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
Transcript
There are two approaches to aligning goals with one another, bottom-up or to-down.
Let’s start with the bottom-up approach. In this approach, we’ll identify a child goal that we want to align with the parent goal.
We can find the child goal in either the goal list or in the goal alignment section, and click on it to open it.
I’m going to go to the goal alignment section, so you can see how to navigate in here.
Click on the child goal, and now in the goal details page in the parent goal information section, click on add goal and start typing the goal name.
Goals in the same or future time period of the child goal will appear in the list.
Select the parent goal and click save changes.
Going back to the goal alignment section, we can see that the parent goal now has one aligned goal, and we can click on this arrow to see what it is, it’s the child goal.
In the child goal it’ll also show that it’s aligned to something.
The next approach is the top-down approach. To show this, we’ll open the child goal and add an activity.
Go to progress indicators, new progress indicator, create activity. And this is something we’ll need to complete before the child goal can be completed.
So we’ll give it a name, create activity.
Once we’ve created the activity, we can select it and we can convert it to a goal.
Of course, when we’re creating a goal we have options to change the period, the owner and the description, and the goal name, by default it’s just the activity name. Click save, and now we have a progress indicator of type goal and this is automatically aligned with the child goal. So going back to the goal alignment section, we can see the child goal now has one aligned goal.
We can click on this, see the whole group here.
Now child goals appear as progress indicators to their parents, so if we wanted to go to the parent goal, look at progress indicators and we see the child goal is in here.
And this is where you can go to disconnect a goal that’s aligned to another goal, so we select it and then we have this disconnect option.
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