In the fast-paced realm of business, the process of setting strategic objectives, integrated with structured performance tracking, isn’t just a luxury—it’s an imperative. My years as an Executive Coach have only helped further validate what I learned in my years in the corporate world.

Goal setting is an art🖌️

It is also a skill and the artform comes in the shape of leadership development, which is a journey rather than a goal.

Setting measurable goals and aligning them with your organization’s purpose propels not just business performance, but fuels employee engagement—the very essence of growth and success.  In this article I will delve into the strategic approach of goal setting and performance tracking for organizational success and offer some practical guidance for leaders who want to drive business success and growth.

The Art of Strategic Goal Setting

The goal of any Goal is to define a result to aim efforts.  This is a large ask of something that typically gets ditched before it even gets traction. A strategic goal is more than just setting a goal for a new year; it takes a wider view into the future to enable measurement of actions and align them to meaningful results. Strategic Goals are about breathing your company’s purpose (Vision x Values) into the brain of your objectives (Mission), and mobilizing an entire organization to drive growth. 

See, I told you it was a large ask.

Companies who are able to connect their Purpose with Performance Objectives provide a roadmap for the work needed to drive progress, the day to day purpose for all work, and the means to measure the quality and quantity of the work done by all the workers.   This makes strategic goal setting a non-negotiable for the modern leader. I have distilled it into a three-step system to help make it a little easier to follow, because good Strategic Goals work for people as well as they do for companies. 

I’m telling you the dude is a workhorse.🎠

The system.

Most companies see these three steps as an event, to be done in a time frame and then delivered and delegated from there. There is no doubt the above steps are heavy lifting on their own but once defined the art begins when the process becomes a path for a collaborative and integrated measurement process. We leverage the process with our clients as a checkpoint for the actual goal, ensuring that it isn’t just clear, but actionable and measurable, so learning and growth is documented more frequently, enabling strategic shifts to happen more fluidly.

This process is less about traditional tactics and more about leveraging systems thinking to optimize performance within the existing business scaling best practices for sustainability, and capturing new thinking and ability to test along the way. Because systems thinking is an examination of the business ecosystem to identify the patterns that contribute (for some real fun check out the video link at the bottom of this post) it requires a balance of management and leadership skills.

By taking a holistic approach, we have helped clients identify potential areas for improvement and implement slight changes that create positive impact on overall performance.

In the next post I will share some techniques around these three steps.

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Strategic Goal-Setting Techniques: A Guide for Leaders

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In the meantime I am sharing this video that I seriously love that explains systems thinking in a way that is very systems thinking.