Defined goals for organizations and people are used to set direction and improve performance.  But how many companies, and the people within these companies, have strong goal setting programs?  A recent poll identifies that a minority of organizations actually have strong goal setting programs.

Growth Strategy Partners, a management consulting firm accelerating the revenue, profit and organizational performance of privately held companies, conducted a webinar last month on Goal Setting for Executives and Individual Contributors. Through polls of attendees, they discovered that most companies and leadership teams do not have defined goals.

The attendees were mostly CEOs and senior executives of privately held organizations.  When asked how many had defined goals: 28% responded to having goals at the company level and only 8% responded to having goals at the leadership/executive level.   When asked how many had goals at other levels of the organization, the following results were found:

• 24% for directors or managers
• 16% for supervisors
• 24% for all employees

“It is surprising and disappointing to see that a minority of companies and leaders have defined goals”, states Christopher DiCenso, Managing Partner of Growth Strategy Partners.  “We know through our research and experience that organizations which have defined goals for the company as well as most people in the organization, outperform those who do not.”

A poll was also taken to identify what the top challenges were in building a goal setting program: 

• 43% described being in the middle of implementing their program
• 35% identified making it a priority
• 13% identified company culture/leadership not promoting goal setting
• 4% identified not having company goals so setting individual goals was a challenge
• 4% identified not knowing how to develop a goal setting program

Throughout the 30-minute session, Growth Strategy Partners shared some of the tools they use to build successful goal setting programs; such as goal cascading, the ‘sandwich’, levels of performance, the executive matrix, and the 2-page individual contributor sheet.   The webinar was recorded and can be viewed through this link  http://growthstrategypartners.com/resources/videos-2/

Growth Strategy Partners is a management consulting firm accelerating the revenue, profit and organizational performance of privately held companies by applying its research driven 7 Keys to Growth. To learn more visit www.GrowthStrategyPartners.com