BUSINESS metrics YOUR TEAM will champion

When I was a kid, I would dream up a million things for my brother and me to do on Saturdays. Let’s build a fort, then go climb a mountain, then bake cookies and then pretend like we are in a spaceship.

As a business leader, I have to catch myself in my old habit of trying to do too much. When I ask the C.E.O.s I work with what their most important goals are for the year, they usually give a three- to four-item list: grow revenue, build a new software solution, improve our delivery time. Sometimes the executives on their team will say the same list, but more often than not, the executives will rattle off a longer list: launch a new product, decrease lead conversion, hire two new managers, improve the billing process, launch a new marketing plan. Then, when you go to the front-line team and ask them if their list is usually a little foggier, “I think we are supposed to improve sales?”

We all know the benefits of a unified team moving in the same direction towards a greater goal, but how many of our teams feel connected to the greater goals beyond their number of calls or improvement of click-through rate? In marketing, we know that the key to successful communication is simplicity. In addition to annual goals you might consider choosing a "theme" for the year that can be a common thread in all of your annual goals. For example, our 2018 theme is listening. We have business metrics we are tracking like increase subscribers, reduce bounce rates and grow our digital revenue. But as a part of each of these growth and improvement plans we are including a listening component. Better community management on social, better tags based on recent searches and client surveys are all ways we'll drive our key business metrics while sticking to a unified theme.