Goal cascading or aligning
Goal cascading has been around for a while now; In fact it has been around for far too long. And finally we are starting to do goal alignment instead. I will explain why I think that is a step in the right direction and why goal cascading might be pretty in theory and in reports but not so useful in real life.
Imagine you wan to improve a car. Yu have a large group of people that works on the car development. They are experts on propulsion, steering, design, comfort and all other stuff.
So as a boss that is using Performance Management you setup goals. You have a goal that is:
Build a better car
You realize that is not something you can do by yourself, and instead of sending out a memo you want to set goals for everyone, so you cascade it.
So now everyone has the goal:
Build a better car
And you can report on the progress in all sorts of wonderful ways.
But what does it mean for the expert on propulsion? Is she supposed to improve her bit by 15%? And how is it done? And 15% is a bit of abstract information, it does not say anything on how it fits into the whole (It IS the whole). You as a boss will also just now that she is supposed to improve by 15%, not how she can do it or if she has the potential to improve her bit more or less.
Enter the goal alignment
In goal alignment instead of just pushing the same goal to everyone we encourage everyone to create individual goals that are aligned to their manager’s goals. We can have all manners of rules around it so that we can’t approve a performance plan without goals are aligned and stuff like that, but that’s just administrative stuff. The important bit is that the employee has to look at its manager’s goal and then write down in what way they can make that happen.
So if the original goal was:
Build a better car
The manager for design might say:
Improve air resistance
The employee working on the car body style might say:
Work on car body to decrease air resistance while making it slimmer
So now we have 3 goals.
The high speed resistance goal is supporting the air resistance goal that is supporting the overall improvement. They are aligned.
So why do we like this better than the cascading?
- Each employee has its own unique goal that relates to that employee
- The employee takes part of formulating the goal
- The goal is owned by the employee, not the HR/super manager
- We can see how the individual effort is adding value in the value chain
Yes it will take more effort than just cascading out goals, but if we cascade goals we might get goals for everyone, but are they relevant?
What’s most important - to get a report saying that everyone has a goal or to get goals that actually mean something?
