Goal Setting Guide

In many ways goal setting allows us to remain disciplined and clear with everyone about what is important now - and in the future. Setting goals is one of the most essential ways to ensure that your company gets the right stuff done - and on time. It’s how you align individual and team efforts to ensure that you’re all rowing in the same direction. While the goal-setting process is helpful for figuring out where you want to head in the future, it’s equally as valuable to keep you from being lured off-path by exciting - yet distracting - opportunities.

THE GOAL SETTING TIMELINE

Goal setting works best when it has an annual cadence to it, starting in January, and follows a quarterly sprint pace. By nature, it’s a backward design approach: where do we want to be in a year from now? What are our metrics of success? And then how do we focus our efforts for the next three months to position ourselves to best reach our goals?

Annual goal setting:

Early January is the perfect time to reflect and set new goals for the coming year. What do you want to be able to say are the accomplishments you’ve achieved in a year from now? It’s important to be as specific as you can be about what success looks like, quantifying wherever possible. It’s often helpful to host January's annual goal-setting as a retreat to jumpstart and energize the year ahead.

Quarterly goal setting:

Once you’ve identified your annual goals, you will break them down into twelve-week sprints (starting January, April, June, and October). Ask yourself what needs to get done and by whom over the next three months to be able to set yourself up for achieving the annual goals.

Bi-annual individual goal setting:

Instead of traditional performance reviews, it’s helpful to take a moment - twice a year - to do individual goal setting to reflect holistically on how each person is doing with their work. What’s working well? Where are areas for improvement or growth? What are some individual goals for the next stretch of time? No one should ever hear surprises at goal-setting meetings, instead they are a culmination of weekly manager/employee check-ins.

Make an annual calendar:

You may want to create an annual goal-setting calendar so that everyone in the company understands the timeline - especially since there is tight coordination that must occur at the end and the beginning of each quarter.

It’s a smart decision to add these dates to your company calendar or to have a Google calendar with these dates on it that everyone subscribes to so that all employees are in lock-step in understanding the order of events and the specific dates when they are identified each year and quarter following this pattern.

TYPES OF GOAL SETTING MEETINGS:

Team meetings:

Quarterly company-level goals should start first at the team level, then be shared with the leadership team for feedback, then head to the board for sign-off, and finally return to each team to translate into operational tasks.

Every team should meet once a week to be able to coordinate, communicate, and leverage talent to help the team make steady progress toward its goals. As the quarter comes to a close, the team will reflect on how they worked together and will begin to identify improvements to how work gets done.

Some teams really like to have daily standup meetings to stay on track with tight coordination and deadlines.

Leadership meetings:

Leadership meetings are when the C-suite gets together weekly to discuss critical issues at the company. This is a great structure to have in place for regular communication and problem-solving. As the quarter comes to a close, meetings can be used to reflect on the past quarter’s goals, and, at the start of each quarter, these meetings can align board feedback with team-level goals.

Board meetings:

Typically only the CEO attends board meetings. While part of the purpose of board meetings is to share progress and updates, when used effectively, board meetings are an extraordinary opportunity to solicit input and feedback on goals and strategic decisions from a group of field leaders who care deeply about the company’s success. It’s helpful to have the board review quarterly goals as a practice in case they have a more global perspective to evaluate if they are appropriate given macro conditions and trends.

Weekly manager meetings:

Everyone in the company needs a manager and that manager’s job is to optimize each person’s contributions towards company goals. The manager’s job in these weekly conversations is to troubleshoot when obstacles threaten progress, to allocate resources effectively, and to coach individuals to bring out their best.

COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES

With so much information going back and forth in the goal-setting process, it’s important to think about deploying a range of strategies to ensure that the message is clear and that everyone is on the same page. Leaders often underestimate how often they need to remind their team members about what is important right now.

Try to vary your communication approach for different types of learners in your company. Here are some ideas you may want to try:

  • Slide decks

  • Weekly team meetings

  • Group/team meetings

  • Shared meeting notes

  • Slack updates

  • 1:1 meetings

  • Weekly all company emails

  • Town hall meetings

  • Senior leadership meetings

  • Daily stand-ups

START WITH STRATEGY: MISSION, VISION, AND VALUES

Goal setting works best when you start with your company’s vision and mission. Together, these elements provide the framework for your strategy - the big picture of where you want to be heading as a company and how you fundamentally behave in order to get there.

Try to paint a picture with words describing what the world looks like ten years from now if you are wildly successful. How is society meaningfully different because of the work your company is doing? Once you have that image in your mind, summarize it with key concepts.

As a useful exercise, I think it’s also helpful to articulate the Hedgehog principle for your company:

  • What are you passionate about?

  • What drives your economic engine?

  • What do you do better than anyone else in the world?

If you can keep the grand vision as your north star along with the discipline of being able to articulate your passion, revenue, and differentiation then you have a great base to use for goal setting.

Mission statements: Why do we exist?

Mission statements explain why you exist. They are short and concise. If done well, your vision statement for the future provides additional details on what the future looks like if you are wildly successful.

Vision statements: What does the future look like?

A vision statement should be forward-looking and inspirational. Every word should have critical value and answer the questions: What do we do? For whom? How do we change or impact the world?

Value statements: How do you do the work?

What are the core cultural values that describe how we behave at this company? How do we get the work done? If presented with a difficult situation, these values point the direction toward reasonable solutions that align with our beliefs.

Here are some examples of company mission and vision statements so you can see how they are all connected:

Mission, vision, and values examples:

Some companies have a mission statement and a value statement but don’t also clearly articulate a vision statement. Some companies have all of the elements present but have used some creativity to express them in their own style.

