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Communicating Mission, Goals, Strategy

Communicating Mission, Goals, Strategy

I was managing a five-person startup. We had put our mission, company values, goals, and strategy in place about 6 months ago. We had spent several days together in a small, windowless conference room nailing down these things. No distractions. Just focused on making sure the mission, values, goals, and strategy were all well defined.

Since there were just five of us, I figured that communicating those things again wasn’t necessary. Then about 6 months later, we were talking about current projects and future projects when suddenly, Kevin said in a frustrated tone, “I don’t know where we are going. How can we determine what projects to do next if we don’t know where we are going?”

I was stunned. We had all agreed on our mission. It hadn’t changed. That mission certainly defined our end game, what we wanted to achieve over time and we had defined goals to get us to that end game.

I suggested we take a break. When we got back into the room, I said I wanted to review our mission, values, goals, and strategies just to make sure nothing had changed. We went through them and didn’t even tweak one. I then asked what new projects we should consider and we had a productive conversation.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need to repeat our mission, values, and goals periodically. We were only five people – how could we not all be on the same page? But I found it doesn’t matter if you are managing five, fifty or five hundred people. As a manager, I have to constantly review these things with my organization. Communication takes effort and I have to invest my time in it constantly.

I need to remind myself that as a manager these things are important for me to know and track. But employees are focusing on other aspects of the company and projects and it’s not their job to keep these things up front and visible.

So now I always review the mission and goals with my teams and tie it to what they are working on right now. Most people like knowing they are contributing to the company mission and goals. You can also review progress toward goals. I’d rather have people say they are bored with hearing the mission statement and goals than them saying they don’t know where the business is going or what we are trying to accomplish.

Constantly communicating the mission, value, goals, and strategies helps keep people focused and on target. And helps them to see how they are contributing.

Cascading Goals Down into an Organization

Cascading Goals Down into an Organization

When the end of the fiscal year approaches it means it’s time to create goals for the next year. At a large company, this can be challenging, as often the corporate goals are sometimes very high-level.

Frequently, I’ve seen people get very cynical about high-level company goals. Or worse yet, software developers who think the company goals have nothing to do with them personally. That’s simply not true. Everyone in the company needs to support the company goals. The work each employee does impacts those goals whether they realize it or not.

Let’s look at an example. If a company has a goal to increase revenue by 30% , how do I, as the manager, translate that into something meaningful for my development teams? I definitely want to support increasing revenue, after all, I want my company to be successful. I want my teams to be aware of this goal for the company and that what they do impacts that goal.

Let’s assume I have a software development team working on a new release of an enterprise software product. The new release will be out in spring. The question to ask is: How will this product release contribute to increasing revenue?

If the release is high-quality, customers will be happy. If it is of low quality, customers will complain and that information could impact sales to other customers. And, if the changes the team makes to the user experience truly are easy-to-use and intuitive versus not so easy to use and not intuitive, that will also impact customers and sales.

So in this example I am going to create goals for my team supporting the revenue goal using these two requirements: high-quality and easy-to-use intuitive software. The goals could be written as:

  1. Release the software with no priority 1, 2, or 3 defects. This will be measured by the number of open defects.
  2. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use. Measured by the feedback from usability studies and comparison with prior testing.
© 2008 Annette Wagner. All Rights Reserved.
©2008 Annette Wagner. All Rights Reserved.

Both of these team goals support the 30% increase in revenue goal. The next step is to translate these product goals into individual contributor goals:

  1. For each software development team member assigned to the April release, they will write unit tests and fix all p1, p2, p3 defects found by QA/QE.
  2. The software development team is required to work closely with the user experience team to create a user interface that is intuitive and easy-to-use and to support user testing needs.

By tying an individual developer’s goals into the company goals, everyone understands how they as well as their  team contribute to the company goals. This not only makes those goals meaningful and achievable, it makes the goals understandable and doable by the team members.