How Do You Ensure Your Team Remains Aligned With Organizational Goals?
Keeping a team focused on company objectives is a common challenge for leaders. We asked fifteen CEOs and founders to share their best strategies, from embracing signage for constant reminders to simplifying company objectives. Dive into their insights to find the best approach for your team.
- Embrace Signage for Constant Reminders
- Hire and Train Young Talent
- Cultivate a Family-Like Culture
- Use a Strategic Roadmap
- Hold Quarterly Alignment Sessions
- Remind the Team of Their Impact
- Promote Employee Education
- Implement a Central Dashboard and Weekly Meetings
- Build a Team of Aligned and Like-Minded People
- Conduct Monthly Vision Refresh Sessions
- Link Objectives to Direct Impacts
- Utilize Goal-Management Software
- Welcome Feedback and Two-Way Communication
- Focus on Three Key Objectives
- Simplify Company Objectives
Embrace Signage for Constant Reminders
When it comes to keeping my team focused on the objectives of Redfish Technology, I go Luddite and embrace signage. We all spend so much time in front of our computers that notes on a screen are easily ignored.
Instead, I’ve had posters made up with the help of a graphic designer and hung them around the office for a visual reminder of what we stand for. I’ve found that keeping our ethos in full view ensures it’s always prioritized and never forgotten.
When it comes to short-term objectives, I have a whiteboard at the front of the office with weekly and monthly goals, and I update it often to keep people informed of where we are and what we need to do.
Rob Reeves
CEO and President, Redfish Technology
Hire and Train Young Talent
For me, this comes down to the structure we chose for our company when we first got it off the ground. We knew we wanted to have fully-aligned and growth-oriented leaders in the future, so what we did was hire young talent to fill in every role and trained them up holistically between myself and the founder of our company.
You’d be surprised how much easier it is to keep the team focused on the company’s objectives when they all helped shape them and have been there to see them grow and develop from the word go.
Onno Halsema
CEO, Contentoo
Cultivate a Family-Like Culture
Cultivate a family-like culture within the team. By treating your teammates as family members, you can foster an environment of trust, collaboration, and shared goals, ensuring that everyone is aligned and motivated to achieve the company’s objectives.
There should be no hierarchy, only collaboration. To build a family-like culture, it is crucial to eliminate hierarchical barriers within the team.
Rather than holding formal meetings, these conferences should be informal, relaxed, and interactive. Encourage open discussions, where team members can share their progress and ideas.
Fostering a family-like culture also means recognizing and respecting the personal lives and individual well-being of your team members. Encourage a healthy work-life balance by promoting self-care and understanding personal priorities.
Roy Lam
CEO and Co-Founder, GeniusHub Digital Marketing
Use a Strategic Roadmap
One effective way to keep the team focused on the company’s objectives, as I’ve found at Kualitee, is to regularly communicate and reinforce these objectives through a well-defined and documented strategic roadmap. This roadmap clearly represents the company’s goals and the steps needed to achieve them.
Consistently referencing and discussing this roadmap in team meetings keeps everyone aligned and motivated toward the shared objectives, ensuring their efforts are channeled in the right direction.
Khurram Mir
Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Kualitee
Hold Quarterly Alignment Sessions
Keeping a team aligned with the company’s objectives is vital for cohesive growth. One effective method we’ve implemented at AMF Creative is the use of “Quarterly Alignment Sessions.”
Every quarter, we gather the team for a dedicated session to revisit our company’s overarching goals. During these meetings, we assess our progress, celebrate achieved milestones, and identify areas needing improvement. This is not just a top-down presentation; it’s an interactive session. Team members are encouraged to share insights, voice concerns, and suggest new strategies.
By consistently recalibrating and ensuring everyone is on the same page, these sessions foster a sense of collective responsibility and direction. They serve as a reminder of what we’re working towards, instilling a renewed sense of purpose and motivation. The regularity of these touchpoints ensures that our objectives remain fresh in everyone’s minds, driving concerted efforts and unity in our approach.
Aaron Friedman
Founder, AMF Creative
Remind the Team of Their Impact
Keeping my team aligned with ZenMaid’s objectives isn’t just about direction; it’s about purpose. I’ve realized that a simple reminder can go a long way. When I share positive feedback from our customers, it’s like a light turns on. They see that their work counts, and it’s not just another task. It genuinely affects our customers.
Yet, it’s not always smooth sailing. There are moments of lull, times when the energy drops. That’s when I step in. I share the feedback, remind them of their impact. Not with long lectures but with simple, heartfelt reminders. For any leader out there, remember this: showing your team they matter can rekindle their drive. It’s straightforward, but it works wonders.
