Camille Rapacz: Which comes first, strategy or goals? Does it matter? And what happens if one is missing or is ineffective? Today we're talking about the relationship between strategy and goals for building a high performance organization. Though in George's terms, it's a cage match.
George Drapeau: It's the cage match. The strategy versus goals cage match.
Who will be the winner?
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: So, George, how often in your career have you seen an organization get the relationship between strategy and goals right?
George Drapeau: Wow. Um, I was going to say I'm never in an organization with no goals, but that's not true.
I've been in one with like no goals and it's crazy. I have been in organizations that don't really have strategy. I've been in organizations that have both strategy and goals and then they struggle with meaningful connection between strategy goals, like where everybody gets the relationship between the strategy and the goals. I guess I'm going to go with, it's not that common where I see the organization have a clear relationship between strategy and goals.
One of the ways I see it go wrong most frequently in big organizations is. Somebody has good intentions and they have a strategy that only has a couple of points on it and they try to turn that into a small number of goals. But each of those goals has like a subpart and sub subparts and sub subparts.
And really those three goals turn into 30 things, which is, it's not only like too much goal. It also, in an attempt to make the relationship between the goal and strategy, just does just the opposite. I don't think it's that often now that I think about it.
Camille Rapacz: My experience has been similar. And what I realize is if I was in a position below the director level, I really didn't have any insight into it at all. Which is a shame. Like, I didn't have a good perspective on how the work that I did actually helped the organization achieve its goals.
Aside from, like you'd have an all hands and they'd talk about the numbers. But that's it. I didn't really know, like, what's our strategy? I didn't know any of that stuff and it would have helped me if I did. And I think that's also where organization struggle is. Even if they do have it, making sure people actually know what it is.
It's all the people you're counting on, by the way, to actually make those goals happen, that they actually know what it is. That's probably a whole other podcast to talk about that.
This may not be the best way to keep people listening. With what I'm about to say, but I feel like we should answer right out of the gate.
The question of that I posed, which is, which comes first strategy or goals? If I was really wanting people to listen, I'd make them stay till the end, but we got to start with my answer is always, it depends. But in this case, I'm going to say there's a little more to it than just, it depends.
George Drapeau: That was my answer though, too.
And I'm not always saying depends, but I see it does depend though. Okay. I want to hear your, I got to hear this.
Camille Rapacz: It depends, but with the caveat to it. So, it does depend, and we're going to talk a little bit about that, which you should do, which comes first, but I will say that the ideal state for an organization is that strategy comes first.
That's your ideal state. It's just not always realistic, but I hate saying that because I also don't want to give people an out. Like, well, but I heard that it's actually okay if goals come first then we'll never get to strategy. So I want everybody to aspire to strategy first. Goals second. That's ideally how it should go, but that's not that easy to do.
So I understand why organizations may struggle to do this. And the reason it doesn't always go this way is, strategy is actually hard goals are easier to set. Strategy is much harder. Strategy is making some really deliberate decisions about what you're going to do and what you're not going to do.
And that's a lot harder to do in business. So it's understandable, but we should all be aspiring to it. And actually, if you do aspire to creating strategy first, that can easily level you up with all of your competitors who are also, struggling to do this, everybody struggles to do this well. So the faster you can get there the better advantage you'll have against all your competitors.
So let's talk about though, first, when should an organization actually set goals first? When does it actually make sense to do that? Okay, so here are my answers, and I wonder if you have anything you can add to this, George, but mine, I just have three quick answers to this.
So one is if you just need to build momentum and provide clear direction to do that. So if that's your number one aim in your business right now, then yes, set some goals to start building momentum on forward movement in the organization because without goals, people are just kind of like doing whatever. Yeah, agreed. That's one reason.
The second one is when there's external pressure on the organization and you've got to respond quickly, so we might not be able to spend time. Developing a really deep strategy. And we just need to set some goals that get us through this, Get us through whatever the external pressure is bringing to us. We're in survival mode. Yes.
And then my last one is that maybe the organization is at risk of being in analysis paralysis. So like, we're just constantly thinking about our strategy, and we haven't been able to define it, and it's preventing us from setting goals. So if your process isn't fast enough, you should go ahead and set goals anyhow while you're still trying to figure out the strategy.
