Cascading Objectives
The Root of Conflicting Objectives
Over the course of my career, I’ve been involved with the Annual Objective Process for decades. One manufacturing company had no process at all, and no annual reviews either. Needless to say, this company continually floundered. This company provided no direction to its employees and because of this, they experienced inconsistent performance and overall poor results.
However, most of the manufacturing companies had a strategic plan and an annual objective process. The employees’ objectives were tied to individual performance reviews, however unfortunately, the employees’ objectives were not usually linked to the company’s strategic plan. When the objectives of individual employees are not linked to an overall high-level plan, you will see a lot of conflicting objectives at the lower levels of the organization within a company.
As such, you may have been assigned a project objective and this project might require help form an internal support resource. But, if the support resource is assigned to a different project, then they won’t be able to support your objective, and you would be at risk of missing your company assigned goal.
Goal Conflicts Create Organizational Gridlock
Here’s a more specific example. A plant I was working at had a machine bottleneck. This bottleneck was causing orders to ship late and thus created customer service issues. My boss assigned me an objective of improving machine output to eliminate this bottleneck. I put together a team and this team identified a solid action plan to increase output and resolve the bottleneck. But alas, the Engineer on the team was not allowed to work on the improvements because he was assigned a different and unrelated objective of designing some equipment for a different area of the plant. Upon looking deeper, it seemed as though every engineer had objectives that conflicted with operational goals.
You see, if you are given a goal to get objectives ABC done by 5/16/XX and coworker Mike is given an objective to get XYZ completed by 6/3/XX, then you will need each other’s support to protect against mutual failure. Without goal alignment, it is impossible to reconcile the resource constraints. When objectives across the company are not linked together, each department marches to their own drum.
In my situation, every individual employee was cordial in their interactions, and everyone was apologetic in their rejection of support, it didn’t matter. You see, we all realized that in this company, conflicting objectives coupled with limited resources yielded gridlock. We were all handtied. It was a frustrating situation for the entire companywide team.
There is a Solution!
There is a solution to this dilemma though. It starts at the top with the company’s strategic plan. Savvy leaders have vision and smart executives narrow the focus through a strategic plan. The strategic plan should include only 3-5 high level but well-defined company objectives. Strategies for manufacturing companies will most often tie either directly or indirectly to profitability, but the strategies need to drill deeper. How are profits going to improve? Through revenue growth? If so, how are you going to grow? New product lines? SKU rationalization? A new pricing strategy? Marketing plans? Or in some other way? Each strategy needs to be defined to a degree whereas it can become actionable at a departmental level.
Once these 3-5 strategies are defined, then each department (Sales, Marketing, Operations, Engineering, R&D, etc.) needs to align their annual objectives to these strategies. Then, there should be executive approval of these manager objectives. Once the executive level approves the department level objectives, then the departments can cascade annual objectives down to individual department employees.
In this way, the goals of each department are linked to one over arching strategic plan and each employee’s individual objective is linked to their department goals and linked to the goals of every other department via the cascading strategic plan. This process aligns company resources and gets everyone to pull in the same direction. Company vision reigns supreme. The company’s strategy plan is supported by every department. Individual actions are linked and focused on a single set of plans. Conflict is eliminated in the way.
If your company experiences resource conflicts due to misaligned objectives, start with the strategic plan and cascade the goals down to each individual employee. Strategy deployment will be effective and resource conflicts will be eliminated.
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