The Hierarchy of goals: eliminating wasted resources by Aligning tasks and goals

Tactics fail, projects die, teams waste time, everyone is frustrated. Sound familiar? It happens all the time and though there are many reasons it happens, one issue seems to come up time and time again. The tactical work isn't aligned with goals. People end up working on things that are a distraction, nothing gets done and everyone wastes a bunch of valuable time or worse, money.

It sounds like a simple problem but it can be a real challenge to make sure you and your team are working on the right things at the right time. Often these distractions are disguised in a pretty cool idea that people are excited about. Sometimes they come down from the boss or a client and the team feels like that have to do it, even if they aren't aligned with the idea. 

Another very common cause of this is a much bigger issue. The team hasn't been brought along with the vision, the big picture, the WHY of the company or project. The ultimate goal at the top isn't clear (or shared) and as the goals work their way down through the company, they become like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy until people are just working on "stuff". Every request gets granted, results drop, babies cry. 

• 48% of all organizations fail to meet at least half of their strategic targets.
• 61% of C-level executives acknowledge their firms struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and day-to-day implementation.
• 47% of team members don’t know how their leadership is tracking the strategy execution.

It's impossible to avoid the death trap of idea distraction without a framework and alignment from top to bottom. So if you're a leader, you need a clear vision and a tool that enables you to make sure your entire team is rowing in the same direction. And if you're in the boat rowing, it would be nice to know where the fuck you're going. 

But how can you quickly determine if the latest idea fits into the game plan or not? Here's the tool you need.

The Hierarchy of Goals

Being efficient with your time and resources is crucial for almost any kind of project. To ensure you aren't wasting time or money you need to make sure that your tactics align with your goals from the top down. It's called the Hierarchy of Goals, and once you get clear on yours, it gets easier and faster to evaluate ideas. 

There is a catch though. It does require you to have a vision or an ultimate goal. You need to know at the highest level, what the actual objective is. Some leaders really struggle with this. Some don't have the ultimate objective clearly defined, while others don't share it with the entire team for various reasons. That's catch number two, everyone actually needs to know the End Game goal and be bought in. If your team doesn't know what the ultimate goal is, how do you expect them to help (or care)? What's the big carrot you're chasing? Here's some examples depending on what you are working on. For this example lets keep it in a business context and say the ultimate goal is a $1 billion dollar exit.

(You can also apply this to any other project you are working on ie. Winning a championship in sports, a musician going on tour with Taylor Swift, speaking on stage at SXSW...)

So the end game goal is clear, that is going to sit at the top of the pyramid. To start building out your Hierarchy of Goals, you start building down by asking questions like "how are we going to do that? What needs to happen?" which will begin to lead you closer and closer to tactical work. If we want to sell our company for $1 billion what do we need to do? How are we going to get to that evaluation? The answer to that question become the next level down. The strategic goals. 

"In order to sell this company for $1 billion we need to _____________". Lets fill that blank with "increase the value of the company". Sounds logical, now how are we going to do that?

"In order to increase the value of this company we need to ____________". As we start to build down our actions should get clearer and more specific so this level lets add "increase revenue" and "increase brand value". 

Now we start to split our Hierarchy of Goals and we can start adding specific goals. For example "increase revenue to $X ARR".  This is the Intermediate Goal level where senior leadership likely starts to hand it off to their teams. Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Product and so on will all start to build their strategies to contribute to their piece of the growth. 

Each team will build out their Tactical Goals. Again asking "how?" the Tactical Goals are created to fill in the blank. "To increase revenue to $X ARR we need to _____________."

These become pretty obvious pretty quickly. "Increase sales to X per month or Increase retention by X" and we get closer and closer to execution. You will also notice we are starting to multiply the branches as we work our way down. This is a representation of the amount of work and support that will be needed. 

"To increase sales to X monthly, we need to ________________". These blanks get filled in with things like "Drive more leads" or "Increase conversion rates". 

Now we are getting down to the tactical level. Ideas can start to flow, brainstorms, tests - all that good stuff that we get excited about BUT now it's focused. You may have good ideas come up but if they don't serve your Immediate Goals, park them for later.

Now you have a direct correlation between these ideas and the ultimate goal. The team can quickly determine if something is aligned with the big picture goals and push back if they need to. This clarity is invaluable for keeping the work focused on meaningful efforts.

Aligning your tactics to your goals really doesn't take long and it doesn't have to be painful, as long as you have that oh so crucial piece, your north star goal. Don't hold back from your team, they need to understand the vision if you want them to buy in and give you all they have.