Corporate strategies are the broad goals designed to grow the business. These strategies are vital because they will give each and every manager within the organization, including you, a focus. The mission will be achieved when these strategies (think objectives) are accomplished. These strategies or objectives, built around the organization’s mission and the demands of the marketplace, cascade down within the organization, translated at each level into goals that support the strategies.
Tactical goals—broad goals designed to achieve the strategies—are generally developed by middle managers. Line managers and staffs typically create operational goals, whose purpose is to facilitate tactical steps.
This top-down approach to planning continues to be used more often than the bottom-up approach, in which the organization sets broad corporate aims and then asks managers and their staffs at lower levels to specify what they can do to achieve them. Although the bottom-up approach is far more effective at ensuring that unit goals are realistic and at gaining staff commitment, it can be time consuming, calling for several cycles of decisions and revision.
So you and your team may have goals imposed on you, or you may set them yourselves, or you may find yourself somewhere between those two extremes. Goals (tactical and operational) cover output, quality, and allowable expenditures, as well as employee-related issues like recruitment and retention (think turnover), pay and benefits, and safety issues. The goals may be qualitative (described with such words as improve, maintain, good, or better), they may be quantitative (tied to number of pieces completed or dollars saved or earned), or they may be both. The kind of goals you set depends on your unit’s work.