Like, don't let that stop you from setting some goals, because you'll also learn in the process of doing it. Those are my three big ones.
George Drapeau: Yeah, I love those. Off the top of my head, mine was the same as yours and I'll put it in different words.
I find goal creation and goal setting a useful tool for a broken organization.
Like if you're coming to something and they're just nuts all over the place. It's an relatively easy, well understood way to impose order. Like you say, to get momentum, to get people the first step in getting people. Behaving as a team, aligned, standardized, all that stuff. If you can do it, if you can set up a goal framework nicely and people can get on board with it, it's a good foundation for other stuff.
I line up with the first one a lot. It's a nice thing to help get an organization in order. If you come into an organization and you're trying to survey them, that might be interesting. Talk about how do you survey a new team or new group if you come upon them or, you know, a new group of people.
George Drapeau: Whatever you do to figure out what's their state and you find out, wow, you guys are a mess. Good first start. Strategy would not be right then. No way.
Camille Rapacz: No, they do not. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because that's also just a more complicated process. You first have to start with the easy thing, but I like your way of describing it.
Like if things are broken, if things are dysfunctional, I think that's a good time to think, wow, things just feel like they're a mess. Things feel very chaotic. Let's not try to go through a strategic process. Let's just set some clear goals first that gets everybody back on track, or at least on the same page.
The trick there is that you do want to make sure the goals are good. You've given them good goals or the right goals to work on. And that can be a little bit tricky. So it's important. I mean, all of this is assuming that you're doing a pretty good job in setting goals because you can also do a really horrible job setting goals.
Yes. But at least if you set a goal, you have set out an expectation of we're going to do X to get Y. And then you can see where things are off and you can identify gaps and problems much more clearly that way than if people are just randomly doing work. So it's, it's always beneficial even if the goal isn't that great, right?
Yeah. The better the goal, the better your, obviously your performance will be.
George Drapeau: Yeah, I agree. I like the idea of using it to kind of unlock strategic writer's block to take care of the paralysis.
That's yeah, absolutely.
Camille Rapacz: I think it's helpful if you are really struggling in that space. I think sometimes we struggle with strategy because we're not even really sure what that means. A lot of times I get in with leaders and they're like, they're really good at writing goals, but they haven't really gotten up to this next level of what does it mean to do it strategically?
So if you're struggling, like keep doing the goals, but keep working to get to the strategic level. But there are also some downsides to setting goals first. So let's talk about what those are. Like what?
The downsides are your goals may contradict each other or be in conflict with one another.
If you're not writing goals that are aligned around a strategy, you could have goals in one area that conflict with goals in another area. Hmm. And that can impede the overall progress of the organization. So that's one reason.
Another one is. When you do goals that aren't aligned to a strategy, you can end up having a very inefficient use of resources.
So you might deploy people to doing work on goals that maybe aren't taking the organization in the direction that you intended. That's not on purpose. It's just that's how it could pan out. Because it depends on the goals.
George Drapeau: I agree with this. Sometimes when I'm in this kind of situation, I'm big on learning. And so what I will do is I'll say, you know what? This is not the most efficient way to go right now, but there's so much we need to learn as an organization to get on the same board. I'm going to think of this as spending capital or spending money on learning.
And so sure it's inefficient, but let's figure out what I'm going to learn from just doing this and seeing how people perform. That's my rose colored glasses look at this point, which I agree with.
Camille Rapacz: You can put the rose colored glasses on all of these points to be honest. If you can make all these mistakes and as long as you're learning from them and correcting for them, that's great. Yeah, exactly.
There's still some downside. You're still going to have this happen. So I think both can be true.
The third one is those short term gains can sometimes then the short term game being the goal, right?
So I've set this goal. We want to achieve this thing this quarter or this year, even it can take priority over establishing some long term sustainability in the business. So maybe you've set a goal and it's like, we're just going after this thing. And you're basically ignoring the long term sustainability tasks and projects that need to happen.
I've seen that happen a lot.
