Goals versus objectives: Learn to lead your teams to success

You work with your team day in and day out. Even so, figuring out how to take advantage of their potential and keep them on track are perennial challenges for every manager. 

Understanding the difference between goals versus objectives is a great place to start. Learning the value of breaking down large goals into measurable and specific objectives can help make your team more accountable, motivated, and strategic with their time.

What are goals?

A goal is a desired outcome that's broad but achievable. You’ll generally define these for long-term time frames and they typically regard the company's overall productive, financial, or operational health. This might include implementing a new operating system, increasing customer revenue, or decreasing employee turnover.

No matter the type you set, a handy method for developing goals is using the SMART method: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. Using those characteristics as your guide means you create clear and strategically-planned goals.

Here are three goal-type examples.

1. Time-bound goals

Deadlines and time targets drive time-bound goals. They're useful for setting timely actions, and specific objectives and timelines complement them. 

The manager of a team of graphic designers might set a time-bound goal to bring team members up to speed on artificial intelligence and automation practices with several training sessions within a month. 

2. Outcome-oriented goals

Outcome-oriented goals focus on transformative business needs. They're north stars that guide smaller measurable steps toward end results and often stimulate major changes in your department's performance or the overall business plan. 

Since an outcome-oriented goal focuses on the big picture, there's more flexibility in adjusting deadlines or changing course on strategic or tactical objectives. 

Imagine you're a sales manager in a company that wants 5% of the market share. While leadership will likely set a desired time frame, you'll lead your team toward that goal for as long as it takes. Along the way, you may decide to build new products, adjust pricing strategies, and analyze new key performance indicators (KPIs) to successfully reach the final goal. 

3. Process-oriented goals

Process-oriented goals center around building new internal policies, systems, and workflows. Rather than focusing on a specific outcome, process-oriented goals focus on the methods teams use to complete work. You define these to increase team efficiency and productivity.

Maybe you're the head editor for a content agency and you need to improve the efficiency of your team of writers and editors. An example of goals you may adopt is aligning everyone to a new workflow app, creating style guides, and developing a messenger channel to share client feedback.

What are objectives?

If your goals are the final destination, objectives are your roadmap. An objective is a measurable action with a set target. They're generally time-bound, and you create them to break down large goals into small, attainable steps. 

Effective objectives are like an action plan. They shift your team's focus from broad outcomes to more manageable steps and let them know the actions they must take to reach the larger goal. And as you check each objective off the to-do list, you can motivate your team to continue seeing the final goal through. 

Here are three examples of objective types.

1. Strategic objectives

You create strategic objectives to shape the overall vision of a long-term goal and provide team members with structure, vision, and direction.

Imagine you're a sales manager for a wholesale clothing brand. Leadership wants to increase total sales revenue. To reach that company goal, here are some strategic objective examples: 

• Each sales agent must make 10 weekly cold calls a week to potential clients

• You must identify five products to bundle or upsell

• You must develop weekly and monthly sales reports to track performance and find patterns

2. Tactical objectives

Tactical objectives concentrate on short-term deliverables and the impact of completing those tasks. This objective type aligns short-term workflows with long-term milestones. And you typically analyze them alongside KPIs to measure goals and help with future decision-making. 

Let’s say you're a marketing manager whose team produces social media content for several brands across Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. To meet your monthly quotas and client deadlines, you create weekly measurable objectives (like drafting 30 social media posts each week) to complete all evergreen content three weeks before posting. 

In the process, you find that some clients take longer to respond to revisions, and so you adjust deadlines to continue to meet individual quotas and publishing due dates. 

3. Operational objectives

These are short-term daily, weekly, or monthly benchmarks you can use to implement a larger strategy that unites several departments and keeps everyone on schedule. 

