Goals are the glue that holds a company together. Setting the right business goals help all the people in a company—from customer support to sales—align around making progress and moving forward to a shared vision.
They don’t just help a company’s bottom line either. Research shows that goals help increase the drive and persistence of the people who are trying to achieve them.
Goals give your company the capacity to incentivize and motivate your team toward specific action.
For a finance department, though, setting team goals can be extremely tricky. Other teams in a company often have clear goals to drive the business forward: “Decrease churn by 20%” for your product team, or “Increase user sign-ups by 4x” for marketing. Within a finance department, it isn’t always clear how specific goals connect to the growth of the business—they’re often more focused around managing cash flow or containing costs.
For goals to succeed, you have to be able to connect them to the broader trajectory of what your company’s trying to do. You have to connect the dots between the bigger strategic goal of your company, the operational goals of your team, and the individual goals of your people.