Smart Goals, Smarter Teams

The Implementation Playbook: Practical steps to escape the activity trap and drive real results

Grab a coffee: Today’s newsletter is a how-to deep dive, 7 minute read

Driving Results

In my last newsletter, I argued that shifting from monitoring activities to measuring outcomes is critical for both organizational performance and workforce equity.

Today, I'm diving into why this shift is so challenging and providing practical steps to begin the transformation.

The Barriers to Change

Building an outcomes-based organization requires hard work. You need cultural norms around transparency, accountability, and trust. You must invest at all levels in systems, communications, and training. And perhaps hardest of all, leadership has to walk the talk—consistently and visibly.

Here's why many organizations struggle:

Cultural inertia: The "I succeeded this way" mindset creates resistance, especially among leaders who rose through systems rewarding presence and visibility. This mindset can be reinforced through acquisitions or C-Suite turnover, particularly during turnarounds.

Executive trust issues: Many leaders fundamentally distrust that employees work effectively without visual supervision. As one CEO told me, "I don't know that they're walking the dog four hours a day, but I know they can't if they're in the office." The solution isn't philosophical debates—it's building systems that measure what matters.

Measurement difficulties: Many struggle to measure outcomes, especially for knowledge work. As Peter Drucker noted back in 1969, "Once we automate rote tasks, what's left is creativity, decision-making, and complex problem-solving." At Google, we'd talk about "landings not launches"—did you drive usage? It's harder but more meaningful than tracking activity.

Change and investment challenges: This transition requires significant organizational change, including difficult executive-level discussions and clear communication throughout the organization. Sustained investment is essential.

Overcoming inertia and making the investment is increasingly critical. Work isn’t getting “simpler.” Measuring keystrokes yields keystrokes, applying a tool that logs how many hours someone spent in a tool doesn’t boost profits.

Core Principles for Success

You won't get it "right" the first time, or even the third. The journey creates the value: continuous improvement in setting crisper goals, identifying meaningful metrics, and instilling accountability. This is as much about culture as it is about measurement.

Here are the guiding principles I've developed over 25 years of building companies and leading teams. YMMV.

1. Good Solutions Help People Say No

In my startup days, we maintained a Top 10 list of key initiatives with specific deliverables and clear owners, updated monthly. The most valuable aspect wasn't accountability—it was that an engineer asked to work on something not on the list could say "that's not on the list."

Most of strategy is saying no. Regardless of which system you use, if your OKRs, KPIs, or MBOs are so numerous that every effort in the company easily tracks back to something, you're doing it wrong. Force discipline into the system with these guidelines:

• Organization level: No more than five Objectives (longer term aspirations), each with no more than five Key Results (measurable goals for this year, updated monthly and reassessed quarterly).

• Team level: No more than three Objectives with no more than four Key Results each. Every team member should also set personal goals, including at least one development goal.

Priorities are crucial and really difficult. I've been guilty more times than I'd care to admit of wanting to avoid tradeoffs. "The team's grown, why CAN'T we do X, Y and Z?"

But a leader's job is making those tough calls. What are the 3 most important deliverables for your team this quarter? Be clear, place the bet—and change it only if absolutely necessary.

2. Set SMART Goals That Matter

At the risk of stating the obvious, SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) are essential. I've seen too many organizations where quarterly reviews consist of 40-person readouts on "what we did last quarter" and goals for the next quarter are simply "launch features" or "run campaigns."

At Google, we emphasized "landings not launches." Get disciplined about reviewing proposed goals, shifting from "launch pilot" to "get feedback from 30 customers," from "kick off campaign" to "generate X leads at Y cost per acquisition by end of March."

Establish what good looks like. At Google, my team targeted 80-90% attainment on key results each quarter. If everything is green, you aren't pushing far enough; if everything is red, people are burning out (or you're terrible at estimating). Getting alignment across functions on these standards is critical.

3. Create Balanced Scorecards

What gets measured gets done. You need a focused list of metrics that drive results and measure outcomes. Amazon describes this as "controllable input metrics" and "outcome metrics." A controllable input is something your business can directly influence that drives outcomes you want: quality assortment increases sales.

Balance your limited set of metrics across:

• Outcomes: Revenue generated, active users of your product, market share growth

• Leading indicators: New customers, feature adoption, or as Amazon's retail team tracks, "percentage of detail page views where products were in stock and immediately ready for two-day shipping"

• Quality: Reliability and customer satisfaction or net promoter score (NPS)

• Efficiency: Are teams and systems becoming more efficient as you scale?

