Department goals work against each other because they were drawn up independently, each from the logic of that one department. The solution is not found in discussions between department heads, but in placing a single picture above the departments against which all goals are tested.
With 50 to 300 employees, there is usually no shortage of ambition on the work floor. Sales gets a revenue target, operations gets a cost target, HR gets a turnover target. Each goal is defensible on its own. The problem arises because no one has established in advance how those goals relate to each other. Sales promises delivery times that operations considers unachievable. Operations cuts back on something HR had just promised to improve. This is not a collaboration problem between people, it is a missing layer above the department goals: there is no target state that indicates which choice takes priority when two goals clash.
A common mistake is that department goals are derived from an annual target, rather than from the ambition that lies beneath it. A revenue goal from sales and a margin goal from finance can work against each other as long as no one has stated whether the organization is steering toward growth or toward margin this year; that difference is explained on the page about how to weigh growth against margin in a strategy. Without that choice, each department optimizes for its own figure, and the figure of one department is not infrequently the cost item of another. The same applies to the difference between a goal and an ambition: a goal is a number with a date, an ambition is the direction that number is supposed to be an indication of. Anyone who does not have that distinction sharp will find it reflected on the page about the difference between a goal and an ambition. At a wholesale company with 120 employees, the tension between sales and the warehouse turned out to be resolvable only once leadership made explicit that service level counted more heavily this year than revenue growth — before that, both teams were right, each from their own goal.
The reflex is a meeting between department heads to "align" goals. That works as long as the tension is visible, but the next hurdle appears as soon as the context changes: a new customer, a tight labor market, a supplier that falls out. Then another meeting is needed, and another, because there is no fixed reference point that new choices automatically run up against. A target state in four layers — vision, vision state, target and target state — does provide that reference point. Each department traces its goal back to the same layer, making contradictions visible before they collide in execution, not afterward in a crisis meeting. This is also why the ambition round does not stay with the executive team alone: when the entire organization thinks along about what the target state means for its own work, conflicts between departments come to the table while it is still a conversation, not once it has already become an operational problem.
Goals working against each other are often visible on one dimension before they are visible in the figures: capacity, customer experience, costs, or culture, to name a few. A double test across eight dimensions forces a goal to be assessed not only on its own result, but also on what it does to the seven other dimensions. A sales goal that scores excellently on the revenue dimension may expose a shortage on the capacity dimension that operations has felt for weeks but had not reported back. The five confidence gates ensure that such a goal does not shoot through to execution before that tension is resolved, rather than only surfacing at the quarterly figures. At a software company with 90 employees, this approach made visible that the sales team's growth goal and engineering's quality goal were structurally working against each other as long as onboarding of new customers had not been scaled along with it — something that was not recognized as a conflict in an ordinary planning discussion, because both teams were simply hitting their own goal.
Whether your department goals are working against each other because of a missing vision or because of a vision that has not been translated, this can be quickly seen with the test of whether your vision is steerable in six questions about the four layers; that test also shows how you make a vision measurable so that department goals can actually be tested against it, and how that relates to setting up a target operating model in plain words. What remains after that is the translation of that target state to who does the work: which roles and tasks the new course requires, in addition to what already exists today. That difference in hours and staffing, per department, is worked out in the work scan at ftetoai.com — the place where the aligned goals land again in concrete capacity.
Vertel wat u wilt bereiken, dan kijken we samen wat daarvoor moet staan.
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