Goals are targets that an organization intends to achieve at a future time period. Goals can be short or long term depending
on its scope and how long it will take to achieve them. An organization may have several goals to attain in its list and key, on a manager’s mandate, is to check the relation of these goals to one another and come up with the best and effective way to achieve them.
Goals can be complimentary, that is, they have the same attainment strategy and one goal supports the attainment of the other. For example, if an organization’s goal is to be the national market leader, that will be complimentary to being an international leader in the industry it is operating in. Goals should be complimentary of each other as this will provide a better and effective approach to attain them. Leaving one will affect the other in some way.
Goals can also be indifferent in that they are independent of each other. Leaving one will not at all have any effect on the other since their attainment does not relate and are on the same achievement platform. Choosing to achieve one has the same attainment as the next. For example, an organization’s goal of taking care of the environment same as boosting sales and one can choose each independently without affecting the other goal, since with don’t clash. The managers indeed, remain indifferent choosing any of the goals to achieve.
Goals can also be competitive in such a way that they contend for similar resources and always clash over their being prioritized for attainment. This is mostly seen in different organization departments that feel they are to be considered first in fund allocation because they feel they are more likely to successful attain certain goals. The finance department goal might be to pool financial resources together and utilize it wisely but the marketing department might want much more than allocated to popularize the organization product/services, thereby conflicting with the finance section. Those are competing goals.