major conflicts for individual employees or departments caught in the crossfire.
For example, the marketing group’s decision to reduce costs by cutting out trade shows undermines the goals of the training team, which had decided to channel all learning for the year through trade show opportunities. What can you do? After setting goals with individual employees, present their goals to your boss, who in turn can compare them with goals in other groups to make sure there are no surprises.
As much as possible, make sure that your own employees’ goals support your managerial goals, which in turn must support those of the manager above you. All goals must align with each other and with the corporate strategy, yet be specific to each individual or team as well.
THE GOAL-SETTING PROCESS
Effective goal-setting is a negotiation, with three phases to the process:
(1) the discussion, or detailed presentation of the