CASE STUDY
Teaching Leaders to Translate
Strategy
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In previous years, cascaded objectives had been pre-populated into individual performance plans. This year, the organisation wanted to build that capability within its own senior and middle leadership.
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A 2.5-hour interactive workshop on goal setting, paired with detailed, role-specific leader conversation and meeting guides for career, feedback and goal-setting discussions.
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A leadership cohort with clarity on strategy and the practical tools to translate enterprise goals into team and individual objectives, independently.
Our Approach
The organisation’s board-approved strategy was, once again, the starting point. But the brief this year was different. In previous years, cascaded objectives had been written and pre-populated directly into individual performance plans. This time, the focus shifted from delivering the cascade to building the capability to do it — specifically, within the organisation’s own senior and middle leadership cohort.
A 2.5-hour interactive workshop was developed and co-facilitated, taking leaders through the practical skill of goal setting rather than simply handing them a finished template. Alongside the workshop, detailed leader conversation and meeting guides were developed — covering career and development conversations, feedback conversations, and team and individual goal-setting meetings — so leaders had something practical to return to long after the session ended.
The shift from delivering the work to teaching it meant leaders left equipped to repeat the process independently in future cycles, rather than relying on it being done for them each year.
Outcomes
The middle to senior leadership cohort came away with clarity on the organisation’s strategy and the tools to translate enterprise goals into team and individual objectives themselves. Goals were embedded in the organisation’s HRIS, and — more importantly — backed by genuine conversations between leaders and their teams.
Background
This engagement was delivered under MAKR Consulting, building directly on a prior year’s enterprise goal-cascade engagement with the same organisation.
Shifting from delivering the cascade to teaching leaders to do it themselves reflected the organisation’s growing maturity, and a deliberate choice to invest in lasting internal capability over repeat external delivery.
“I wanted to say a huge thank you for your work with us on this project. Your quick response time, great communication and quality results have supported us to get all our people on board with the new way of setting goals. We have had very positive feedback from our leaders, and are now ensuring everyone has their goals in our HRIS — but we know that good conversations are being held. So thanks again, Rachael. We really appreciate your support with this work.”
This engagement was lead by:
Rachael Kelly
Principal, HR & People & Culture Strategy
What this
engagement shows
Building leaders’ capability to translate strategy themselves outlasts any single performance cycle. The measure of success isn’t just goals entered into a system — it’s the quality of the conversations that produced them.
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