The art of goal alignment

STRATEGY 2: Find your passion. People often choose jobs without taking the alignment issue into consideration or deprioritize it over other attributes of the role. And even those who begin on the same page as their employer sometimes see that alignment fade over time. When that happens, employees often experience a lack of personal motivation and disengage from their work, which can be a costly problem for the organization. To restore that alignment, Latham says employees should work with their managers to find new ways to contribute to the organization in ways that better align with their personal interests. 

For example, when Latham was hired as department chair at the University of Washington in Seattle, he found that a number of faculty members had clearly lost interest in their jobs. One of his first orders of business was to sit down with each over lunch to discuss how to get them to contribute more. “They had been teaching the same courses for 20 years, so I gave them permission to create brand new courses that they would love to teach,” he says. “Suddenly there was a bounce in their step, and it lasted until the day they retired.”

Latham explains that when personal goals are lacking, or not in line with the broader organizations’, it’s incumbent on individuals to work with their managers to find new ways to contribute — or accept that the relationship may have run its course. “Within the parameters of the organization’s overall goals and vision, what are the one, two or three things that you could do that would make you feel good?” he says. “In big organizations, it’s much easier to find a home for people than in a smaller organization.” 

Also read: To do or not to do: How to frame more ambitious goals so you stick to them

STRATEGY 3: Set organizational goals from the bottom-up. Those who seek employment at organizations whose values and mission align with their own are much more likely to be successful in the short term. Maintaining that alignment, however, often requires a certain degree of wiggle room, which is typically more present at some organizations than others. 

Objectives that are dictated from management, Latham says, are more likely to be achieved if contributors lower down on the corporate ladder have some degree of flexibility to contribute in ways that align with their own goals. That’s why he believes it’s important to be transparent about organizational goals, and not too rigid about how individual contributors, teams and departments work toward shared objectives. According to Latham’s research, bottom-up approaches to goal setting are more powerful than top-down ones because they are “expressed in the language of the employees.” 

“Senior management comes up with an overall, five-year plan—the goals they want to attain and the overall strategy they want to see the company pursue,” Latham says. “People lower in the organization can then set goals for their department that link directly to that plan.” 

STRATEGY 4: Seek feedback. Individuals might feel confident that their personal goals are in alignment with their organization’s, but the only way to know for sure is to ask. According to Latham, goal setting is much more effective when people have a sense of their progress. It is incumbent on managers to provide feedback — but also on individuals to seek it out — to maintain ongoing alignment. 

“Feedback has two functions,” he says. “The first is informational. It gives information about what you need to start doing, stop doing or consider doing differently. Feedback is also motivational in that it tells you whether you’re making progress toward goal attainment.” 

Maintaining strong alignment between personal and organizational objectives, he adds, requires regular, detailed and thoughtful feedback. “You personally need to take the initiative to seek feedback to clarify the goals you should be working towards,” he says. 

Failing to Meet Goals

Despite our best intentions, everyone has had to give up on a goal at some point. Perhaps they set the bar impossibly high; maybe they didn’t have the required resources to get the job done; perhaps the circumstances surrounding the goal changed; or they lost interest. Whatever the reason, knowing when to pivot on a goal in the face of new challenges or unforeseen circumstances is an important skill in both professional and personal contexts. 

“You have to continually ask yourself, ‘Are these still the right goals? Are these things I want to continue to pursue?’” says Latham. “It’s about constantly scanning your environment to determine whether what was true before is still true now.” He says that often the most successful organizations and individuals have a strong understanding of when to stay the course and when to pivot to something new. To master the art of pivoting, Latham says you need to do four things:

Reassess your situation. Nobody is immune to changing circumstances, but individuals do have the power to adjust their expectations based on those changes. To maintain motivation and commitment in the face of volatility, however, Latham says it’s important not to pivot too often, or you may begin to lose faith in your ability to follow through. “Don’t do it whimsically,” he says. “There has to be strong evidence.” Latham explains that before pivoting, it’s important to consider the root problem preventing you from achieving your goal. Otherwise, you risk running into the same roadblocks later.  

“You have to ask yourself why you aren’t meeting those goals,” he says. “Are you getting adequate feedback? Feedback is necessary because it tells you whether your plan is a good one for goal attainment. Ask, ‘Do I have the necessary resources? Has adequate time been allotted to goal pursuit? Are the goals still within my ability?’” This assessment should provide adequate evidence to consider how to adjust your news goals in a way that overcomes the challenges that prevented you from achieving the old ones.