Amar Ghose
CEO, ZenMaid
Promote Employee Education
By promoting employee education, especially as a small business operating within a small organization, employees can see the ins and outs of our business and can watch how their individual work positively impacts the bigger picture. This fosters a culture of learning, growth, and development, as well as helps our employees to see their own work in action and gives them a sense of purpose. It’s that sense of purpose that helps them focus on the greater goals and objectives of the organization.
Erin Banta
Co-Founder and CEO, Pepper Home
Implement a Central Dashboard and Weekly Meetings
Despite being a small company, sharing useful information and keeping the team focused on hitting our goals is a struggle.
Two tactics we implemented this year have helped us.
On the technical side, a central dashboard that shows our key stats and gives the team access to the tools they need to get their jobs done has helped us see where we are at in relation to our goal.
But more importantly, discussing quarterly goals in weekly one-on-one meetings has been the key to discovering things holding us back, as well as fostering organic conversations throughout the day about the important objectives we must meet.
Dan Ketterick
Growth Manager, FleetNow
Build a Team of Aligned and Like-Minded People
If you want your team to focus on your company’s objectives, hire people who are aligned with and like-minded towards those objectives. Sharing your corporate values, ethics, social initiatives, mission statement, etc., during the interview process is important for gauging a candidate’s like-mindedness.
When you find candidates who align with those factors of your company, you can be sure that your teams will be more focused on the common goals and objectives of the company.
Nicholas Mathews
CEO, Stillwater Behavioral Health
Conduct Monthly Vision Refresh Sessions
One way I keep the team aligned with the company’s objectives is by conducting monthly “vision refresh” sessions. In these meetings, we not only review our goals but also celebrate small victories, ensuring everyone feels their contribution is directly linked to the company’s broader mission.
Alex Stasiak
CEO and Founder, Startup House
Link Objectives to Direct Impacts
By linking company objectives to something that actually impacts them, I don’t really expect them to care about things the company does that have no direct impact on them. Us doing really well that quarter and it meaning absolutely nothing for their bottom line is hardly a good way to do business.
Setting targets and linking rewards to those targets is a good way to keep everyone pointed in the same direction, as it is the oldest trick in the book. Make it transparent, ambitious, and also well-rewarded, and you’ll never have a problem.
Dragos Badea
CEO, Yarooms
Utilize Goal-Management Software
Our company has a mix of onsite, hybrid, and fully remote workers, so ensuring we’re all aligned at all times on our company’s annual and quarterly priorities is critical. We attend weekly marketing Zoom huddles, daily creative meetups, and Slack each other when we need immediate, real-time answers.
But the one tool we all rely on as a whole is Rhythm Systems, which is goal-management software that helps us track KPIs, take ownership of weekly goals, report on strategic wins and marketing campaigns, and monitor our quarterly successes and shortcomings. It keeps us all rowing forward in perfect alignment, no matter where we’re working from. It’s a great tool for promoting employee ownership, tracking personal performance, and ensuring accountability.
Marcy Kelman
Digital Content and Engagement Specialist, Church Hill Classics
Welcome Feedback and Two-Way Communication
One key approach I employ to keep the team aligned with our company’s goals is embracing feedback. By actively encouraging team members to share their thoughts and concerns, it creates a two-way street of communication. This not only builds trust but also ensures that everyone feels valued and involved.
A team that knows its voice matters is naturally more engaged and committed to the organization’s objectives. Moreover, by addressing their feedback, we can adapt and refine our strategies, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and working toward a common goal.
This collaborative environment, rooted in openness, not only drives focus but also fuels innovation and growth within the company.
Marco Genaro Palma
Content Marketing Manager, PRLab
Focus on Three Key Objectives
Keep it simple. Over the years, we’ve refined the process by focusing on no more than three objectives at a time. We started out by having a trailing list of several goals that would be rated and ranked in the order of delivery. This attracted more objectives in the process than we wanted, so we decided to bring focus back to the primary matters at hand—choosing three objectives that will help us achieve our goals.
The remaining items became secondary initiatives. This resulted in staying true to our mission while achieving those goals, which fueled the secondary initiatives as a positive side effect. Side with simplicity to leverage time and resources.
Sasha Laghonh
Founder, Sasha Talks
Simplify Company Objectives
By making them simple, relatable, and understandable, internal communications is a tough field. Many people ignore emails, Yammer posts, etc., so I’ve found that the simplest way to keep everyone focused on the company objectives is to make them so dead simple that it’s hard to forget or misunderstand them. This way, we don’t have to worry about continuously steering the boat, as we’re more of a raft all moving down the river together to our destination.
Kate Kandefer
CEO, SEOwind
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