Wanting to succeed is a natural and worthy desire; but success does not always require struggle and suffering. It can be relatively painless, and done in such a way that you are having fun even when you’re working extremely hard.
The key to unlocking effortless success lies in the goals that you choose to pursue. The more your goals are aligned with your purpose, the more fun you’ll have and the more easily you’ll achieve those goals. Identifying, acknowledging, and honoring this objective is perhaps the most important action successful people take. Without a purpose it’s easy to get distracted and end up achieving very little. With a little planning and purpose, realizing our goals and completing projects seem to fall into place. The people, resources and support you need will become clearly defined. Your company will benefit too. When we act in alignment with our long-term goals, all of our actions automatically push us toward the finish line.
But what is alignment? Goal alignment in an organization involves ensuring that people working in all departments, from the top to the bottom, are operating to achieve similar goals. Alignment is when your goals, actions, and mindset are in harmony and move you toward your true north or purpose. It’s vital that people from all levels of the company contribute to the achievement of the same set of goals. Of course, we must first have these goals clearly defined.
Once we have these definitions it’s important to confirm that these goals are important to the success of the entire organization. We also want everyone to understand how their own individual contributions impact the achievement of the organizational goals. Just like meeting friends for dinner, we can’t expect everyone to show up at the same place if we don’t first state where that place is. We also want all departments in the organization to aim for the same defined goals. HR, IT, Engineering, Quality, and the list goes on, should make their operational decisions in light of the overall goals and objectives of the organization as a whole.
Why is aligning goals so important? Obviously, we want people to be pulling in the same direction within our organization. We don’t want everyone going in different directions, any more than we would want a rowing crew, or a track team, focusing on different goals. We want our departments to do the same. Many times, groups get so pre-occupied with their own day-to-day tasks that they forget how their piece of the puzzle fits into the overall organizational goals. Getting both people and departments to align goals with the overall organization results in much less effort, higher productivity, and much less frustration within the company.
What can you do today to make sure your goals are aligned? Answer these three questions:
- What are my organizations long term goals?
- Have we established 1-year goals and are they moving us closer to the long term goals?
- Is the work I’m committed to this week contributing to those goals?
Hopefully you will be assured you are on the right track. If not, there is no better moment than now to realign your efforts!