The same approach works for internal teams: What's your usage metric? Quality of service measure? Reliability and efficiency? Remember that employees are customers too—what's your eNPS (employee net promoter score)?

4. Clear Roles and Decision Rights

In startup mode, it's straightforward to determine who's responsible for what and how decisions get made. As organizations scale, however, establishing clear accountability and decision rights becomes both more challenging and more critical. At minimum, you need clarity on two key roles: who's responsible for driving progress, and who makes the final call.

These roles can be combined into a single person, often called a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI). Netflix uses the concept of an “informed captain” — the person best positioned to make an informed decision about the topic they're managing. Importantly, don't confuse role with level: the most senior person may not be the right lead for every initiative.

For larger organizations, a framework like DACI provides valuable structure:

• Driver: Steers the process forward, corrals stakeholders, and pushes for clarity

• Accountable: Has the final decision-making authority

• Consulted: Provides subject matter expertise, input, and recommendations

• Informed: Impacted by decisions but not directly involved in making them

Clear decision rights prevent the two most common failure modes: decision paralysis and constant revisiting of supposedly "final" decisions. When everyone knows who makes the call and how input is gathered, teams move faster with less friction.

5. Balance Timelines and Flexibility

The bigger the organization, the harder it is to change direction—ocean liners don't turn on a dime. But even early-stage startups can't change everything weekly; the context-switching cost alone is enormous. Consider these boundary examples:

• Set half-year goals with matching resource allocations—hire H1 people and spend H1 money; make substantial goal and resource realignments semi-annually

• Conduct major progress reviews with modest cross-team adjustments quarterly

• Measure monthly, allowing teams to adjust resources within their teams monthly or biweekly

• Make emergency adjustments when truly necessary, but remember: adding anything new means taking something old off the plate

Smaller organizations and individual teams can be more nimble, but with limits driven by the ability to absorb change and the reality of the timeframes needed to see impact.

A future newsletter will dig into processes like Quarterly Business Reviews and Weekly Operations Meetings, which can either be an utter waste of time or the most critical tools of management – your choice.

6. Make Progress Visible

Transparency enables trust and reinforces accountability. The bigger the organization, the more you’ll need tools that allow people to track shared goals or even find other teams that are also contributing work that moves a specific measurable forward.

At a local level, having team visibility into progress is critical. Systems or at minimum individuals responsible for periodic (weekly, monthly) updates to measurable goals makes it easier to get everyone aligned, and allows people to ask for help when something is off track.

7. Connect Goals to Performance

Having organizational and team-level goals makes performance management significantly more effective. For some functions like Sales, attribution is straightforward, but for project-based roles across functions, it's more complex.

Performance should always balance WHAT and HOW:

• What tracks back to impact—the outcomes and measurements discussed above. For employees whose work is done in projects, they inevitably inherit the impact of the project as well as their own contributions, with functional assessment of their work quality.

• How needs equal clarity. At Slack, we rebuilt a messy system by focusing on four attributes: Smart (learning orientation), Humble, Hard-working, and Collaborative. That clarity allowed for consistent conversations and peer inputs.

On a quarterly basis, managers and employees should discuss how individual goals align with team objectives and track progress at least monthly to avoid surprises. Weekly 1:1s with individuals can be an opportunity to talk about progress, priorities and blockers – how can I help you move forward?

Getting Started Today

None of this is rocket science, but it's not easy either. You can do this in a business unit or within a team, but odds of success increase dramatically when your CEO and C-Suite commit to the work, with support from Finance, program managers, and Communications teams.

You won't get it perfect the first time—or ever. But continuous investment yields real results. And you don't need to wait for top-down implementation; your own team will appreciate the clarity you bring to their work lives.

The best time to start was yesterday. The second-best time is today. What are you waiting for?

---

---

Postscript

Alexandra Schwartz replied on LinkedIn, pointing out that she’s not seen any companies successfully implement all phases of this.

I’d agree: there's no good way to get it all to happen, certainly not at once. I've found more luck with getting people to solve one, maybe two, aspects at a time:

• Building measures that matter (ex., product teams with goals that impact the business, not just "on time delivery")

• Working with execs repeatedly to get to clear priorities and supporting that for the next two quarters (at least), or

• Focusing on role & decision making clarity.

Any one of those is a big lift, and progress is measured in quarters.

Feedback? Ideas? Reach out! I’m brian@theworkforward.com

---

Further reading on measuring organizational outcomes, courtesy of Future Forum

---