Aligning Training and HR activity to an organisation's strategic goals is much harder in practice than in theory! Cascading goals down through an organisation can sometimes end up like Chinese Whispers. However, aligning goals is a key aspect of both measuring and delivering a good ROI in training.

What are the financial goals of the organisation and how are they translated into strategic goals (public sector organisations will look at strategic goals first and financial goals second)? This is a job for the Board, often aided by a good facilitator.
Your company strategy document should make these links clear.

This can be a challenge: If the goal is to be Number One for Customer Service – what is that worth to the business? If the public sector organisation has a major delivery target, what proportions of reward/resources are at stake?
By valuing the goals, even if only roughly, it will become clear where the business needs to invest resources

This is the acid test – each person needs to understand how their work enables their manager to deliver the results that are needed. Note that this is the exact opposite of daily management practice, where each manager ensures that they are supporting the team below them to deliver their individual goals.
However, for the business to really be aligned, each person should understand how what they do contributes to the whole.

In many organisations, the impact of this step – asking people to align themselves upwards – is that a gap appears between what the organisation strategically has committed itself to deliver and what each person is focused on doing. Sometimes major organisational goals are missed because the organisational goals are not fully converted to personal goals through the team.

In the next issue we will talk about how to use the goal alignment process to create a detailed Line of Sight – the foundation of our approach to ROI in training .