In this article, I’ll be looking at the main types of business objectives for a team, unit or organisation, and looking at the pros and cons of each. Business objectives can be broadly split into quantitative and qualitative. It’s important you find the right blend, based on your context and requirements.
Qualitative objectives
Less prevalent due to the relative complexity that is typical of this form, qualitative objectives are more common in service business, especially those with a high degree of creativity.
Pros:
- Tend to present a richer picture and encourage a deeper understanding of the performance being measured.
- Tend to enable more detailed discussion about performance and improvement actions.
Cons:
- Can be overly complex.
- Can be opinion-based or subjective.
- Typically more difficult to measure.
- Hard to represent or report on.
- Often need to be underpinned by several quantitative measures.
Which type of business objective should you be using?
As with most things in leadership and management, the secret lies in making good decisions about the type of objectives and measures that will enable an accurate picture of performance, and drive effective action.
It goes without saying (or maybe it doesn’t, judging by some of the issues that seem to arise routinely in big corporations) that an objective is really just a benchmark against which one can measure progress and achievement. While measures are an essential guide to action, they can’t exist in isolation, or be used as a substitute for intelligence.
What we really want from our objectives is insightful information about our progress towards them. This is so that we can make intelligent decisions about what we need to do next. We might set ourselves the qualitative objective of becoming the number one organisation in our field. But, we’ll need a range of quantitative measures of things like sales, customers, market-share, profitability, innovation or growth in comparison to our competitors, in order to know whether we’re moving in the right direction.
Perhaps the most effective way of setting objectives is combining both quantitative and qualitative measures. Effective goals often consist of a few qualitative objectives, underpinned by a range of ‘performance indicators’ that are most likely to be quantitative.
The key is to remember why you are setting the objective, and to be clear on the information you will need about progress and achievement in order to really know how you are performing, and what you need to do next.
