The One New Year’s Resolution Every CEO Should Keep in 2011

This article was written by Alison Eyring

The one New Year’s resolution every executive and manager should keep it is to ensure all his or her people have clear, measureable and challenging goals for the year. The idea of setting goals may seem too basic or trivial, but just take a look at decades of research on the topic and you’ll be convinced of the importance of goals for driving performance.

Most senior leaders are clear on the financial goals of their company and increasingly, they are clear on non-financial goals that lead to financial performance. Over the past decade more leaders have learned to drive alignment of business and individual goals as well. This is terrific. But, cascading goals isn’t enough in complex, global companies and many leaders fail to get as much benefit from goals as they need.

Here are a few tips leaders in global companies can follow to get the biggest benefit from goals:

• Clarify responsibilities. Employees often struggle with unclear roles and responsibilities that overlap amongst team members.  Goals can clarify these accountabilities. Engage people within and across interdependent teams to achieve individual goals. Ask them to share their own goals for the year. Take advantage of these conversations to discuss how they can support one another.
• Manage stakeholders. Goals are often aligned vertically, but not horizontally in the organisation, which means departments might be working in different directions.  Use your goals to align your stakeholders to your team’s priorities. Seek inputs from stakeholders before driving commitment in your team to goals. that have been agreed
• Set a high standard of performance. An important aspect of leadership is to set high expectations and motivate the team to succeed.  Make sure your goals set a high standard across all team members. By discussing individual and team level goals up/down/across the organisation, leaders create awareness of standards and build shared commitment to these
• Recognise success. Motivate your team by recognising progress and achievement of goals. Don’t wait until the end of the year to assess performance. Instead, create a routine for reviewing progress, rewarding and appreciating progress towards agreed goals, and coach on an ongoing basis so they can achieve performance.

Too often the setting of goals is a once a year event. Worse, it becomes a paper exercise that drives siloed behaviour. Leaders who use goals to build shared commitment, drive both vertical AND horizontal alignment, and foster greater learning and development will have greater impact on individual, team and organisation performance throughout the year

There are always new leadership fads and hundreds of books with advice. It’s easy to forget the basics or lose patience with techniques we learned when we just started out supervising a team. The ability of goals to help us drive performance is something all leaders should keep in mind as we start the new year.

(c) 2010 Organisation Solutions Pte Ltd.

About the Author: Alison Eyring is the founder and president of Organisation Solutions, a global consultancy specialising in organisational design, development and change solutions worldwide. Alison has 25 years of experience in the field of Organisational Development and her areas of expertise lie in large-scale organisation design and change, leadership development, and the design and management of distributed organisations.