What are strategic goals?
Strategic goals are an extension of your vision. They should feel like you are starting to put the meat on the bones of your strategy to achieve your vision.
Strategic goals are the bridge that connects your vision to objectives and actions. They should articulate what are the key areas you need to focus on to achieve our vision.
Strategic goals are set for a 3-5 (ish) year period. Depending on your business situation this could be slightly shorter or longer.
They should address the core areas of your business. At adapt, we use the 4 zone framework to group strategic goals. The 4 zone framework ensures your strategy and subsequent goals and objectives have a whole of system or balanced scorecard approach. You have already set your vision and strategic themes using the 4 zone framework.
Setting strategic goals
Step 1. Agree on your 4-6 strategic goals.
Sometimes this step is obvious and strategic themes cleanly convert to strategic goals. However, this is not always the case. Start by reviewing your strategic working board, The themes, SWT and competitors analysis.
Create simple names for each goal and put them in the platform.
Do you have at least 1 goal in each zone? Having a strategic goal in each zone ensures your plan is balanced and you are strengthening the whole system.
We often find that customers will have 2-3 goals in the Economic Engine. They could be around “Engaging the market”, “Sales”, “Delivery”, “Customer retention” and/or supporting or nurturing customers.
Step 2. Get clarity and alignment
Working with all the data you have recorded on your strategic working board work through each goal and ask yourself and the team;
Where are we now? Consider the present state of the business using the SWT, health check, and competitors analysis. Be realistic, don’t kid yourselves.
- Where do we need to be in 3 years to reach our vision?
- What are the gaps?
- What do we need to do to bridge the gaps?
- What is our approach to achieving success?
- How might we measure progress towards our goal?
- Can we measure progress with milestones each year(appropriate period)?
Answering these questions will help give your goals clarity. It’s this clarity that will help create the Objectives, and Key Results and actions to implement your strategy.
Step 3. Write and record SMART goals
Name: Clear and simple name that states what the goal is.
- Engage more customers
- Improve customer retention
- Improve profitability
- Develop replicable systems
- Improve our customer satisfaction score
Description: Try and include the impact or measure in the description and broadly how you are going to achieve it.
- We have improved customer retention by improving our delivery and our post-sale customer support. We have increased our customer retention from 50% to 95%.
- We are profitable with NPBT of 20%. We have achieved this by reducing our delivery costs and increasing our selling price to meet the market.
Put some metrics around it if possible. Time and measurables are not absolutely necessary but if you can you will have more powerful goals and you can measure your progress.
Step 4. Quality check
- Have you got fewer than 6 strategic goals?
- Have you considered the whole system? At least 1 goal in each zone?
- Do they give clear company-wide (not team or department) directions that express where the business is going?
- Are your goals SMART?
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