Linking Pay to Performance: Cascading Goals

Ask any competitive sports’ coach to identify the primary team goal before any given season and he or she would certainly respond with something along the lines of, “to win championships”. The individual tasks of all members of the organization, both big and small, revolve and the realization of this one, all-important goal.

Most businesses operate according to the same basic principle; yet championships instead manifest in the form of augmenting profit margins. Now, in the ever-exasperating world of budget management, it is sometimes difficult to link pay to performance, for how can one determine a specific individual’s impact on the overall budget, and therefore his or her proportional cut of the pie?

Think of cascading goals like a pyramid: at the top is the single, dominating objective, supported by decreasing layers of goals, that although increasingly-vary as one approaches the bottom, are all connected to the original objective. The top is narrow and controlled by few, while the bottom layers are comprised of the rest of the bunch. Although the direction of the various enterprises is limited to a select group, without the support and aid of its bottom levels, any pyramid is destined to collapse. For this reason, as in sports, the whole success of a business is the sum of each and every one of its parts. This system is more than worth its weight in gold for alleviating some of the stress of budget management.