The 3 Best Business Books of 2019
Why Company Goals Don’t Turn Into Employee Goals
KPIs, OKRs, and BHAGs aren’t that great at motivating or evaluating people. Here’s what works instead.
An excerpt from Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall. One of the three best business books of 2019.
Goals are everywhere at work — it’s hard to find many companies that do not engage in some sort of annual or semi-annual goal-setting regimen. At some point in the year, the organization’s senior leaders set their goals for the upcoming six or 12 months, and then share them with their teams. Each team member looks at each of the leader’s goals and sets a mini-goal that reflects some part of the leader’s goal. This continues down the chain, until you, and every other employee, has a set of goals that are mini-versions of some larger goal further up in the organization.
As the year unfolds, you may well be asked to record what percentage of your goals you’ve completed. This “percent complete” data is then aggregated into bigger and bigger groups so that the company can, at any point during the year, say things like, “65% of our teams have completed 46% of their goals. We need to speed up!”
