Leadership Essential: The Importance of Aligning Goals

As military leaders, we all understand the importance of accomplishing the mission. The mission is the most important objective. However, unit goals can be different from mission goals. For example, your mission may be to be combat-ready for deployment into a conflict area by a certain date. Your unit goals may be to be the best unit on the next evaluation, test or inspection. A unit goal may be to be the best unit in the battalion, brigade, or division. But the mission and unit goals must be aligned in order to accomplish anything - otherwise they will be counter-productive or even disastrous. They can’t be mutually exclusive. Individuals also have goals, and the same rules apply to those personal goals. Individual goals that don’t align with the unit’s goal or mission could cause conflict and even failure.

Leaders should try to align their subordinates’ goals with their organizational goals. For the majority of followers, their goals do align with the unit’s goals. They want to be the best they can be and do their duties as well as they can so the unit can do well too. But sometimes, they don’t really align at all.

Two examples from my experience as a company commander stationed in Germany (1977- 1980) come to mind. I had one soldier who would not cooperate with his squad leader to the point that the squad leader was very frustrated and brought the soldier to me for punishment. I sat the young man down and asked him about his life goals. He said he wanted start his own landscaping business when he got out of the Army. I made him the unit beautification manager and gave him all the resources (topsoil, plants, bushes, fertilizer, grass seed, etc.) he needed to care for the area around the barracks. He reported directly to me and as a result, he became a happy camper and we won a prize that year for the barracks’ appearance.

The second incident involved a Vietnam veteran who had only a few months left to serve. We called people like him “Short Timers” because of their attitudes. He refused to go to the field or to do any more soldiering. He felt he had done his share, had seen it all and wasn’t afraid of any punishment I could meld out. I asked him about his personal life goals. He wanted to be a carpenter when he got out of the service. I appointed him the unit carpenter and gave him a long list of projects. The first project was to build a Ping-Pong table. Because soldiers kept sitting on them, the original ping pong tables were damaged and needed to be replaced. That soldier built a table with six 4x4 legs. During one class, I saw 20 people sit on that table without causing any damage.

Maybe I should have court martialed those soldiers; perhaps I was too soft on them or catered to their personalities too much, but they had a dysfunctional influence on the unit completely out of proportion with their rank and duties. In their new assignments, they made a positive contribution to the unit’s goals and mission while also completing tasks that gave them pleasure. They were only two troubled men in a company of 150, but their behavior greatly affected others – at first negatively, but later positively.

Their personal goals were out of sync with the unit’s goals. Keep in mind: at the time, it was not a volunteer army but a drafted army. Many draftees didn’t want to be in the Army, but most put aside their personal goals to serve. Others did not. In our current, volunteer-based Army, personal goals, whether they be to travel the world or earn money for college, are often aligned with the unit’s goals and mission.

Sometimes individual goals aren’t diametrically opposed to the unit goals, but they may not be aligned. Aligning those goals with the unit goals can be mutually beneficial and increase satisfaction. One example that comes to mind also happened during my time in Germany. During a health and welfare inspection, I discovered one soldier who was a budding artist. He drew pictures of super heroes. I told him if he wanted to paint those characters on the day room walls, I would buy him all the paint he wanted. He started by painting all the four walls white. Then he painted large pictures of super heroes. It turned out great, and the aspiring artist was proud of his work ;the unit got a good looking day room in the process. Another benefit was that no one wrote any graffiti on the pictures. It was a win-win all the way around.

In these examples, the individuals made a meaningful contribution once their personal goals were aligned with the unit goals. I’m not saying leaders should let followers do whatever they want; however, it is important that individual goals align with unit goals for a synergetic effect.