Translating company goals into daily tasks is necessary when building a strong culture where employees understand the value of their work and the entire organization is tracking towards the same outcomes. This is especially important when it comes to scaling: you need leadership, managers, and individual contributors working in the same direction in order to grow efficiently. 

Creating a company-wide framework to facilitate this may appear difficult and time consuming for the executive leadership team, but the benefits of intentional goal setting far outweigh the stress and dysfunction of a company that lacks clear direction, says Kerry Nagle, COO at Denver, CO based cybersecurity firm CyberGRX.

And although this sounds like a purely operational concern, Kerry says it takes the successful marriage of company culture and operations to make this work. Here’s how she builds a framework to align all employees by taking big picture goals and translating them into daily tasks.

Getting your team on course 

Throughout her career, Kerry has worked across several industries and realized early, no matter the product or service, an organization is nothing without its people. In her eyes this means building a strong culture that leads to operational success. Kerry has spent her career developing and implementing methods for streamlining operations and building cohesion among executive teams. 

One of the easiest ways to visualize this process is to imagine your team is a rowing crew, Kerry says. First, you have to make sure everyone is in the same boat—this may seem obvious, but when executives are not aligned on the mission and vision this will lead to inefficiencies and an inability to set and keep organizational goals. Next, all team members need to be rowing in the same direction towards buoys along the way to the checkered flag at the end of the race. This means employees working towards the same goals and the same eventual endpoint. Lastly, your crew needs to keep the same pace. Kerry stresses that you can always reevaluate where your buoys are set, but without clear expectations your team will be inefficient.

Setting up your framework

Once your executive team has a clear idea of the organization’s vision, it’s time to implement a company wide tool that takes high level organizational goals and breaks them down into accomplishable tasks at the team and individual level. 

The first step in creating your framework is to keep it simple and establish your agreed upon nomenclature. If your team has “goals” and “objectives”, don’t throw in new terms that may cause confusion when setting expectations for the year/quarter. As often as possible, keeping language simple and ubiquitous makes it easier for employees to understand and lean in. 

Next, make sure the framework is the right size for your company. Kerry says while there are countless professional frameworks available, what is necessary for a 200+ person organization will be far too complex and overwrought for a startup with 10 employees. The person on your team who owns the framework needs to understand what is essential versus what may become overprocessed.  

Lastly, it’s the responsibility of  the executive team to communicate the company vision across the organization. Creating your framework may mean a lot of upfront work for company leaders, but will lead to reduced inefficiency and show employees how their work contributes to the bigger picture. Essentially executives need to be able to answer the ever present question “why are we doing this.”

The Framework

According to Kerry, it’s easiest to think about building your framework from the top down, breaking it into three levels: company, team, and individual. 

Company

• At the top, your executive team is thinking about company vision and objectives for the next 1-3 years. From here, leadership narrows down and sets annual and quarterly objectives. Some frameworks may suggest setting up to 7 objectives in a year, but Kerry says after years of experience she sees the sweet spot as no fewer than 3 and no more than 5 objectives. 
• These objectives need to be measurable and executives should build in KPIs. Depending on your team size success may be measured qualitatively or quantitatively, but it is critical executives understand what constitutes success so they can adjust and reevaluate each quarter.  
• During this process, executives should elicit feedback and input from people Kerry calls your “lieutenants.” These are employees who sit at the team leader level (i.e directors, managers, etc), including these team members helps executives understand what resources are available and will prepare managers to communicate big picture objectives to their teams.   

Team

• Taking major company objectives to the team level often involves cross-departmental collaboration. Team leaders will need to work together to break up major objectives into smaller, incremental team goals. 
• Creating a team road map is a helpful tool as it gives managers a way to tangibly show employees how each team level goal is tracking towards one of the major company level objectives. 
• Quarterly goals are also important at the team level. This allows leadership to continuously evaluate progression towards big yearly objectives and set new buoys along the way as needed.  

Individual

• From the team level you need to go one step further and establish individual employee goals. These will define the daily tasks of your team members. These goals are extremely measurable and will help employees clearly understand how the work they’re doing moves the organization forward.
• Kerry says at the individual level you will often have multiple employees working together to accomplish something. When this happens you must designate a single person as the goal owner (decision-making frameworks like RAPID are helpful according to Kerry). This makes sure there is accountability among your team members. 
• Each quarter managers should take time to evaluate with their employees what was successful, what wasn’t, and what support they need moving forward in order to accomplish their tasks. 
  

This kind of framework may seem daunting at first, Kerry says. But it is a surefire way to band together at each level of a company and create a focused organization that is working together. A framework like this will force tradeoff decisions among executive leaders and will establish organization-wide priorities that are crucial to building strong cultural buy-in and operational success.