Aligning your actions with your goals

Creating goals can be difficult, but is significantly less difficult than creating the daily or weekly habits required to achieve them. Following the initial rush of excitement and activity, the original goals grow stale whilst activity regresses to the mean—the two now detached from one another.

It’s not always obvious when this is happening—people are working hard and communicating regularly. You might even have everything documented and regularly meet to ensure there are no blockers or dependencies between teams. Time to look at progress!

With an often genuine sense of surprise, you might be looking at how you’re performing against your goals and wondering why all of this stuff isn’t moving the needle. Whilst it’s imperfect, I think of this as being in one of four possible states—though you might flow between them.

Describing actions, ignoring goals

In this state, it doesn’t necessarily feel like anything is wrong. Everyone is talking about the projects they’re working on with enthusiasm and excitement. There aren’t many dependencies or blockers between projects, and everyone’s moving quickly—in short, you’re killing it.

Whilst actions are important, they’re nothing without a shared purpose. In this stage, it’s incredibly easy to mistake motion for progress; nothing about the actions being taken is obviously wrong—it’s just that nothing about them is obviously right, either.

Describing both actions and goals

This state is a strange one: you’re talking about the goals and the actions almost as frequently as each other, but not addressing the delta between them. You might lead with the goal before walking people through the actions you’re taking to get there—this thing, then that thing.

For some reason, however, no one is calling out the fact that these things are tangentially related at best, and philosophically opposed at worst. They both sound rational and important individually, so there’s no clear issue—this is good, and that is good, so we’re making progress.

Describing actions, bending goals

Whilst it might not be totally conscious, this state is rooted in confirmation bias. You’ve set the goals and created some actions, and you’re honestly trying to understand how they’re connected and what progress you’re making—but you’re changing the goals on the fly.

You might be looking at things and reasoning “it doesn’t look like we’re making progress here, but the goal is just framed poorly—it’s better if you phrase it this way.” You’re just better at articulating your goals now, you think—nothing to see here (except, of course, there is).

Describing goals, aligning actions

The state we often think we’re in, but rarely are. This often means saying no to things you’re already working on, and are genuinely excited about. It’s not easy, but no one claimed that it was—it means constantly referring to your goals and course-correcting to stay on track.

It’s worth noting that you’re not necessarily aiming for 100% alignment between actions and company goals here. You might reserve 10% of your resources for moonshot ideas; things that nobody is asking for, but could still pay off. You probably don’t want that portion to be 50%.

Okay, so what should I do next?

The next time you’re in a meeting or writing an update on project progress, scrutinise the actions you’re currently taking and see where they might fit into this model. Are your actions highly aligned with your goals, or are you unintentionally ignoring or bending things to suit?