OD CraftOrganization Design & Performance Systems5 October 2026 ·
Your objective is one sentence. It should be five parts.
Most objectives are written like this:
"Increase employee engagement to 75% by end of 2026 under the HR Director leadership."
It reads well. It manages badly.
Five different things are packed into one sentence, so no one can track them separately.
Split it into five parts, one for each SMART letter:
S · Objective: Increase employee engagement
M · KPI: % Employee engagement
R · Target: 75%
T · Time: By end of 2026
A · Owner: HR Director
Three rules keep it clean:
→ An objective starts with an action verb
→ A KPI starts with a symbol: $ (value), # (number), % (percentage)
→ A target is a value + a date
Once it's decomposed, it drops straight into your scorecard:
perspective, objective, KPI, previous, current, trend, target, owner.
Not SMART? Then it's not a KPI yet.
Pick one objective from your current scorecard and split it into these five parts. Which one was missing?
Day 2 of 30 · Measure Twice
Tomorrow: 5 "KPIs" that aren't KPIs, and how to fix each one.
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