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4Get Your Organization Moving

You'll never achieve truly great success or deliver on big projects if you can't effectively move your organization. Learn how to develop teams and get your organization moving.

41 Numbers give clarity, so set KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are just a way of expressing goals in detail with numbers. To achieve our major objectives, we set goals for the steps along the way, and KPI is simply the term we use to refer to those concrete numerical goals.

Major objectives are crucial to influencing the direction of an organization. But to achieve those major objectives, the goals that represent steps along the way to their achievement must also be clearly laid out and visible. Unless all members of the organization understand the progress they have made against those goals, there's a possibility they will lose sight of the path. KPIs are simply the markers along that path.

In sales, for example, you can set KPIs for numbers of new contracts or new clients, expressing detailed KPIs in numbers for each of the actions that are key to achieving your major objectives.

As an organization grows, it's quite common for individual members of the team to come to feel that their role in achieving major objectives is relatively unimportant. This is when it can become almost inevitable for some members to feel that it won't make a big difference to the whole ...