The Hidden Cost of Smart Goals That Don't Connect

SMART goals alone don't get the job done because they don't scale, instead, they get teams dancing to the beat of their own drum.

Goal alignment when you're small just works. Everyone is in the room, you're driving everything as the founder, so it just works. But with rapid growth comes complexity. What worked at 10 often breaks at 50+. Suddenly, leaders don't agree on priorities, and teams are disconnected from company goals. Some days, you feel more like a referee and firefighter than a founder. Everyone has goals. Everyone is working hard. Progress feels scattered. Alignment feels impossible.

You're not imagining it. There's a real cost to misalignment that most founders don't calculate.

SMART Goal Success Doesn’t Mean Moving The Company Forward

The CEO says, "We need to focus on growth."

Here's how each leader interprets it:

• Engineering: Build new features that drive user acquisition

• Sales: Focus on enterprise deals to hit revenue numbers

• Marketing: Launch brand awareness campaigns for market expansion

• Product: Prioritize retention features to reduce churn

• Operations: streamline processes for efficiency gains

Some teams may hit their goals, others struggle because, cross-functionally, they need each other's support but aren't aligned on priorities. So some stall while others proclaim how they hit their metrics. Each team had SMART goals, no one was aligned on priorities, and there was no shared understanding of the actual primary goal and how to meet it.

The problem is the lack of connection between individual efforts and shared outcomes.

What Good Alignment Actually Looks Like

Compare that to companies that scale successfully. Take Google - same goal-setting framework at 30 people and 180,000 people.

Defining the goal and creating shared understanding means:

• Defining the objectives and setting priorities

• Identifying how each team contributes to the goal

• Agree on what success looks like at every level

• Connect employee performance and daily work to company outcomes

Having a goal setting system that aligns everyone on shared understanding and cascades down to daily work is the key to success.

OKRS: The Missing Piece

There's a reason Google has scaled their goal setting from 30 to 180,000 employees using OKRs. It’s a system that scales with growth, connecting company-wide objectives to team execution without losing clarity or focus.

SMART goals are fine for individual tasks. But they miss the crucial element that scaling companies need: connection.

Connection between:

• Company objectives and departmental focus

• Strategic priorities and daily work

• Leadership vision and team execution

• Cross-functional efforts and shared outcomes

Companies that figure this out don't just grow faster. They grow more efficiently, with less friction, and higher team engagement.

The Framework That Creates Connection

This is where OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) come in. Unlike SMART goals that exist in silos, OKRs create cascading alignment throughout your organization.

Here's the difference:

SMART goals: Each department sets measurable goals in a silo.

OKRs: The Company sets objectives, then each department creates its own goals that directly support the company level.

• This aligns departments on shared outcomes

• Key results are used to outline each department’s contribution to the shared objective

• Key results connect teams to the work that needs to be done to meet the shared objective

Teams outline what projects they have to work on to meet the Key Results, and each individual owns a set of objectives or tasks they are accountable for. This ties individual performance to the strategic objectives laid out at the company level. At every level, there is accountability and measurable goals.

OKRs connect the dots between company vision and individual daily work, and they create a shared definition of success across all levels of your organization.

The Real-World Costs & Consequences of Misalignment

Misalignment is expensive. You may not have thought of it this way. It’s about more than missed market opportunities and revenue. It’s also about these operational costs burning up your runway.

• Employees spend up to 13 hours each week getting the information they need to work.

• Disengaged employees cost up to 34% of their salary in lost productivity

• Replacing employees who quit costs 1.5x-2x their salary, not to mention lost institutional knowledge

• 65% of scaling failures are attributed to leadership and organizational failures.

The list goes on. Getting everyone aligned is not a nice-to-have; it’s about reducing your burn rates, time to market, and retention. Above all, it’s about survival.

What's Next? Implementing OKRS The Right Way

This has been a bit of oversimplification, but it gives clarity around how OKRs are the solution to SMART goals not connecting all of the dots.If you want to align your organization around shared goals, I’m helping executives align their organizations around strategic objectives for Q3. If this sounds like what you need, I'm running workshops in June to help you gain alignment and momentum for Q3. Not theory - practical implementation using your actual company goals.

If you're tired of putting out misalignment fires and ready to get everyone rowing in the same direction, join me for the workshop Strategic Goal Setting & Org Alignment That Drives Impactful Outcomes.

Tia Williams helps founders of high-growth tech companies scale execution, align leadership, and avoid burnout. With 25 years in tech and two growth-stage exits, she brings battle-tested systems that deliver results.