7 Steps to Help You Achieve Your Organizational Goals

How do you achieve your organizational goals? Lots of leaders get stuck here. They communicate their goals to their organization at a meeting and think everyone will grab hold of the goals and take it from there. But, this rarely happens.

It’s not that the goals are unreasonable or that there aren’t qualified people in the organization to make the goals happen – it is so much more than that. To achieve organizational goals it takes sustained effort and a sold approach.

Here are 7 steps that will help you achieve your organizational goals:

1. Clearly Define Your Goals While you may have made a list of your goals and spoken about them at an organizational meeting, that does not mean everyone understands them. Get feedback from your subordinates and revise the goals so they are clearly understood. Next, give the goals some context. Why are they important? What happens if the organization does not achieve them?
2. Make Sure Everyone Knows About Your Goals Every person in the organization has to have the same level of understanding and commitment to the goals. Everyone! If the goals are not clearly understood there will be potential for people to disregard them.
3. Refer to Your Goals Often Just because you spoke about your goals once does not mean your organization’s employees will always have them on their minds. The goals have to be worked into every meeting throughout the year. If you do not refer to them often other things will occupy your employee’s minds and drive them elsewhere.
4. Define the Building Block Initiatives That Will Make Your Goals a Reality Very few goals can be accomplished without building block initiatives. These initiatives are smaller discrete portions of work that will make your goals become a reality when they are accomplished with other initiatives. Because of their size and scope, building block initiatives have a better chance of success.
5. Establish an Approach to Completing the Building Blocks Initiatives: Each of the building block initiatives must have an approach for completing them. Just saying “do it” won’t work. Employees must be equipped with skills for organizing, tackling, and delivering what is needed for each initiative to be successful.
6. Give the Building Block Initiatives Adequate Effort to be Completed Your organization only has so much capacity for completing work. Your employees have to pay attention to the operational work that constitutes the purpose of your organization. Then, with whatever time they have left over your employees can work to complete the building block initiatives that will ultimately achieve your goals. Sometimes leaders have to cut back on operational work for individuals so they can complete the initiatives. The bottom line is this: if effort is not allocated to your building block initiatives, the goals will not be accomplished.
7. Publicize Progress in Achieving Your Goals Everyone likes to keep score. If you achieve something important, your employees will want to know if they are winning or losing. Each building block initiative should have a completion date during the year to show that progress is being made towards your goals. It rallies the troops and gives them motivation.

By working through these steps, your organization will be able to achieve its goals. But remember – progress is not cheap. It takes time and effort to reach your goals. Performance improvement companies like Systemation can help your organization maximize its project-related performance. Systemation offers project management training, agile development courses, and corporate management training programs to help businesses and organizations meet even the toughest goals.