George Drapeau: We need to be energy independent. So we're going to open more oil drilling . Solves that for now. Long term not so great.
Camille Rapacz: Exactly. That's exactly a great example in the world. A sad one. Thank you, George.
George Drapeau: Yeah, you're welcome. I mean, well, it just goes to the point that sometimes it can be really hard.
We're talking about it like, Oh, sure. Strategy versus goals. It's some trade offs. Sometimes the trade offs have real painful consequences. Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: They do, and you know, it's understandable if an organization is making some choices because they need the revenue today, and it doesn't align with their long term direction, but they're very clear strategically about what they're doing.
Like we're going to make this short term play now, but we are also working on this long term strategic position. And we're going to use this short term to fund the long term. That's a totally reasonable strategy. So you can do both of those things. It's when organizations do not have a long term plan and they're just doing the short term.
That's when you really get in trouble. So when it takes priority and you don't pay any attention to that long term piece, then you're in trouble. So we could say, I need to do the investment in oil and gas now. And also build long term sustainability. But I'm not at a point yet where I can pull back on the oil and gas because I don't have the other stuff set up. Then you have to do both. It's a both and scenario.
Which is much more practical and pragmatic and in how you do it. And I think sometimes we just want to go for it. We just want to do the big aspirational shift and it's just not realistic.
We just can't make those drastic changes. So we got to be thoughtful. Same thing applies in business.
All right. So my last one is that this focus on reacting to the pressures or the crisis of the moment means you are falling behind your competitors who are being more future focused or more strategic.
So you're losing your competitive edge. That's basically what's happened. Because you're reacting while they're being proactive.
George Drapeau: Absolutely. I like that.
Camille Rapacz: Have you ever experienced any of these, like been in an organization where any of these or maybe some other downsides where the organization was just focused on goals?
Have you ever seen that happen?
George Drapeau: Yeah, for sure. I for sure. Like, I can think of an incident where I had a VP who was this very quick turnaround, fast acting kind of VP. He valued like you call and you answer and instantly you can email us or instantly he was very action oriented, immediate response oriented.
So he tended to think about setting goals, but not thinking the longer term. It was just the whole mindset that, I mean, there was some very clear advantages of how this guy worked. I mean, he was incredibly responsive and he had a responsive organization. Really cool in a lot of ways, but. Past a month out.
We didn't know what we were doing. It's so frustrating.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. And, as you were describing that, I was thinking about some of my experiences too. And I realized that oftentimes organizations I think get into a bit of a trap because they'll hire somebody who's really good at fixing the short term problem, right?
We've got to turn this thing around. And so they bring somebody in who's actually really good at that, but they're not good at the long term piece. They're not good at the long term vision and strategy and setting the organization up. And this is common. You and I both experienced this where leaders are usually either good at one or the other.
Rarely can they do both. And usually when somebody is hiring the fixer come in and fix it. Yeah. That's all they're really good at. And the organization needed that. So it's not to say there's anything bad about that person's skill. It's just at some point, their ability to advance the organization, it runs out,
Once they fix the problem, then what? And if they don't have the skills to do that, sometimes you're putting these people in these high level positions and you didn't go at it with a plan for, I'm just going to put them in here for two years, and then I'm going to hire the next person who's going to take over and take it to the next level or the next stage of business, what I find is then they're like stuck with this person and they're wondering why they can't get to the next level. And it's like, we don't have the right leader in place. They were good for what you needed to happen to this point. But from this point forward, you need a different kind of leader.
And that's a really hard decision for organizations to make. So I see how they get stuck in this cycle.
George Drapeau: Yeah, I totally get that. That makes sense.
Camille Rapacz: And especially when all you've been doing is rewarding that person for that behavior. Of what they did to fix it, why would they change their behavior? You've been giving them bonus after bonus for all the work that they've been doing to fix it.
And now you want them to do something else? That's weird.
George Drapeau: That's a good point.
Camille Rapacz: There's lots of reasons why organizations struggle with this. You just have to be very, I think, pragmatic about how this plays out, and the realities of how it should go.
The idealistic way that this will go is almost never the way it actually happens on the ground. Yeah.
