The organizations mission is developed by the leader(s) of the company. Each manager in the organization then develops the objectives for their department/team to support the mission of the organization.

The next step is the managers meeting with their team to review the organizations mission and their team’s objectives to support this mission. The managers and team members then jointly discuss and agree upon the strategies for the team to be successful in meeting its objectives. These strategies are then assigned to the individual team members.

This process insures that every employee is working on a set of clear cut and agreed upon strategies that support their team’s objectives which in turn supports the overall mission of the organization. The net result is that every employee is rowing in the same direction and there is immense power when this type of synergy can be created.

Dan Stewart
Mr. Objectives
Twitter: @MrObjectives

When I was promoted to my first management position I was put in charge of an existing team in our company. I soon discovered that each member of the team had their own ideas on what was most important and everyone had their own agenda. This behavior resulted in delays to all project deadlines and low team morale. I tried everything from team building exercises to weekly group meetings to improve productivity and moral but nothing seemed to help. It was out of sheer desperation that I began searching for help and I discovered the management tool, Management By Objectives.

Using this tool, I met with my team to review the company mission and what our team was expected to do to redeem this mission. The meeting was very informative with lots of questions and sincere interest by all of the team members. We then discussed what would be the key strategies to insure our team’s success. To my amazement, everyone contributed ideas and we soon had a very solid list of key strategies. After reviewing these strategies, I set another meeting where I assigned our agreed upon strategies to the individual members of the team.

I think for the first time, every member of our team understood how they would be helping the team meet its objectives. We then agreed to meet monthly to review our progress. Using this process, we began completing our projects ahead of every deadline and everyone on the team was proud of their accomplishments. Management By Objectives helped turn our department from dysfunctional to one of the best teams in the company. I have been using this management tool ever since with the same results.

Dan Stewart
Mr. Objectives
Twitter: @MrObjectives