Top Down or Bottom Up: What’s the Best Way to Set Goals?

Everyone needs goals. As an IT leader, it will be your responsibility to help your team set individual and team goals. While this sounds pretty straightforward at first, in practice it often turns out to be a bit complicated. The most important question you will need to answer is which way you want to set goals: top down or bottom up?

The top-down approach

Say hello to “Big Brother” – he will set the goals for you and your team. The top-down approach to goal setting is where your company’s top management identifies the goals they want you and your team to work toward. They then ask you to assign these goals to your team members.

When goals are set in this way, the company has generally identified a broad set of goals that it would like to achieve in the near future. Your task is then to take these broad goals and create objectives for your team members that are aligned with what the company is trying to achieve.

Although it may seem a bit overbearing at first glance, this approach actually works well in certain situations. Specifically, there are three types of IT workers who need top-down goals: those who need close supervision to get their jobs done, new team members, and any team member who doesn’t know or understand what it is. the company. the goals are.

The bottom-up approach

As a manager, you’d think the bottom-up approach to creating goals for team members would be easier than the top-down approach, but it turns out it’s not. In the bottom-up approach, your team members create their own goals.

Once this is done, it becomes your responsibility to combine these various objectives into a unified set of objectives for the team. As you can well imagine, this can be quite a challenge for any manager.

There are certain types of team members for whom the bottom-up method of goal setting is appropriate. Specifically, those team members who determine their own work, who understand the company’s goals and strategy to achieve those goals, and who understand their role in the company.

It’s all about the purchase

Regardless of which of these two methods is used to set your team’s goals, it will be important for everyone on the team to agree to both their personal and team goals. As an IT leader, it’s your job to make sure this happens.

The best way to gain buy-in from your team, no matter which way you choose to set goals, is to involve everyone in your goals. Participation creates a sense of ownership, and as an IT leader, that’s what you want from your team.

If you’ve used the top-down method of assigning goals to team members, it can be a bit difficult to get buy-in. However, taking the time to talk with team members about their goals, why they are important, and how they relate to the success of the company can foster a sense of ownership.

What all this means to you

Goals are a critical tool IT leaders need to lead the way for their teams. The best way to create those goals has been an ongoing debate since the beginning of time.

The two most common methods used today are top-down and bottom-up. In the top-down method, IT leaders assign goals related to business objectives to team members. In the complementary approach, team members create their own goals and the IT leader uses them to create a set of team goals.

In the real world, a mix of top-down and bottom-up methods is often used to create goals for IT teams. As an IT leader, it’s your job to ensure that not only goals are created, but that each goal also has an owner who will be responsible for ensuring it’s achieved. Good luck!