So let's talk about why strategy first. Okay. That's what we started with. So in the cage match of strategy versus goals, I'm going to say ideally strategy wins, but I agree. In the real world, I think most of the time goals win.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Most of the time they do.
Camille Rapacz: I mean like goals end up being the thing that organizations do more often or better than they do strategy.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Pour more of the organizational energy into that than in strategy.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. Yes. There'll be goal, goal, goal, goal, goals, even if they're not very good, but you can't really see a whole strategy that's driving that, but they got them!
And we will spend a whole other episode talking about what makes a good goal. Cause I got things to say about that.
Why strategy first though? Why strategy first? When you think about strategy, strategy includes, and we did an episode on this where we talked about vision and mission.
Remember we talked about the vision statements? That's part of your strategy. So defining the purpose, the mission, and the vision is part of your strategy. But beyond that, and I don't think we talk about this enough in strategy, we just say, Oh, it's your purpose, your mission, your vision. No, that's not enough.
What you really need for your strategy to be good is for it to define how you are going to achieve your purpose and your vision. And some of that is in the mission statement, but you need to do more than that. You have to choose what you're going to do and what you're not going to do. And I think that what we're not going to do is the hardest part of the strategy.
Saying we're not going to be this kind of business. We're going to be this other kind of business. This is where we're going in our industry, in our marketplace.
Saying in that very deliberately making those decisions about how you're going to achieve those goals Is the key to a good strategy. So that's number one.
When you do that, you are creating this mechanism for aligning everything in the organization. Your goals, your performance measures, all of your stuff now gets aligned around if this is how we're planning to do business, this is what we are, who we are, then that tells us everything about what kinds of goals to set.
And this includes things like, you think about your strategy, it includes things like what level of quality is our business going to be about? So are we going to be the Walmart or are we going to be the Nordstrom of retail? That's a strategy choice. Absolutely. And that drives the types of goals that you set and the performance measures and all of those things. So you need to have that defined in order to know where you're going.
So alignment is a big one. It also, and I think this is something that gets missed in the process of doing a good strategy, which is that it should allow you greater flexibility in setting goals. Because the goals are really now, this is how I'm going to execute on my strategy, and I can make choices to pivot quickly when I need to, if a goal isn't, getting us where we need to go, because I've always got the bigger picture in mind.
Otherwise, pivots can just be random, because I don't really have a clear direction. I just decided we're not doing this goal now. You've been in organizations, right, where they're like, Oh, that one's not important anymore. We're doing this other thing. And you think, are we changing our whole strategy?
What's happening here? Is this aligned to us? Like, it just doesn't make any sense. And it's most often because those goal shifts are not actually tied to a long term strategy.
George Drapeau: Yeah. That's makes a lot of sense to me. They're not bound to anything.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, I mean, you can kind of do whatever you want then, right?
You can just set a goal that you think, Oh, I think this one will make us more money. Let's go that direction. Sure, sure, yeah. But that's not necessarily the right decision to make. Unless you're saying we need to go this direction to make money here while we also then work on the long term strategy over there.
George Drapeau: I'm thinking of a vice president I worked for for a while who came into this organization and I swear he wanted his whole organization to live in a barracks together so that he could be with them all the time and could move very quickly. He wanted a very quick turnaround on actions but he had no strategy.
His whole thing was let's all try this. Work really fast as quickly as we could. And as soon as we saw it wasn't working, try that and all pivot to that. And so he made up for a lack of strategy by instant action, but it was impossible. His organization was not living in a barracks together. They worked together literally 24 hours a day.
He couldn't get them to react quickly enough for his chaotic. pivots. And because there was no strategy, it just burnt people out. He couldn't really communicate why the organization was doing what it's doing. So he couldn't really get buy in outside of the organization.
And then, like I said, most of the people in the organization were not like him. So they did just burnt out.
Camille Rapacz: There's a few things in there, as you described that at the center of it is what we're talking about, which is if the strategy isn't clear, then all of those pivots just are random.
And I think leaders can easily underestimate the importance of employees understanding purpose, having context for the work that they're doing, because if you just keep randomizing them and asking them to make these quick pivots, I mean, people don't mind doing that if they understand the reason for it.