TRANSLATE YOUR STRATEGY INTO TIME-BOUND GOALS

If you’re having a tough time getting started, it sometimes helps to literally write freehand about what company success looks like in, say ten years, then work closer to the near term. From that, you can typically start pulling out the key elements. Try to be as quantitative and clear as you can and you can always edit down into the core concepts once you have some ideas to work with.

Backward design your goals:

  • What does success look like in 10 years from now?

  • What does success look like in 5 years from now?

  • What does success look like in 1 year from now?

Once you have a sketch of the elements and key indicators of success, it’s easier then to flesh them out into specific goals.

CRAFTING ANNUAL + QUARTERLY GOALS

Most early-stage bio + climate tech startups follow John Doerr’s OKR approach to goal setting.  OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. If you haven’t read John Doerr’s Measure What Matters, you don’t necessarily need to. It’s a good read, but if you’re short on time there are some great OKR 101 video tutorials on the What Matters website.

As an example, think about driving from Boston to San Francisco. Why do you want to go there? How many days do you want it to take? How many stops do you want to make? What locations are you going to use as checkpoints to keep you on track to reach your destination?

You want to write your goals broadly enough that they are strategic goals and not tactical decisions. If done well, the goals don’t change but tactics may.

Continuing with the example above, let’s say that we decided we want to head from Boston to San Francisco in 2 weeks and we’ve put New York, Chicago, Nebraska, and Utah down as checkpoints. We may start by driving the first leg of the journey and realize that it’s taking too long and hop on a train for the second leg instead. Those are tactical decisions on how to get from point A to point B, but the strategic goal remains the same. Here are some great OKR examples.

As the What Matters website states:

Objectives are:

  • Connected to your company’s mission, vision, and values

  • Meaningful - top priorities that articulate a clear direction.

  • Bold - represent a significant change from where we are today.

  • Inspirational - easy to remember and empowers your teams.

Key results are:

  • Specific and timebound.

  • Aggressive, yet realistic.

  • Measurable and verifiable.

Tips for writing goals:

  • Be reasonably ambitious so that you can succeed. It’s a real morale killer when no one reaches their goals because their goals are too high. At the end of the quarter, you want to be able to check off that you achieved your goals.

  • Break down big goals into quarter-size pieces. Consider a big goal and then be realistic about what can be achieved towards that goal in each quarter; break it down into achievable pieces - i.e., instead of having Q1’s goal be to hire 3 new scientists, perhaps you break that into stages. Q1 focuses solely on designing a process and sourcing candidates.

  • It’s OK to have a goal that explores the feasibility of a future goal or assesses or sketches out a pathway forward.

  • Write goals to align with your values. If you care deeply about collaboration, make sure you don’t write your goals that prioritize individual contributions or reward specific people for team outcomes. Goals can incentivize the wrong company behaviors and values if you aren’t careful.

OPERATIONALIZING + TRACKING YOUR GOALS:

Every quarter there should only be a handful of goals and each team then figures out how to get the work done. It may be helpful to clarify roles and responsibilities with a RACI chart and get granular about weekly benchmarks to hit.

You likely want a company dashboard to keep track of quarterly and annual goals. Lots of startups waste a lot of time and money on fancy systems. While the most common tool teams tend to use is Monday.com, other teams like Airtable, Trello, Google spreadsheets, and Notion.

Regardless of whatever tool you use, keep it simple so that it is easy to use, and make sure it’s part of your regular practice in meetings to review and update it to keep everyone aligned on the current status of these goals.

Every team, however, should feel free to use whatever micro-task system is useful to keep track of the minutia behind these goals. These are internal team resources only and are rarely useful to share with folks outside of the team because they include a lot of “insider” talk.

REFLECTING + REVIEWING YOUR GOALS

As you near the end of each quarter - and each year - it’s always a useful exercise to share back on your goals. Did we get the work done? What worked well in our process? What didn’t? What might we try differently next time? It’s always healthy to not only share results but also to reflect on how we could have improved our process of getting to our destination.

If you didn’t achieve a goal, it’s important to double-click on each one to understand what went wrong. Was the goal written too broadly? Was the goal too big? Did we have confusion somewhere? Did something unexpected happen? Over time keeping a log of “missed goals” may help surface patterns that can help your team troubleshoot systemic problems for improved future performance.

The key to doing a review meeting effectively is creating psychological safety - making sure everyone feels safe sharing and identifying mistakes. If people are scared to share, you’ll get nowhere. It’s so helpful to go into these meetings with a reminder about being a growth mindset company.

OTHER TIPS:

  • Celebrate successes when you can. Startups are hard; take a moment to celebrate the wins when you have them!

  • Consider how your goals are distributed. Does one small team carry all of the weight right now? What can the rest of the company do to support them?

  • Keep stakeholders in the loop. No one likes surprises. It’s always good to drop breadcrumbs along the way in between board meetings so that investors and advisors are aware when red flags begin to emerge - well before they are active emergencies.

  • Take breaks in between sprints. No one can sprint indefinitely. Consider the collective energy needed and make sure that your team is taking breaks when they can. Maybe you need to take an all-company “fun day” at the end of the quarter before digging into the next thing? Maybe as a reward, you give everyone the day off after achieving a giant result.

WRAPPING UP:

While this may seem like a whole lot of planning, communicating, and managing, it’s how stuff gets done effectively. The right up-front effort can save tons of time and conflict by proactively aligning people towards a common target. The more work you can do up front to create clarity and smooth operating systems, the easier it will be to take on bigger and bolder ambitions - and pick your speed when you need to.