Understand the challenges of aligning work to goals
5 min
Beginner
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Identify the challenges organizations face in setting and aligning goals
- Describe the impact of ineffective goal setting
- Detect the signs of ineffective goal setting and identify the underlying causes
Explore common challenges with setting goals
Goals communicate your organization’s vision for evolution and how evolving will benefit everyone. To set goals that align with your organization’s overarching strategy, you’ll need an effective plan, including creating, aligning, refining, and putting your goals into action.
👇 Click each icon to see the results of research about the impacts of ineffective goal practices.
Read more about these findings in Atlassian's State of Teams 2025 study.
Identify ineffective goal setting
Organizations must have clear goals that connect every team. Goals allow teams to understand the ‘why’ behind their work and prioritize accordingly. Every project should align with a goal, and goals should be used to inform how teams invest their time. Teams want to do work that matters – people don't feel good spending most of their waking hours on something pointless.
👇 Click the tabs below to explore some of the most common challenges.
Ineffective communication of goals across an organization leads to misalignment in efforts and outcomes.
Goals should be revised as work evolves and circumstances change. When goals aren't adapted to reflect current strategies, they can become obsolete.
The System of Work
Leaders can struggle being confident that their teams are focused on the most important work. Teams can be overwhelmed by meetings, communication, and coordination. This is a phenomenon known as the “collaboration tax” which leaves teams busier than ever, yet lacking context and struggling to make progress on the work that really matters.
Atlassian's approach to aligning work to goals is rooted in our System of Work Practices. This set of principles is designed to help teams collaborate openly, move quickly, and continuously improve.
We recommend three core best practices to align work with goals:
- Set clear and ambitious goals
- Make goals visible
- Use goals to align work to priorities
👇 Click each icon to learn more about these practices.
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Align work to goals for companies and leaders
- Transform goal setting in your organization
- Company-wide best practices
- Leadership best practices