If they're given them purpose. And so if you said, Hey, we need to make a quick pivot because this thing we're doing isn't helping us achieve the long term goal, and it's not aligned to our strategy, then everybody's can make that shift much easier than if it's just, Hey, this isn't working. We're going to try something else.
That's just random. And sometimes the leaders will say, well, I know what it is. Like, well, that's great. Why are you not telling your people? So the second part of that is just communication. Like, sometimes they even know, but they're not telling anyone. More often I find they say they know, but they don't know well enough to actually describe it to their team.
Like they really haven't yet articulated it for themselves. They want to believe that it's aligned in their heads because they know it should be, but it actually isn't. And so that's also why they hold back on communication. So there's all sorts of layers of issues with this. Yeah, that whole randomization of people is definitely a problem.
And yet I think there's a misunderstanding that if I set this strategy and these goals, it boxes me in and it's not intended to do that. It is intended to help you say, I am choosing a path and have a direction. I am taking a risk here by saying, I think this is what's going to work. But the only way for me to know whether it works or not is to go all in on that and test that out.
And then as I find things aren't working, I can start to make adjustments to figure out what will work. Yeah. If you're just being random, it is the, when we talk about in our belief shifts, strategy versus a spaghetti on the wall. That's what it is. Spaghetti on the wall. Everybody just tries it.
It is. Yeah. Horrible.
So my last one is related, it's the opposite of something we talked about earlier of course, which is around aligning resources so you can use them more efficiently. If you have a clear strategy and you're aligning goals to that, then you can be sure that your resources are getting deployed and used towards the things that will make a difference in the business, as opposed to some random project that somebody decided they wanted to do.
You've seen this. And they're like, I'm not really clear why we're funding. Why is that project happening? Is that part, is that their strategy now? Is this some of these pet projects? Like sometimes leaders get those, I guess, get to do this pet project that they think is really great.
And then it wasted a bunch of money and didn't go anywhere.
George Drapeau: Wow. That's a long complaint.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, it's happened. I think maybe you've seen this before. Yeah, I've seen this before. You haven't? I
George Drapeau: have. And I've probably complained about it for that longer and longer, too.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I mean, it's just so frustrating to watch it happen when it doesn't need to happen, you know? Yeah.
So this ideal state strategy is absolutely the place you should start. That's your ideal state. If you're not starting there, it's okay, but know that you need to get there. You want to be able to take it to the next level of performance or just your division, whatever it is that you're in charge of, you do have to get to the point where you're doing strategy first and then goals aligned to that.
Because without this, you're setting yourselves up for long term failure. It might not be today or this year, but eventually that reactive approach you're going to fall behind and the competition is just going to beat you up. Yeah. So don't avoid setting goals if you are struggling with strategy though.
Don't avoid the goals. Just know you have to get to strategy first.
Any last bits of advice or stories about strategy versus goals and the cage match of the business cage match?
George Drapeau: This reminds me of a time when I did our team's quarterly business reviews and where I'm going to go with this is I would do them in such a way that I would always present the first section, but would delegate most of the content to the individual contributors. In the organization, we'd rotate who got a chance to do it.
And we did that for several reasons. One was to get presentation exposure for these folks to the company. But the bigger reason was it got me a chance to have them express the strategy. What they have to do is report. I would give them a template and they'd all have to report on the template.
So I knew it was important to work on, but it would get them thinking, Oh, how did we really do against this? It's a backward looking exercise reflecting on how we perform, but in the way it was structured, they had to think and then present to others. Here's how we did against our own goals and against terms.
And here's why that's good or bad. So we've got them thinking about strategy. So I guess this is a long story to say help people understand strategies to make them responsible for at least articulating it.
I'm sure you can do the same thing for goals.
I've just never thought of that. Yeah. Why not? Probably easier.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. In fact, I would start there. If you're trying to help people better articulate what's going on in the organization, start with just being able to articulate the goals. So I often see goals written again, we're going to have to do a whole other podcast on this, but just goals are written so fluffy, like improve blah, blah, blah.
