Most executives know their company’s strategic priorities by heart and can recite them without looking at a slide deck. Ask employees how their own individual goals support those broader priorities, and the words may not come quite as easily. In fact, many can’t draw a straight line between what they’re measured on and what the organization as a whole is trying to achieve.
This disconnect shows up in the monthly or quarterly results. Teams stay busy, dashboards fill up and projects move forward, but the big goals still feel out of reach.
“When performance goals aren’t clearly tied to the company’s vision, employees end up optimizing for activity instead of impact,” says Dana Zellers, an executive and leadership coach with 25+ years in corporate and agency roles at companies like Uber, Twitter and Publicis.
“Alignment isn’t about cascading KPIs down a slide deck,” Zellers continues. “It’s about helping people understand how their work moves the business forward and then [helping] them prioritize accordingly.”
Five Ways to Connect Employee Goals to the Bigger Picture
Meaningful performance goals don’t set themselves. Leaders must define what success looks like, connect it to real business priorities and ensure employees understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. When that connection breaks down, goals drift and performance reviews turn into paperwork instead of progress.
Here are five ways executives can make performance goals more meaningful and more closely aligned with company success:
1. Translate strategy into personal stakes.
Company-wide goals don’t drive performance unless employees understand where they fit into the grander scheme. When leadership sets a growth target or profitability objective, someone has to break it down to the department level and then to the individual level. If that translation never happens, people focus on their tasks without seeing how those tasks move the business. Over time, that disconnect spreads, and results stall.
Jay Titus, VP and general manager of the Workforce Solutions Group at University of Phoenix, says leaders can’t assume employees will connect those dots on their own. “Everyone in the company needs to understand how their own work impacts and contributes to the larger company goals,” he says.
Action step: Have managers spell out how each enterprise-level objective translates into specific team deliverables and individual performance measures, then revisit those connections in regular one-on-ones.
2. Measure outcomes, but track activities.
Set the tone for what matters most (e.g., growth, profitability, retention, etc.), and ensure they are measured and communicated. “The middle word in KPI is ‘performance,’ not ‘participation,’” says Titus, who advises leaders to set KPIs that give insight into whether or not activities are leading to outcomes. For example, if an employee in a call center hits their weekly call target but their customer service surveys are dismal, and customer retention is a company goal, there is misalignment from the get-go.
Action step: In quarterly reviews, have managers pair every activity metric with at least one outcome metric and discuss whether the activity is actually driving the intended result.
3. Connect the dots from company goals to individual roles.
Many companies communicate strategy well, but then they stop short of connecting it to what employees do each day. When that link is missing, performance goals drift away from business priorities. Zellers says leaders can avoid this problem with a simple structure showing how company objectives translate into team deliverables and individual ownership.
“The fastest way to connect employee performance goals to the broader mission is to build a clear translation layer between strategy and daily work,” says Zellers. “If a performance goal can’t be tied directly to a strategic priority, it’s either a development goal or it doesn’t belong.”
Action step: Map the year’s top priorities, the team outcomes that support them and the individual goals that ladder up, then review that map before finalizing performance plans.
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