Are Your Goals Centralized?
Setting Goals in a Matrix Organization Must Centralize Purpose
Ever feel like you’re on an island in the office? You know, everyone seems to be battling for their own needs and there’s a constant demand for your help, but rarely an offer of assistance in return?
If so, it is a classic example of what happens when a business gets sloppy with goal setting, and fails to centralize organizational focus. While we can accept the fact that people generally mean well and that people want to do a good job, ultimately, individual responsibilities will take priority over collective success when there is a conflict between the two.
While the benefits of a matrix organization include things like resource pooling and functional excellence, matrix structures also come with their share of challenges. One of the primary challenges we are examining here is the natural creation of silos in a matrix structure and their tendency to create competing (or conflicting) goals within an organization. Over the course of several visits to a client, I had the ‘opportunity’ to witness this conflict first hand.
The Standard Leadership Team Meeting
I sat through a series of my client’s regularly scheduled leadership team meetings not long ago. This particular team consisted of higher level managers, business unit leaders and other individuals with significant responsibility in the company. The format for these weekly leadership meetings was a once-a-month review of each function’s metrics, challenges and highlights. Each week, two or three different department heads would get up in the front of the room to provide an update on their team’s activities, highlight trends and share action plans in response to data. It should be noted that this was the only 90 minutes the team spent together each week.
Over the course of several months, though, I started to see a slow decline in the team’s focus. I could not help but notice that attendees were multitasking during their colleagues’ updates more and more. Additionally, attendees started coming in late and leaving early. As the weeks went by, the standard agenda was followed with less rigor, with one or two managers frequently interjecting their ‘issue’ as an urgent topic of discussion. It’s understood that people in management positions are often very busy and that there are conflicts for time. But the obvious issue with this team that could not be overlooked was the fact that there was a gradual decline in cross-functional collaboration and a sense of joint-ownership for the organization’s success.
The Surfacing of Conflict
Last week, it came to a head. During his functional review, the first scheduled presenter abruptly stepped away from the podium mid-sentence to call people out.
“Folks, I have an issue. When I stopped on that last topic, I only had one person’s attention, and there are 12 of you in here” he said. Everyone had their laptop up, clearly typing away and not listening to him speak. “If this is not important enough, I’ll just sit down and we’ll move on to something else, no problem.”
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Another manager, guilty of ‘multitasking,’ promptly defended herself by stating she was in meetings all day. She continued by saying she had already seen these metrics and was trying to catch up on emails. Other functional leaders then entered the debate. What ensued was a lengthy (albeit healthy) discussion of what was important, who had final say and ultimately, that things were not working well and change was needed. It was clearly a mutual feeling shared by everyone in the room.
As I sat back and watched (I had actually been wondering why it had taken so long for the conversation to occur, having witnessed this behavior for months) it was apparent to me that the root of the problem was nothing personal or the skills of the managers on the leadership team. Rather, the source of the problem was misalignment of their individual priorities and goals, an issue that impacts many organizations.
The Source of the Problem
As it turned out, each functional manager in the room had metrics and goals to deliver to the business, but few of them were actually related or connected to one another. For example, the supply chain manager’s goals were to reduce inventory and negotiate lower prices from suppliers. The engineering manager’s goals were to produce patents and develop new products quickly. The quality manager’s goals were to reduce scrap material and catch any flawed product before it left the factory. Sure, all of these things are important to the business, but there was simply a lack of overlap between each department’s objectives.
We discussed an actual example of how misaligned goals impact organization performance previously at the Manager’s Resource Handbook, and concluded that for organizations to function well and for accountability to exists, alignment of individual objectives was crucial. This team’s behavior was a classic example of what happens when organizations lack focus.
The Impact of Poor Goal Alignment
The purpose of setting goals in business is to define central and mission-critical objectives that the organization wants to achieve. In order to be successful, the business’s leaders and managers must ensure that all employees are aligned to these central objectives. The result of a successful goal setting exercise, therefore, is to set expectations for all employees that support the organization’s overall mission.
“Individual responsibilities will take priority over collective success when there is a conflict between the two.”
By contrast, when a team lacks alignment between individual goals, there is no collective purpose. In other words, everyone is off doing their own thing, focused and prioritizing their needs over the needs of others on a regular basis. As was the case with the meetings I sat through with this particular client, it was clear that there was no shared objective. In reality, this leadership team was just a group of individuals.
Let’s be fair: centralizing and limiting your business goals down to the critical few is not easy. In fact, the bigger the organization, the more difficult it is to do. In the case of my client, there actually were a limited number of high level goals set at the top. These included thing like achieving superior financial performance, increasing sales growth and improving customer satisfaction. The problem was, however, that these top-level objectives were expanded into a list of projects and initiatives (approximately 20 per function) that was simply too lengthy to drive any focus. So, the results were predictable: the long list of ‘important’ objectives was never completed, and encouraged an ‘every man for himself’ culture.
Successful Goal Setting
When setting goals inside a matrix structure, it is vitally important to not be greedy. Narrow down your list of priorities and initiatives to a key four of five. If you don’t, you run the risk of diluting focus within the organization and are unlikely to achieve any of them. Once you have you select few, each high level objective should have an equally limited number of supporting projects or measures that are agreed upon across functions. Finally, each function must own a piece of those projects and objectives, so that there becomes a shared and cross-functional purpose to the entire organization.
Managers and business leaders are responsible for defining the goals and the targets for their firm. But success is in the eye of the beholder. When setting strategic initiatives in your business, be sure to drive focus and go to great lengths to ensure every employee’s work is aligned to help achieve those goals.
Do you have any examples of bad goal setting in business? Leave a comment and share!