Without like, what's improvement mean? I feel better about it at the end of the year? I feel like so and so did a nice job? And these are getting written as somebody's in their performance evaluate like these are my three goals for the year that I'm going to get my performance based on, and it doesn't have any real measure to it.
And so even though they can say, well, I know what activities I'm going to do. They're not really heading towards anything very tangible and specific. It's a shame when we have these goals that are just kind of generic. It's better than no goal, I will say. So if you can't get to some measured thing, at least it's saying this is the area of work that is of most importance.
That's a good thing, That's helpful. It's just not going far enough.
George Drapeau: I get that. I can come up with an example of that. Where let somebody off the hook or give them a little bit of a break on the goal. Like maybe the goal is for you to write a report on something or do an assessment of a market area.
Like, okay, I produced the assessment. How do I make that more quantitative or measurable? Like, I don't know. but I did the writeup. That's a fair question. And I agree with you if, like, you're not used to setting measurable goals, and this is the best they could come up with, like, at least I knew I had to write a report, and here, here's the report.
You can judge me on whether I did the tangible thing or not. Yeah, sure, that's a start.
Camille Rapacz: It is a start. And whenever there's a goal like that, what I always ask people to consider is what is the purpose in doing that activity? So what's the purpose of the assessment? What would a good outcome look like from you doing the assessment?
Well, usually with an assessment, it's, Oh, because we want to make a decision about X. That's why we're doing the assessment. And so you can actually say instead of I wrote the assessment was the goal, you could say I did the assessment is the work you did to achieve the actual goal, which is we were able to make a decision on X. Which would say I obviously I had to have written a good assessment if it allowed for the organization to make that decision.
So it's always kind of thinking about, but what's the point of me doing the thing in the first place. So whenever somebody says, Oh, I just, I'm supposed to write the report or I'm supposed to do assessment, or it's just some activity, like if you can't say what purpose it has, then I want to know why you're doing it.
George Drapeau: Yeah, that's awesome. I can easily imagine the conversation I would have with people about exactly that. Like, okay, you do the report. Why'd you write this? Yeah, what do you want to do with it? Yeah, I was told it. Yeah. But what do you want to happen now? I mean, you wrote this beautiful thing. Do you have any opinions in there?
Yeah, they'll, they'll know you're right. They'll know. And you can lead them down that path and help them come up with something measurable. That's awesome.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. And I think people think they have to tie the, outcome to the actual decision. It's like, no, no, you don't have to know what decision gets made.
You just have to know that the decision did get made. That was the whole point, is that we got to a decision point and we made a choice and we got to move forward. And so whatever work you did in front of that, It worked. It was valuable. That's a way to think about when you got those fluffy goals to really ask yourself, like, what's the purpose in this?
Why am I doing it? And if you can't come up with one, then maybe you shouldn't do it.
George Drapeau: Folks bonus tip right there about goals.
Camille Rapacz: Bonus tip about goals. It needs to have a purpose. I mean, it sounds silly when we say it, but I see a lot of goals that I'm not really sure, like, what, why are we doing that one again?
Tell me what's the outcome. And we shy away from those, I think, because we don't have control of that outcome. so we'll say, well, I can't control whether, you know, XYZ happens. Like, that's okay. You don't have to control that. You just have to know that something is happening afterwards. Again, I can't control which decision happens.
Or maybe I don't even have control over whether a decision happens or not. But you do have control over whether I have done my job to ensure a decision can be made. Now it's in someone's those hands if they're delaying it, whatever. But I did my part.
It could be tricky business these goals, two thumbs up.
All right. So that's all I have to say about strategy versus goals. Strategy first, everybody. But if you can't, then just goals are fine. Just goals are fine. Just aspire, aspire to do strategy first. That's what I want every business to be doing.
That's all I have to say. Thanks everybody for listening. If you have any questions or thoughts about strategy versus goals, you know what to do.
You can go to thebeliefshift.com. You can leave us a voicemail. We'd love to hear from you.
More importantly, if you need help, you have questions about this, we should talk about it. You can do a free consultation with me at CamilleRapacz.com/bookacall. All these links will be in the show notes.
We'd love to hear from you. Thanks everybody. We'll be back in your ears next week. Bye.
