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Cascading: Aligning Your Goal to a Parent

Anna Goryachikova
  • Updated

How to create and view cascading goals

If cascading goals have been enabled, employees can align their objective or key result to a parent goal. While Lattice still allows you to create independent goals that are not aligned with a higher-level goal, the cascading functionality enables employees to link goals to each other with strict alignment. 

Strict alignment allows the parent goal to inherit the progress of its children. You can ensure alignment between the company's strategy and department/individual objectives by explicitly linking goals to one another. 

Note: Unlike objectives, key results will not inherit the progress of other key results unless the parent key result is measured as binary. 

There are two places in Lattice where you can align your objective or key result to a parent:

Add a parent goal from the Goal Creation page

  1. Navigate to Home > Create goal.
  2. Select to create an objective or key result. For a detailed walkthrough for creating an objective or key result from this page, check out Create a Goal.
  3. Within the Work toward another goal at the company card, select Choose goal.
  4. The parent goal context panel will appear –– Find the desired parent goal to link by either:
    • Filtering the list of goals
    • Search for goal owners
    • Search for goal titles
    • Select one of the recommended filters (Company goals, Department goals, My Manager's goals)
  5. Click + Add parent goal to align. 

Image of Lattie Goals creation page with a red square and arrow highlighting the Add parent goal button

Create a supporting goal from the Goal Creation page

Under Add supporting goals?, you can create objectives or key results that will support and align with your goal. These will be considered the child goals. The progress of these child goals will contribute to the success of your goal. Your goal will be viewed as the parent to these child goals. 

Add supporting goals by selecting + Add objective or + Add key results.

Image of Lattice Goals creation page where a red square highlights the Add Objective and Add Key Result button

Add a parent goal from the Goals Explore page

  1. Navigate to the Goals page.
  2. Next to the Export CSV  button, select and enter the Cascade view.
  3. Click on the desired goal.
  4. Within the goal context panel, select More > Edit.
  5. Within the Work toward another goal at the company box, click Choose goal. 
  6. Search and find the parent goal and select + Add parent goal. 
  7. Click Save. 

Image of Goals Explore page. A goal is selected to open the right-hand context panel. An arrow points to the Add parent goal button within the review context panel.

Create a supporting goal from the Goal Explore page

  1. Navigate to the Goals page.
  2. Next to the Export CSV  button, select and enter the Cascade view.
  3. Click on the desired goal.
  4. Click Insert objective or Insert key result to select the supporting goal you want to align to your goal.
  5. Create the supporting goal and select Publish.

Image of Goals Explore page. A goal is selected to open the righthand context panel. A square highlights the Insert Objective and Insert Key Results buttons in context panel and also the Goals Explore table.

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