A Big Goal That Brings Your Leadership Team Together
You have a clear picture of where you want your business to be in ten years.
You have spent time thinking about what the business could become, the customers it could serve, the opportunities it could pursue and the impact it could have. You have shared that vision with your leadership team, and everyone seems enthusiastic about the future.
Yet when you look at the decisions being made across the business, you begin to wonder whether everyone is working toward the same destination.
Your sales leader is focused on entering new markets. Operations is concentrating on improving efficiency and capacity. Your people leader is concerned about developing the talent needed for future growth. Each is pursuing something important, and each believes they are supporting the company's long-term goals.
The difficulty is that their priorities do not always fit together.
When those competing priorities need to be resolved, the decisions often come back to you.
You know where you want the business to go. The question is whether your leadership team sees the same future clearly enough to help you get there.
A Shared Goal Does Not Always Mean a Shared Vision
One of the challenges I have seen in leadership teams is that people can agree on a goal while holding very different interpretations of what achieving it will mean.
A company might have a BHAG, a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, that describes an ambitious future ten or more years away. Everyone knows the goal. It appears in strategic discussions, leadership presentations and annual planning sessions.
But ask each leader to describe the business when that goal has been achieved, and you may hear several different answers.
One leader pictures a much larger organization serving more customers. Another sees a highly efficient operation with industry-leading capabilities. Someone else imagines a business known for developing exceptional people and providing outstanding customer experiences.
There may be value in every answer. The issue arises when those different pictures begin influencing decisions, investments and priorities without a common understanding of the future they are meant to create.
As the CEO, you may find yourself repeatedly explaining why one initiative takes precedence over another, resolving competing priorities or bringing leaders back to the bigger picture.
The Real Value of a BHAG Is Leadership Alignment
A BHAG gives a business something significant to work toward over the long term. It provides a Beacon on the Hill, a destination that remains meaningful as the business grows and the circumstances around it change.
Its value extends well beyond setting an ambitious target.
A BHAG creates alignment.
When your leadership team shares a clear understanding of the future, that understanding begins to influence how people think about their responsibilities today.
Your sales leader can consider which customers and markets fit the business you are building. Operations can evaluate the capabilities required to serve those customers successfully. Your people leader can identify the leadership capacity and talent the business will need as it grows.
Each leader continues to bring a different perspective and area of expertise. The shared destination helps those perspectives work together.
This does not mean every decision becomes easy or that disagreements disappear. Strong leadership teams will continue to debate priorities, question assumptions and challenge one another's thinking.
What improves is their ability to make those decisions with a common understanding of where the business is going.
That is a very different leadership experience from having everyone pursue their own interpretation of growth.
When a Big Goal Becomes Another Source of Pressure
There is a temptation to use an ambitious long-term goal primarily as a way to push people to achieve more.
The goal becomes something that is repeated when results fall short, when deadlines are missed or when the business needs greater effort from its people.
Over time, the BHAG can begin to feel like another performance target, only much larger and further away.
The leadership team may understand the ambition without seeing how it connects to the work they do every day.
A compelling BHAG offers something more useful. It helps people understand what they are building together and why their contribution matters.
Consider the difference between telling your leadership team that the business needs to double in size and helping them see the kind of company you intend to become.
What will customers experience that they cannot experience today? What capabilities will make the business distinctive? What opportunities will exist for employees? What reputation will the business have earned?
Those questions help bring the future into focus.
They also give leaders a better basis for deciding what deserves attention today.
A BHAG is most valuable when people understand the future behind the ambition and see how their work contributes to making it possible.
A Practical Leadership Alignment Exercise
If you want to understand how clearly your leadership team shares the future you envision, there is a useful exercise you can try at your next meeting.
Begin by asking each leader to answer one question independently:
When we achieve our BHAG, what will be different about our business?
Encourage them to think beyond size, revenue or other financial measures. Ask them to describe the company as they imagine it will exist when the goal has been achieved.
What will your customers say about you? What will employees experience? What will distinguish your business in the market? What capabilities and strengths will you have developed?
Give everyone time to write down their answers before discussing them as a group. This helps you hear each person's understanding rather than having everyone adopt the first answer offered.
Then compare what they have written.
Look for the common themes. Notice where descriptions differ or where important elements of the future are missing.
You may discover that your leadership team shares a remarkably consistent picture. That is a valuable foundation to build upon.
You may also find that people have been working toward different versions of the same goal.
If that happens, you have identified an opportunity to strengthen alignment.
The next question is equally important:
Which of our current priorities will contribute most to creating that future?
This connects the long-term destination to the choices your leadership team is making today.
You are looking for a shared understanding that leaders can carry into their own decisions, departments and conversations with their teams.
The exercise is valuable because it makes something visible that can otherwise remain an assumption: whether everyone is working toward the same future.
What Leadership Alignment Means for the CEO
As your business grows, your ability to personally guide every important decision becomes increasingly limited.
You need capable leaders who understand where the company is going and can use that understanding to make sound decisions within their areas of responsibility.
When your leadership team shares a clear picture of the future, you gain something valuable.
You spend less time explaining the direction of the business, resolving priorities that are working against one another and reconnecting decisions to the bigger picture.
Your leaders become better equipped to work together, anticipate what the business will need and take responsibility for moving it forward.
You still provide leadership, judgement and direction. You also create more room to focus on the future rather than continually coordinating the present.
This is one of the most important payoffs of having a meaningful BHAG.
The goal becomes something your leadership team understands, believes in and uses.
And as that shared understanding grows, so does your team's ability to lead the business toward the future you envision.
How Clear Is Your Leadership Foundation?
A shared long-term direction is one part of building a leadership team that can make confident decisions and move the business forward together.
The Leadership Clarity Index helps you assess the clarity and alignment supporting your leadership team and identify areas that may benefit from greater attention.
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