Your performance goals drive your business strategy. If your goals are fuzzy, weak or unclear, don’t be surprised if your strategy has similar characteristics. On the other hand, clear, ambitious goals – such as becoming the #1 player in your market, or achieving sales of £x million – demand a clear and well thought through strategy.
That is why it is so important to identify your organisation’s #1 performance goal; the goal, above all your other targets, you want to achieve over the next few years.
Here’s what Ian Filby, the CEO of DFS (the UK’s leading sofa retailer), said about the importance of goals in my book, The CEO’s Strategy Handbook:
One of the big strategy lessons I have learnt as CEO of DFS is that a strategy has to meet a clear goal. Without agreement about the goal, you can’t settle on your strategy. As a result, one of my first tasks was to agree the exit strategy goal. To agree the size of the business, its growth prospects and the type of sale expected by the owners.
As we did this we realized that we had different sale options according to the length of the current ownership journey, that inevitably would be market dependent.
We then built on these insights to create some new growth options, which hadn’t previously been considered. That’s what I mean about goals driving strategy.
What are your big, strategic goals? How clear and distinct are they? And what must you do if your organisation is to achieve them?
© Stuart Cross 2017. All rights reserved.