Creating Your Vision

Mission Driven Goal Setting

Every manager and business leader creates formal and informal goals for themselves and their teams throughout the year. If they are lucky – some percentage of those are achieved, and occasionally even exceeded. What prevents us from having a great level of success with this process? The most common reason for goal setting to fail is that the goals are not aligned with the mission of the company, or that mission hasn’t been communicated effectively so that the importance of the goals is not clearly understood.

Early on businesses will write a mission statement that they put out of their website, maybe even hang up in some public place, print it on marketing material, etc… and then the words and meaning are forgotten. If as the leader of the company you don’t have a clear vision and purpose for what you want to achieve, then you certainly aren’t able to articulate it. How can you get anyone to follow you or the goals and objectives you have set, if they don’t know the “why” behind them?

The over-arching mission statement for the business may or may not be the mission or purpose statement that drives your quarterly and/or annual goal setting process. However, the mission or purpose statement that you focus on for driving those goals must align with the big picture for the business. After defining what you are focusing on for the time-period at hand, you are then able to create specific goals and objectives that will get you towards that vision. Share this with your team and have them create their own goals that roll-up and support what you have laid out. This partnership will increase the buy-in across the organization for working towards the objectives that have been set.

If you as a leader are passionate and driven to achieve the mission and purpose you have defined, that excitement will carry forward through your team and help to bring a value to the goals. This will take the goals from an arbitrary directives to an organizational rally point for success.