Align your goals
Align goals between individuals, teams, and the company
Now that you’ve created and activated your goals in Workfront Goals, let’s make sure they are aligned to one another. Goal alignment is an important part of goal management. If you haven’t completed the learning path Workfront Goals, Part 1: Establish a vision and strategy, we recommend you take that first before continuing.
Use the Goal Alignment section to:
- View goals that belong to you or your organization.
- Display goal hierarchy and view aligned children goals.
- Open the goal to see its progress indicators.
Ensuring goals are aligned means everyone from the top down will be executing on work that drives the same initiatives forward. Visualization is an important part of how each top corporate objective directly aligns to the departmental, team, and individual level. Silos are reduced by aligning teams cross-functionally. Alignment creates clarity around everyone’s purpose and connects the organization to what truly matters.
When aligning your company goals, remember they are meant to create clarity and focus through simplicity. If you are struggling with alignment, it’s probably because you are trying to force together goals that are inherently disconnected. When you feel stuck, simply revisit the top company goals, then the group and team goals, and decide which are the most important to keep. Eliminate anything that seems redundant or that does not align with your organization’s vision.
After the top-level goals are established and reviewed, it’s up to individual contributors and team members to create goals that cascade from that level in order to set more focused goals. The scope of the individual goals will be more narrow.
Here are some things to consider before aligning goals in Workfront:
- Keep it simple. Identify the most important priorities for the company right now and determine goals to support that.
- Start with 3-5 company-level goals, at the most.
- Always remember that goals must be specific and have a time limit.
- Don’t force alignment. Because alignment influences progress, only align goals when it is necessary. A common misconception about aligning goals is that you must align every single one within your organization. Goals of one organizational unit might not need to be aligned to another unit, although all units should, in some way, be aligned to the overall company vision.
- Assign personal responsibility. You can create a complex hierarchy when you align goals. Try to assign the last goal in the hierarchy to an individual contributor. True goal hierarchy means you have individual contributors at the last tier of each branch of goal alignment so they can update the progress on their own goals, which could then update the overarching team or group goal progress. This information contributes to the achievement of the top company goals.
In this video, you will learn how to:
- Align goals using both a bottom-up and a top-down approach
- Navigate the Goal Alignment section