What are good strategic goals?

In our private lives, we repeatedly set strategic goals. For example, we set ourselves strategic goals to achieve a career move, save enough money for a major investment or win a championship in a sport. 

In order to achieve these personal goals, which are often several years in the future, we set performance targets for our personal processes. For the strategic goal of “winning the sports championship”, this is roughly the time in hours that we want to use each week to practise the sport.

Strategic goals in the company express what the company wants to achieve in 1-3 years.

This is about the big steps towards the future. Good strategic goals are both ambitious and realistically achievable – even if they require effort.

Good strategic goals are …

• concrete. They express exactly what is to be achieved (e.g. more market share in another country)
• measurable (e.g. via a market study)
• attractive (e.g. for employees)
• realistic (e.g. 10% more market share per year, which should be possible based on experience)
• terminated ( e.g. the first 10% increase in market share is to be achieved by the end of the year).

In order to make strategic goals (with the help of processes) concretely realizable, performance targets (for these processes) are defined in the next Step.