A Goal Life Cycle is Essential for Success

Most of us have seen the strategy to execution gap and wonder how to close it. This is particularly tricky when conditions and situations can modify the goals and the linkages to sub-goals that are driving to completion. Organizations must sense themselves in the context of their changing environment and adjust accordingly to reach top-level goals that cascade and guide in-flight efforts to results. Having an explicit life cycle that everyone understands and subscribes to is a big deal to reach goals and aspirational dreams for organizations and their contributors. This life cycle is the key foundation to goal management and adjustment effectively percolating through the organization in a coordinated fashion to deliver successful business outcomes. It connects well to supporting objectives and key results (OKR) and must have more rigor than just PPT presentations and EXCEL spreadsheets running the complete life cycle. Let’s explore the Goals Life Cycle (GLC)

Goal Creation

Creating upper-level goals is usually done by stakeholders in a cooperative fashion, however, these upper-level goals could be the vision of a strong and trusted leader. The advantage of a cooperative effort is the follow-on support from the functions and organizational unit leaders. These goals will be broken down into contributing efforts, all of which, will likely follow the same goal life cycle at the level they are at without losing sight of the upper goals and their specific contribution to the overall balance needed for success.

Goal Collaboration

It would be easy to set goals without gaining the “buy-in” of the leaders and contributors to the final outcomes. Collaboration should permeate the efforts of creating and executing on the goals set making sure that the goals will bear success, not violate governance and be consistent with the risk profile of the organization or organizations participating in attaining the goals. The collaboration process ensures a more common understanding of the desired results and outcomes with precited measures of success.

Goal Curation

All things good require some burn-in time or time to cure. This is particularly true when going down and out from the core stakeholders. It takes time to get minds around the goals and how they interact with legacy practices if at all. Time needs to be factored into feedback cycles initially or as the goals iterate and evolve. The key is not to allow too much or too little time.

Goal Communication

One of the crucial steps is to fully communicate the goals and any changes as they evolve as fast as possible to all those involved. By directly linking communications to the stakeholders’ goals with visible feedback, gives all a picture of the goals at any point in time. It is also critical to notify all participants when changes are taking place

Goal Co-Adjustment

It is important to evaluate the progress towards goals and the resulting changes. There needs to be an evaluation that determines the extent to which a set of efforts (program) has achieved its goals. This will require collaborative adjustments to bring the results closer to 100 percent success over time. This is where several iterations and variations can be modeled or tried. During the evaluation phase, some goals can be retired or audited for future lessons learned

Net; Net:

We all intuitively know the GLC is often iterative in nature because there are many moving targets these days and following the key sequence of the life cycle helps organizations move closer to success with fewer iterations. Having the proper support in place and working smoothly is also crucial for achieving success. The next posts will hammer home the business and technical supports necessary to achieve a goal-based culture, behaviors, and desired results enabling success. This will be followed by case studies or examples of efforts in the process.