In a recent article, I wrote about how to get strategic goals right, narrowing them down to the few that will shape the future of the business.
But getting the goals right is only half the battle. The next challenge is execution, and that is often the biggest gap. It’s the classic image of the binder sitting on the shelf collecting dust.
How do you know if you are actually making progress toward your goals? How do you keep the leadership team focused on the priorities you worked so hard to get clarity on and not get pulled into the day-to-day?
This is where measures and targets come in. They are how a team moves the plan forward, by defining how progress will be tracked and what success looks like.
The process of defining them together as a leadership team forges greater alignment around the plan as a whole. The conversation often includes some healthy debate and when decisions are reached, enables the team to make resource decisions, including where to invest energy over the course of the year.
For each strategic goal, there should be a small set of measures that indicate whether the organization is moving in the right direction toward accomplishing the goal. These measures help teams see progress (or the lack of it) as it is happening, rather than waiting until the end of the year to see results.
For example, if one of your strategic goals is to expand into a new geographic market, revenue alone is not enough to track progress throughout the year. An additional useful measure could be the number of sales meetings happening in that market. If that number is increasing over time, it is a good signal that market penetration will improve, even if revenue has not yet followed.
It’s helpful to distinguish between two types of measures. Result measures reflect outcomes, such as revenue or market share, while driver measures track the activity that leads to those outcomes, such as sales meetings or pipeline development. Both matter.
Result measures tell you where you are, but they tend to lag. Driver measures give you a more immediate sense of whether the work required to reach the outcomes. Together, they give the team a clearer picture of progress over time and help surface issues earlier.
When you have good measures in place, they help teams respond earlier, surface issues before they become larger problems, and create an opportunity to adjust along the way.
Measures should be quantitative and track progress over time. A common mistake is to use a date or milestone as a measure. While those may be important, they do not show whether progress is actually being made along the way.
Measures should also not be too challenging to track. If a measure relies on data that is difficult to access or requires systems that are not yet in place, it is unlikely to be used consistently. Strong measures are easy to update and review over time and become part of the team’s regular rhythm.
When deciding how many measures to have per goal, there should be enough to capture both success and progress, but few enough to keep the team focused and able to act. In practice, this usually means a small set of measures (5–7) that the team can consistently review and respond to.
Measures tell you what to track. Targets define what you are aiming for.
Without targets, measures can quickly become passive. Teams may review the data, but it is not always clear whether performance is where it needs to be.
Targets provide that clarity.
Continuing the example of expanding into a new geography, a team might set a target of 250 meetings over the course of the year. That translates into roughly 21 per month and gives the team a clear way to assess whether they are on track.
If the number falls short, it naturally leads to better questions. What is getting in the way? Do we need to adjust our approach? Are we allocating enough resources to this goal?
Targets help turn measurement into action by making expectations explicit.
Teams often have different views on what the right target should be, and that discussion is an important part of the process. The goal is to land on targets that are both a stretch and achievable, creating the right level of focus and effort.
The targets you choose determine how much energy the organization will put behind a goal, making it critical that the team is aligned on what they are aiming for.
The real value of measures and targets is not just in how they are defined, but in how they are used over time.
When leadership teams regularly review progress together, it creates a consistent opportunity to step back from the day-to-day and focus on how the strategy is unfolding. It allows the team to assess where things are on track, where they are not, and what needs to change.
This ongoing rhythm is what turns measures and targets into something more than a tracking exercise. It becomes a way for the team to stay aligned, make decisions, and continue moving the strategy forward over the course of the year.
To support this rhythm, leadership teams need a simple way to track and review progress.
As part of our Strategic Ascent process, we work with clients to define their measures and targets and capture them in a Strategic Scorecard.
In its simplest form, a Strategic Scorecard is a one-page view that includes each strategic goal, its focus areas, and the measures and targets used to track its progress.
When teams regularly review the scorecard together, it creates a consistent way to step out of the day-to-day activities, assess progress, and make decisions about where to focus time and energy.
Setting strategic goals is an important step. But what determines whether those goals actually move the business forward is how they are measured. When leadership teams define the right measures and targets and track them on an ongoing basis, they create a shared understanding of progress and a consistent way to manage it. That is what turns strategy into execution and what allows a strategic plan to have true impact on the organization.
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