Goals That Align with Your Purpose
“A clear purpose will unite you as you move forward,
values will guide your behaviour, and goals will focus your energy.”
Kenneth H. Blanchard
🎳 Goals
Your business needs both long term and short-term goals to allocate resources, gauge progress, and ultimately achieve growth, innovation, and/or market leadership. The main differences between long term and short-term business goals are the time frame, scope, and specificity involved:
Long term goals set the vision and guide strategic direction.
- Time frame – Usually 3-5 years in the future
- Scope – Broader focus across entire business
- Specificity – More general directional outcomes rather than detailed metrics
- Examples – Expand to 10 locations nationally, become #1 market share leader in industry, acquire competitor X
Short term goals set out measurable, tactical objectives as milestones to accomplish long term aims.
- Time frame – Usually 1 year or less
- Scope – More narrow focus on specific business functions (e.g. marketing, new product development)
- Specificity – Clearly defined with measurable, quantifiable outcomes and deadlines
- Examples – Increase sales by 10% this year, release new product line by Q4
Step-by-Step 🪜
Business goals that realise your deepest vision centre around the core purpose. From there you will devise strategies to manifest that purpose, and processes to track progress. So how exactly do you create business goals that align with your sense of purpose?
- Define core purpose.
Check your business purpose statement to clarify why you started the business. Determine the problems you want to solve, the people and causes you want to serve, and the vision that motivates you. Draw on the work you have just done to correlate these with your values. - Set key outcomes.
Define clear SMART goals that serve your core purpose. For example, provide affordable healthcare services to 1,000 low-income families in 5 years.
- Map stepping stones.
Identify shorter-term goals needed to achieve these big outcome goals. These could include operational goals (launch service in 2 communities in 12 months), marketing goals (acquire 100 customers in 6 months), product goals (attain certification in 2 years) etc.
(This will be covered in more detail in Module 2 – Business Strategy & Development) - Integrate into processes.
Incorporate your goals into business planning and management processes – goal-setting frameworks, business plans, OKR (objectives and key results), strategy reviews, performance management systems etc.
(This will be covered in more detail in Module 3 – Business Operations) - Check alignment periodically.
As strategies evolve and priorities change, pause periodically to check how current activities and plans honour your core business purpose. - Make values and purpose central.
Display these statements everywhere you can. Make major decisions based on alignment with core purpose rather than just short-term profits. Let your purpose guide and inspire your business journey.
Goals vs KPIs
💡The main differences between business goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are:
Business Goals:
- Describe a desired business objective or future state.
- Tend to be more qualitative.
- Set strategic direction aligned to vision and priorities.
- Examples: “Expand to the Western Cape”, “Release the next version of the software”.
KPIs:
- Provide quantitative measures and metrics to evaluate progress towards goals.
- Specific, numerical, and based on data.
- Help gauge profitability of business-critical activities.
- Examples: “R1M in annual revenue”, “Acquire 1,000 new customers per month”, “Achieve 80% customer satisfaction score”.
In summary:
- Goals define WHAT the business wants to achieve.
- KPIs define HOW to measure progress towards those desired goals.
Goals set the destination while KPIs track the journey. Aligning goals and metrics clarifies decisions and resource allocation. Together they transform objectives into executable reality through monitoring of data-driven milestones. Tracking KPIs guides progress to ultimately accomplish larger business goals.