From the Daily Record
It's the end of the year and time for resolutions.
Perhaps a better bet would be for organizations to create realistic goals.
Consultant Hal Resnick contends organizations should set strategic goals that generate action toward annual business goals as well as toward the longer-term vision.
Resnick is a Ponte Vedra-based organizational and training consultant with more than 40 years of experience with local, nationwide and international companies.
He is president of Work Systems Associates Inc. and wrote about strategic goal-setting for his November newsletter posted at worksystems.com.
Resnick provides six principles for effective and successful goal-setting.
1. Goals are a senior team responsibility.
Strategic goals should be developed by the senior leadership team working together, Resnick says.
The process can take one or two days and should take place before the budgeting process because some goals might need resources.
He advises against "bottom-up" goal-setting because that creates "transactional" goals.
2. Look at the current reality.
To ensure strategic goals are grounded in reality, the senior team should first conduct an honest and rigorous review of its current situation, Resnick says.
• The external review should examine the marketplace, including competitors and their recent actions, successes and failures. It should include an appraisal of the current customer base – size, profile of the current customers, emerging customer needs and current customer satisfaction.
• The internal review should include an assessment of organizational strengths that create competitive advantages as well as current weaknesses that could be exploited by competitors.
3. Review mission and vision.
Pull up the organization's mission and vision statements, which should be the centerpiece for setting strategic goals, he says.
"An analysis that either affirms or modifies these statements is an essential prerequisite," he says.
He says the team can discuss and agree on the substance of changes and assign the editing task to a single person or small team. That person or team can bring back several versions for the group to review.
4. Set goals at the organizational level.
There are two approaches to developing strategic goals.
Resnick said the first is to have the group brainstorm all the barriers and obstacles — internal and external — that might prevent the organization from achieving its vision. That is a risk-based scenario model.
The second is to have the group brainstorm all the strategies they think need to be implemented — again both internal and external — to achieve the desired vision and fulfill its mission. That is more forward-thinking in style.
5. Assess capacity.
After the goals have been set, the next question is whether the organization has the capacity to reach for all of them and when.
"This requires honest rigor and analysis of financial capacity, leadership capacity and implementation capacity," Resnick says.
If not, he recommends reviewing each goal against the question: Is this goal necessary for us to achieve our vision? If the answer is no, then implementation is optional at the moment.
When the goals have all been reviewed, the second question is whether the achievement of the strategic goals is sufficient to achieve the organization's vision. If no, then some strategic goals are missing.
6. Implement wisely.
Goals fail because there is no single point of ownership and no cross-functional team collectively accountable for their success, Resnick says.
His recommendation: Each goal should be given to a strategy leader from the leadership team, and that leader should identify three to five people to serve on a team.
The first task of the team is to develop an implementation plan to be approved by the senior leadership team, along with a process for reviewing progress.
"Most organizations are very good at the tactical day-to-day implementation of their work," Resnick summarizes.
But few are equally good at setting and reaching for strategic goals.
However, doing so "can catapult an organization toward the achievement of its vision."