Effective Goal Cascading: From Strategy to Employee Actions in Business Agile (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So in this video we'll talk about how do you actually cascade goals down from your strategy all the way to your employees and how do you make this into a quick enough process that this doesn't take too much time and effort from your organization. Typically what we find is a strategy it's in reality built around 20 to 40 initiatives that the management team has on their agenda during a year. There's been really interesting studies performed where they've asked management teams to rank the business potential in all of these initiatives that they have ongoing and what they find is that on the top half of the initiatives, actually 90% of the real business potential is situated. That begs the question, what do we do with the bottom half? Why do we even try to make these? So a question for you is, can you actually stop doing things? Is that part of what makes a priority a priority. Added to that if you go even further you can find that within one or two of these strategic initiatives that we talked about you can find 60 almost 70% of the total business potential. Those are what are your strategic initiatives, those must win battles. And in order to make alignment within a company and cascade targets you ask each and every team to align what's most important for them in order to contribute to this overlying strategic initiatives and on a functional level it's it's quite normal that you manage between 30 and 100 different targets and KPIs over a year. So focusing on less to achieve more, what two most important goals can you choose to really put focus on and emphasis on that supports the team above you? And this is then cascaded down all the way throughout the organization and And ultimately, you end up around behaviors. So in order to accelerate these most important goals, in order to make them happen, what are the behaviors that we need to accelerate? And this can mean either that we need to do more of something, we need to do it with a higher quality, and we call these acceleration KPIs, to really put emphasis on that we need to accelerate the behavior. So typically, when we talk with CEOs and senior managers, they feel that we've cascaded now targets within the organization and we really made the strategy come to life. But in all honesty, this is only half the story. You've come a long way, sure, by focusing on less in order to achieve more and prioritizing the goals for each and every team and aligning the structure. But in reality, what's really difficult is to make it happen and typically what companies find is that they need some type of commitment process in place. And this is a weekly, you can call it an acceleration meeting or a stand up where you proactively take commitment on these behaviors, the acceleration KPIs, in order to truly make them happen in reality. When you start implementing the system, you quite quickly find out we need some type of support in order to remember, okay, what commitments did we do last week and proactively what do I want to achieve this week? And if you're implementing this only for one team, I guess Excel would be really fine or something similar, something that you've already got built in in your CRM system or whatever system you're in. And we also see that within Agile, this kind of way of breaking it down into weekly sprints or weekly targets, it's really quite native. So applications like Jira or Trello or Slack, they already have support for these acceleration stand-ups. But what the Agile systems fail to take into account is the cascading of the goals. So they're more one team in an isolated island. And what the business Agile application does is combine the goal cascading with the weekly commitment session and that's really how you start driving your strategy in reality. So these were the two skills that were involved in business agile organizations. Prioritization and then taking and making commitments from your leaders all the way down to your employees. And we'll actually just start discussing more on how does this affect your every day in your business and that's coming up in a future videos. So in this video we've done an introduction to the two concepts of prioritization and then making and taking commitments from the organization. But in order to be really successful with business agile in your organization you really have to keep on watching.