Imagine you're a project manager for a software company. Your team is responsible for ideating new apps and integrations for existing software. To ensure that your team stays on schedule and aligns with marketing and sales initiatives, you might develop the following objectives to complete a three-month project:

• Identify coding framework during week one

• Develop 50% of the coding in month one, 100% in month two, and all revisions in month three

• Complete daily code error correction

• Host weekly check-ins

4 key differences between goals and objectives

To highlight the functions of each, here are four major differences between goals and objectives:

1. Timeframe: You may set both short and long-term goals for your team, generally spanning from 1–5 years. Objectives are shorter and split up by day, week, or month. 

2. Purpose: You define goals to set your team on a particular course and use objectives to plan steps to reach the desired result.

3. Scope: Goals are broad (like increasing sales), while objectives are narrow and specific (like increasing revenue of a specific product by 15%, cutting department costs by 10%, and eliminating redundancies by 50%). 

4. Quantity: Due to the scope of goals, you’ll typically only have a handful per department. Objectives don't have a limit. You can use as many as needed to break down a broad goal into a tangible process. 

Goals versus objectives example

Using the above criteria, let’s break down a large goal into several objectives.

The goal: Increase website traffic by 50% by the end of Q4

Strategic objective: SE-optimize all web content

Tactical objective: Increase weekly published content by 20%

Operational objective: Adopt a new workflow app to track progress between writers, editors, and clients

How do goals and objectives work together?

Reaching a goal without measurable objectives is like building a house without a blueprint. Objectives support your goals with a clear structure, vision, and strategy.

Here are five ways that developing objectives for your work goals strengthens the success of your team's goal-setting.

1. Easier to manage

When you break down broad goals into manageable, metric-based objectives, it's easier for everyone to organize their efforts and prioritize tasks. And objectives allow you to delegate work, spot strengths and weaknesses in your team as the process evolves, and keep your team from feeling the impacts of burnout as they consistently hit small milestones.

2. Increased motivation

Studies link setting difficult and specific goals to better performance, resilience, and motivation. But when you fail to hit lofty goals, you're subject to decreased mood, self-esteem, and motivation. Ambitious goals give your team a sense of purpose and inspire them to work together toward success. And having smaller and more easily achievable objectives means they feel prepared and motivated to accomplish these broader goals.

3. More accountability

When you break down a professional goal into clear and metric-based objectives, you make it easier to measure and track team and individual performance. And the KPIs associated with your objectives help you identify pain points and weak links you can have team members improve. 

4. Stronger communication

A lofty goal (like increasing revenue) is difficult to gain feedback and guidance on. It's broad and open to several potential paths and solutions. You can give more specific and insightful feedback on smaller objectives where you’ve clearly defined success and the work needed to accomplish them. 

5. Fewer setbacks

Objectives let everyone on your team know what they're responsible for. As each team member works through their objectives, they can discuss bottlenecks, misalignments, and confusion in real time. And documenting and sharing that information means you can avoid mistakes and setbacks during future projects.

How to measure goals and objectives

Measuring your progress toward overall goals is simple if you’ve defined metric-based objectives. Here are three important components for measuring your team's progress:

1. Identify relevant KPIs: Choose the most appropriate metrics to analyze your ultimate goals. If your goal is to increase revenue, look at relevant performance metrics like sales conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, and average profit margin. The more specific your data, the easier it’ll be to identify opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses in your strategy. 

2. Measure past performance: Understanding past successes and challenges helps you set attainable time-based objectives. If you're a marketing manager and you know that your team takes an average of 15 days to build a new client proposal, you can set reasonable objectives for your team and provide clear communication to your client.

3. Develop a structure: A clear strategy with a step-by-step process helps you keep tasks on track by understanding how progress should evolve. This might include a detailed work plan, daily individual objectives, and weekly team meetings. 

   

Guide your team to the finish line

Every team is unique and requires different strategies to function as a unit that works toward larger business goals. And while there isn’t a magic key to keeping everyone performing well, understanding the difference between goals versus objectives can help you create initiatives that harness your team's potential. 

Analyze your current team goals and break them down into smaller daily, weekly, and monthly objectives. This structure and focus will give your team a sense of purpose. And accomplishing each objective will offer them moments to celebrate that will keep everyone motivated and moving forward.