Guide to great goal writing

2024-06-28

Great business goals provide the roadmap for achieving amazing business results. Whether that means earning record revenue or building a thriving team culture, the goals you set help you fulfill the mission and purpose of your organization.

Conversely, lacking clear goals is a barrier to productivity. Both leaders and employees pay the price, leaving them ill-equipped to succeed in today’s uncertain business climate.

But while setting great goals is critically important, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are our recommendations for writing great goals.

1. First, begin with the end in mind

As a leader, if you're just getting started with setting goals or leading a rollout at your organization, one of the best ways to create lasting change is to be clear about why goals are important for your team.

What is your motivation for setting and achieving goals (and why now)?

To provide better visibility across your organization?
To align remote workers around a common goal?
To spearhead a new product launch?
To provide focus to fend off a competitor?

Being clear on your "why" and communicating what success looks like to your organization will inspire and motivate employees as you incorporate goals into your rhythm of business.

As an employee, understand the benefits of goal setting for you:

Priorities are more focused, so you have clarity about what you should be working on and why.
Visibility into top priorities for the entire organization, your own team, and cross-functional teams.
Ability to better prioritize work, so less time is wasted on initiatives that aren't critical to the business.
Improved autonomy and ownership of your work.
Greater alignment to every team member you work with.

2. Just get started

Some organizations might hesitate to elevate their goal-planning process because they don’t want to make a mistake. But the bigger mistake is to keep waiting until everything is perfect before starting, or worse, to not get started at all.

Whether it’s starting at just the leadership level or letting your goal program take a grassroots approach and grow from the bottom up with a few ambitious teams, the important thing is simply to get started. You’ll quickly learn what’s working and where you need adjustments. Plus, you might be surprised how quickly progress can be made when even just a few enthusiastic users start seeing the benefits.

3. Keep things simple

If your organization struggles to set or achieve goals, it’s probably because you set too many goals or make things too complicated. Here’s how you should view a goal:

An ambitious, aspirational target, tied to a measurable outcome

Start with an ambitious goal you’d like to achieve, doing your best to make it clear, concise, and aspirational so that others can easily articulate it and share your vision. Picture it as a slogan that would fit on a t-shirt.

Having measurable metrics is critical, allowing you to track and monitor progress along the way so that you know if you’re on track or need to make adjustments. At any point you should be able to answer the question, "Am I on track to achieve my goal or not?"

4. Ask great questions

Wondering where to begin, or looking to turn your good first draft goals into great ones? Here's a list of questions to get you started.

Questions to ask when creating your goal list:

What is the most important area of our business that we need to focus on?
Why does that matter for us now?
How would we write it into a statement that inspires our team?
Do these goals go beyond "business as usual" to inspire our team to reach for what’s possible?
Have we limited the number of goals we’re trying to achieve in order to stay focused on the most important projects? What can be cut?
Can our team directly impact the results of our goals, or are we reliant on other stakeholders? If the latter, how can we collaborate to ensure success?
Do we have the right goal owners identified, who will feel accountability for driving progress?
Have we asked other team members (both above and below us) to review our goals to make sure they're clear, concise, and measurable from an outsider's perspective?
Have we shared our goals via Microsoft Teams or PowerPoint to create accountability, prevent roadblocks, and ensure that goals are aligned towards the same purpose, across the organization?

Questions to ask when adding metrics:

What metrics would let us know that we were successful?
Do we currently measure that metric?
What is our target & baseline?
Will we be able to see progress on these metrics during the desired time frame?
Where possible, have we integrated with a data source such as Microsoft Excel or Azure DevOps to provide a source of truth?
Will reaching each of our metrics be sufficient enough to achieve success with our goals?

5. To go from good to great, iterate

Creating and writing effective goals takes practice and is a process that will improve over time. The key to improvement is iteration.

For example:

BEFORE

Goal list topic: Make more money internationally

Measurable goal metrics:

Increase new product sales from $100k to $1.5m (Sales)
Increase social media views from 5,000 to 15,000 (Marketing)
Increase qualified leads via web form from 50 to 3,000 (Marketing)

ITERATION

While most businesses need to make money, this goal list title is too vague to be aspirational and actionable. We’ll want to rewrite it to be clearer and more meaningful.

For the metrics, after a quick review we realize we’re missing some key stakeholders. We add a metric for the Product team tracking a Spanish language version of our product, and the People team for hiring bi-lingual sales staff.

Because the list is getting long, we decide that increasing our social media views is less critical to achieving the overall goal, so we remove that. We now have our revised goal.

AFTER

Expand into the Latin America market in order to increase product market share

Increase new product sales from $100k to $ 1.5 m (Sales)
Increase qualified leads via web form from 50 to 3,000 (Marketing)
Increase users of Spanish language app from 0 to 10,000 (Product)
Increase bilingual sales staff from 2 to 5 (People)

Summary

The essence of great goal writing lies in clarity of purpose and measurable outcomes. It’s about starting with a clear "why," simplifying to focus on the most impactful objectives, and engaging the entire team in a process that fosters ownership and alignment. By asking the right questions and embracing the process, organizations can inspire their teams to achieve amazing results.