The Importance of Unified Goals

A couple of weeks ago, I was working with a CEO on setting goals for her organization. We asked the leaders of every department to come up with their goals for 2024. 

In part, because people were thinking “strategy,” most executives came back with goals that were parts of larger multi-year efforts. The core goals for this year—e.g., funds raised, people served, team improvements—were missing.  

When we followed up, the request was clearer: Provide a list of all of the things you plan to accomplish in 2024.

However, when talking to the CEO, I realized she was also thinking of “strategic” goals separately from “operational” goals. My counsel: You should think about these in a unified way. 

Here’s why: 

Everyone in the organization has to make tradeoffs of their time, attention, and resources across activities. This is true whether the activity is intended to have an impact this year or down the line. Whether I’m going to the gym to lose weight or for greater heart health 20 years from now, it’s still a choice to spend an hour there instead of doing something else. 

The other reason it’s important to approach today’s and tomorrow’s goals in a unified way is that it makes them easier to manage. If strategic initiatives are segregated from other work—tactically, discussed at different meetings and tracked in different systems—it increases the chance that the team becomes overly focused on the present and loses track of the strategic destination. That happens because most of today’s initiatives have pressing deadlines and consequences, whereas the pain of delaying tomorrow’s initiatives is far off.

Finally, I’ve also seen situations where, because strategic initiatives are segregated, leaders who are not directly responsible for the strategic initiatives think of strategy as someone else’s job rather than constantly asking, “How is my team’s work contributing to the organization’s strategy?”

While I see segregated goals often in organizations, I see it even more prominently in how people manage their individual goals, usually with a bright line between work life and our personal life. Here, too, it’s helpful to unify the goals. 

Teresa Taylor, the former COO of Qwest, talked about realizing this. She said, “I thought I had to keep work and home very separate. I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do, especially as a woman. [...] After a while, when I brought my personal life into the office, it was O.K. Now my calendar is one calendar—everything personal and everything professional is on one calendar. I used to keep literally two separate calendars, and then wonder why I missed a few things.”

Alan Mulally, the former CEO of Ford, made a similar observation. “I don’t have separate buckets of my life, like my family life or my personal life or my work life. I just have one integrated schedule….”

Like our professional goals, that integration is the only way to tell if we’re making the appropriate tradeoffs.