Discussion 3                                                                  

There are various ways used by leaders in the organization to measure the organization's strategies and ways in which the organization is working towards the achievement of the company goals and objectives. Managers use the balanced scorecard to measure strategies in an organization and identify individuals' contributions towards achieving the company objectives. This measurement tool improves the company's activities by measuring the internal business actions and their respective external outcomes. The balanced scorecard focuses on four areas of a business: the finances, customers, internal business environment, and the organization's capacity.

One of the advantages of this strategy of evaluating company progress is that it links the company goals to Individual employees (Quesado, Aibar & Rodriquez, 2018). This makes the employees obtain a sense of responsibility towards the achievement of the company goals. Other advantages include the ease of communication in the organization, bring structure to the strategies of an organization, and facilitating alignment of objectives and goals. Some of the disadvantages associated with this strategy include that it requires a lot of data. It should be tailored to meet specific organization demands and be implemented from the lower-level employees to the topmost level employees for it to be successful.

An alternative to the balanced scorecard is the SMART goals. This approach of measuring strategy success in an organization, the term SMART, stands for S- specific, M - measurable, A- achievable, R- relevant and T time-bound. According to this method, the goals set by an organization should be specific, able to track performance, able to be achieved, relevant to the company mission and vision. They should be set for a specific time. Some of the advantages that business that uses this method accrue are; the goals set are not values, helps employees visualize the success, breaks huge goals in small achievable steps, enables one to quickly identify mistakes and helps employees remain focused (Ogbeiwi, 2017). The disadvantages of this method include making people addicted to achievement, and it is easy to make over-ambitious goals and bring confusion in an organization.

References

Ogbeiwi, O. (2017). Why written objectives need to be SMART. British Journal of Healthcare Management, 23(7), 324-336.

Quesado, P. R., Aibar Guzmán, B., & Lima Rodrigues, L. (2018). Advantages and contributions in the balanced scorecard implementation. Intangible capital, 14(1), 186-201.