The concept of "management by objectives" has long been familiar to everyone. The reason why goal management is important is that proper goal setting can effectively guide the direction of employees' efforts. Conversely, a lack of sense of purpose can lead to a loss of focus for the company as a whole. Executives are also unable to provide meaningful feedback to employees.
In the practical management world, the company's top management sets the company's goals, and then expands them down to the goals of each business group and department, and finally transforms them into personal goals, and then cooperates with the KPI assessment mechanism to form the so-called PDCA (planning/execution/verification/control) cycle. Then, that's it, the boss just has to wait for the result!
Is that really the case? How many bosses can really smile and wait for performance to happen naturally with goal management? Almost one in 100? Why? Let's think a little bit about the series of questions below, and then the answers will emerge naturally.
7 questions to check if "management by objectives" is in place:
- Why is it that once a company has formulated a strategy, it seems to be in a filing cabinet, disconnected from the next action?
- How many of the colleagues in various departments of the company know the company's strategic direction?
- How do each department undertake the company's strategy, and what is the connection between the department's goals and strategies?
- How do departmental goals relate to the personal goals of department colleagues?
- Do the goals of colleagues in the department really motivate them, and how much do colleagues "care" about their personal goals?
- Are the competence and knowledge of the colleagues in the department sufficient to make them competent for the job?
- Can colleagues get the right information from the "right people" at the "right time" so that they can take action to achieve their personal goals?
The biggest reason why "management by objectives" is difficult to implement: the "linkage" between goals is decoupled
The common thread behind these issues is "connection". It means that the company's goals, departmental goals, and personal goals are closely linked and not decoupled. Unfortunately, the vast majority of company executives focus too much on their own department's performance goals and ignore top-down integration, resulting in a long-term "decoupling" and "misalignment" of the overall system. As a result, performance is naturally compromised. It is not uncommon for departments to achieve almost all of their performance goals, but the company's overall goals are far behind, and there is no reason for this.
To put it simply, when it comes to the reasons why objective management is difficult to implement, most of them come from the decoupling of links mentioned above. It is important to note here that many organizations seem to lack a dedicated unit to check the linkages between company/department/individual target systems. If you want to make management by objectives more beneficial, start with this.
About the Author:
Action-oriented Landing Learning Expert/Chief Consultant of Kong Shiteng Chen Xuhui Vincent
He has served as the solution professional representative of IBM Company, the business director of Greater China of Sunrise Computer Global Capital Business Group, and the operation manager of Midson Credit Group in Taiwan. He has many years of practical experience in foreign business sales, talent construction, training and leadership of business teams. Specializing in the formation and management of high-level B2B business sales teams, enterprise transformation counseling and diagnosis, problem analysis and solving, etc., through the "Landing Learning Workshop", the goal is to solve the practical problems of enterprise customers.
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