Watch out for changes to outcome-expectancy. When we set goals for ourselves, there is often an expected outcome: studying more will lead to better grades, hard work will lead to a promotion, eating healthier will result in weight loss, etc. Often the best evidence that it’s time to change our goals—and our behaviours—is when ‘outcome expectancy’ changes, Latham says. If you are passed over for promotions despite the extra effort, if you are gaining weight despite eating healthier food, if your grades are still suffering despite dedicating more time to studying, it’s probably time to consider a different approach. 

Set sub-goals. One of the best ways to follow through on more complex and long-term goals is to set sub-goals, or what Latham refers to as ‘proximal-performance goals.’ According to his research, setting proximal goals that operate in service of larger ones can make it easier to pivot and adjust in the face of new challenges or changing circumstances. 

In a research paper titled “Goal Setting: A Five-Step Approach to Behaviour Change,” published in Organizational Dynamics, Latham challenged a group of high school students to a business game that offered fluctuating dollar amounts in exchange for toys. Through that experiment, he concluded that those who set sub-goals were more motivated and more successful in the face of changing circumstances.  The study also revealed that breaking down long-term goals into smaller sub-goals can act as an early warning system that notifies us when our initial approach is no longer able to produce the desired longer-term outcome. 

Look for models. Often the best way to determine if you’re on the right path is to look to others on the same course. “You can find a model with whom you identify; the model can be another organization or another individual,” he says. In his research, Latham notes that ‘self-efficacy’ — the belief that you can attain your goals — is key to successfully pursuing them. Once you lose that, it becomes very difficult to follow through. Key to enhancing self-efficacy, he says, is finding role models who have accomplished the same pursuit previously. 

“Take the employee on your team who received a good performance appraisal (while yours was disappointing): look at what that individual did, so you can emulate it,” he says. “If on the other hand you decide you don’t want to do that, it may be time to look for another job.”

The Role of Managers

The best managers often commit a significant portion of their time and energy to helping team members set and attain their own goals.  “Goal setting gives employees focus, and it gets people on the same page, so one employee isn’t going in one direction while another is going in another,” Latham says. “It also gives employees a sense of accomplishment and makes them feel good about themselves when goals are attained.” 

Latham has identified a handful of strategies that improve the odds of success for leaders as they help their employees set and achieve goals. He endorses and has contributed research that further validates the effectiveness of the ‘SMART’ approach to goal setting, which suggests that goals should be: 

•    Specific 

•    Measurable

•    Attainable 

•    Relevant 

•    Time-specific 

“SMART goals are excellent for employees to work in a collaborative way with a team,” Latham says. “Otherwise, you can get ‘meandering’ among your workforce.” 

Managers can only do so much to motivate their employees directly. At a certain point the motivation needs to come from within. According to Latham, managers can facilitate a can-do spirit and confidence in their own abilities — self-efficacy — to help their staff achieve their goals by showing rather than telling them what they’re capable of. 

For example, Latham says the Rotman School’s MBA program accepts a certain number of students with a Liberal Arts background, and it’s not uncommon for them to enter the program with anxiety about the more quantitative aspects of business education. “To give those students the confidence of ‘yes, I can,’ we pair them up with second-year MBA students who have a Liberal Arts background and have clearly gotten through the first year,” he says. 

“The first-year students go, ‘Wow, look at these students in their second year; if they can do it, so can I.’ Latham adds that managers can help build self-efficacy among their employees by developing a formal program that pairs junior employees with higher performing colleagues of similar backgrounds. 

In closing

Managers need to constantly keep in mind the ability of the individuals that they’re coaching,” he says. “Often in the workforce, people maintain high goals and then management tries to set them even higher—but they stretch them so thin that it backfires, and employees give up because the goal exceeds their ability.”

Setting goals too high can lead to employee resentment and even dysfunction, he says.

Keeping goals realistically obtainable, and thus more likely to be achieved, isn’t limited to the goal’s degree of difficulty. 

Latham says that to help employees set and attain their goals, management needs to avoid overloading them with too many tasks, regardless of their difficulty. “The goals need to be few in number—three to seven, as opposed to 37,” he says. 

“With 37 goals, the eyes glaze over, you lose focus and then people start to cherry-pick the ones they’re interested in, not necessarily the ones that are of highest priority.”

Gary P. Latham is the Secretary of State Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Rotman School of Management, with cross-appointments in the University of Toronto’s Centre for Industrial Relations, Department of Psychology and Faculty of Nursing. He is the former President of the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA), the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and President of Work and Organizational Psychology, a division of the International Association of Applied Psychology. This interview was originally published on the Rotman Insights Hub.