You’re sitting around the table at your strategic planning offsite, working through what your goals should be for the year ahead. You bring your priorities as CEO, and your executive team brings theirs. It’s not uncommon for that conversation to produce a long list of goals that start to look less like a strategy and more like a laundry list of everything that needs to get done.

That’s the first challenge (and a common one) that we see. And then, even after narrowing the list, often the goals themselves don’t meet a high standard for what a strategic goal should be and end up being more “business as usual.” 

Getting strategic goals right means having the discipline to keep the list short, and the clarity to make sure each goal on that list earns its place.

How Many Strategic Goals Should You Have?

Just recently, a CEO came into our Strategic Ascent process with a list of around 20 goals. All of them were important to the business in some way. But by the end of the planning session, he and his team had worked through the hard choices and landed on a handful of truly strategic goals that would actually get the focused attention and resources they needed to move forward.

Good strategic planning requires tradeoffs. Without that discipline, your leadership attention gets spread across too many fronts, progress becomes incremental, and strategy lives more on paper than in practice.

In Strategic Ascent, we typically push teams toward two to four strategic goals. That range reflects the reality of leadership capacity. Strategic goals require sustained focus over time, and even strong teams struggle to drive too many things forward at once.

I often use a road trip analogy when talking about strategic goals. First, you have to choose a destination. Let’s say San Francisco. Then you have to decide which roads will get you from Boston to San Francisco. Some roads will move you there faster, more efficiently, or at lower cost than the road you’re currently on.

Those new road choices are your strategic goals. They are not business as usual (those are the roads you are on currently). They are intentional decisions about how the business will move toward where you want it to go. And they only speed up your trip if they are clearly directed at the destination you’ve chosen (in this case, San Francisco), not taking you toward Montreal or Miami instead.

What Do Strong Strategic Goals Look Like?

The qualities of strong strategic goals listed below will help you make the hard choices and sharpen the final goals you decide to move forward with.

1. They Aren’t “Business as Usual”

Strategic goals should feel different from running the company day to day.

Sometimes the work itself is operational, but it qualifies as strategic because it requires elevated leadership attention, cross-functional coordination, or sustained focus to happen. What matters is that the goal represents a meaningful shift, not routine performance or a collection of projects.

A useful gut check is whether your company would naturally accomplish this work even if it weren’t labeled as strategic. If so, it probably doesn’t belong on your strategic goal list.

2. They Have the Potential to Be Transformational

A strategic goal should aim beyond incremental improvement.

The right question is whether achieving the goal would have a transformational effect on your business. Would it meaningfully change performance, position, or capability in a way that matters over time?

Strategic goals earn their place by the size of the impact they can create, not by how urgent or visible the issue feels today.

3. They Clearly Map to Your Three-Year Business Direction

Strong strategic goals connect directly to where your company is headed.

As part of strategic planning, we encourage teams to define a clear three-year business direction, including where the business intends to grow, how it plans to compete, and what financial outcomes it’s working toward. Your strategic goals should clearly support that direction.

If it’s hard to explain how a goal advances your three-year view, the goal may be important, but it’s likely not strategic in this context.

4. They Are Clear, Concise, and Memorable

The wording of a strategic goal matters more than most teams expect.

Strong goals are easy to say, easy to remember, and hard to misinterpret. They include just enough detail to create clarity, without drifting into buzzwords or over-explaining.

If a goal needs constant clarification or comes with a long set of sub-points, it becomes harder for your team to stay aligned and harder for the organization to act on it.

5. They Feel Achievable Given Your Team’s Capacity

Strong strategic goals stretch the organization, but they remain believable.

Your leadership team should be able to look at the list and feel confident that you can actively drive these goals forward given the time, focus, and capacity you actually have. This is where the discipline around having only two to four strategic goals really matters. Even well-written goals lose momentum when too many of them compete for attention.

A final check is simple: if you achieve these goals, will you feel satisfied with the progress of your business?

Take the Opportunity to Refine Your Goals

You may have already done the work of setting your strategic goals, but it’s still early in the year. That makes this a good moment to pause and take a closer look. Are you trying to do too much? Is it realistic to believe your leadership team can drive all of these goals forward at the same time?

One word of caution, if you decide a change is necessary it should be brought to the whole leadership team to bless that change before it gets carved in stone. Even if it is a few words, it is worth it to maintain alignment.

From there, work back through the qualities of a strong strategic goal. Do your goals aim to be transformational? Do they clearly support where you want your business to be over the next three years? Are they truly strategic, clearly articulated, and achievable given your team’s capacity?

It’s not too late to refine what you’ve set. Small adjustments now, narrowing the list or sharpening the goals themselves, can materially improve focus and give your team a better chance of reaching this year’s targets in a way that meaningfully moves your business forward.

_______________________________

‍

Learn more about the Strategic Ascent system.