Intuitive wisdom tells us that even the best boardroom visions are worthless if they cannot be realized through the tactics on the shop floor. When a company's chief officers start to question why activities on the shop floor fail to move them toward achieving the vision, they might be well served to take a look at the linkage between their vision and goals, and the operational tactics as they play out on the shop floor. These linkages need to be visible and secure for the operational tactics to contribute to the overall business goals.
Evaluating the Gap
For example, if the company vision includes a growth target over 5 years, each operational element of the business should be able to answer a number of key questions in relation to that vision, some of these being:
- Does each operational element of the business have its plan to help the business get there?
- Is each operational element of the business continuously validating what it needs to look like in 5 years time?
- Does each operational element have its own set of time-phased strategies to move it along to the growth target?
- Does each functional layer of the business understand how its processes need to evolve, what skill sets its people need to develop, what technology needs to invested in or developed?
- Is each operational element of the business measuring itself appropriately as it moves through the stages of the journey?
If these questions cannot be answered convincingly at all levels, then the business does not have a well defined and clearly articulated set of goals, strategies and measures that support the overall business vision. The fundamental requirements for achieving the vision are not in place until every functional level of the business is managing itself toward commonly derived goals.
Setting Goals
There are very effective techniques to map the business vision successively downward to the tactical level. The starting point though, is to get an understanding throughout the company of what the vision is, and what it means to the company. There are a number of important steps to follow when doing this, namely:
- Share the vision throughout the business;
- Drive the vision downwards;
- Take a poll in the various functional areas and levels as to their appreciation of what implications the vision has to them; and
- Define a series of key overall business goals that support the vision, and use these as the framework for lower level functional goal setting.
The top-level business strategies are defined by the top-level business goals. If these business goals are balanced, and the goal setting process forces the lower level functional goals to be derived from them, then consequently the lowest level operational tactics will support the business vision.
In order to be regarded as balanced, business goals should be expressly articulated within the categories of:
- Financial goals (How do we want shareholders view the business?);
- Customer goals (How should our customers view the business?);
- Internal goals (What must we excel at operationally?): and
- Innovation and learning goals (How can we continue to improve and create value?).
Once the goals have been clearly defined and articulated at this level, they must now be driven successively downwards through the functional levels. As mentioned above, there are some very effective techniques to do this and it is very important that as the levels become more and more functional and tactical the visibility of the highest-level goals and strategies remain intact. In other words, regardless of whether it's the materials supervisor or the buyer or the personnel officer, each level should know the company's overall business goals and how their own goals and activities support them and are derived from them. This is how operational tactics link directly back to a company's overall business goals.
Conclusion
Successful business management is part science, part magic. If we get the science right, it might make us somewhat less reliant on the magic. A very structured approach to managing goals and strategies during both the definition and execution of these is part of the science of business management:
- Drive the vision through the business;
- Derive a set of high level balanced business goals to support the vision;
- Derive the lower level function goals from these balanced goals;
- Measure & feed execution results upwards;
- Measure and feed results downwards; and
- Whenever possible, relate all discussions to the business goals.
