You can set strong company goals and still end up stuck in the middle of everything, not because the goals are wrong but because the bridge from vision to execution never gets built.

This issue is about building that bridge so that goals stop living in decks (or, worse, in your head) and start driving performance and guiding decisions, without overwhelming your team, degrading day-to-day execution or pushing everyone toward burnout.

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The Signal (your clue that there’s work to do)

You have clear goals, technically speaking, but one would never guess that based on how the team is running.

• People are feeling chronically overcommitted, even while affirming that priorities are “clear”.
• Stretch work is being treated like side-of-desk effort.
• Business-as-Usual (BAU) gets treated as background noise instead of protected work, so performance erodes gradually and systemically.
• Your strongest people become the shock absorbers for a system that hasn’t reconciled tradeoffs.

If everything is important and work only ever stacks, the system comes to rely on excess capacity to survive… even when there is no excess capacity.

And that’s not a plan, that’s a retention and performance risk.

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The Root Cause

Most scale-ups cascade goals by scope of responsibility.

Founders distribute goals across departments based on what makes sense on paper, without accounting for capacity, sequencing or prioritization against other active projects.

The result is often a pile-on.

Fixing what’s breaking, keeping the core business running and stretching toward the future all land on teams at the same time. Nothing is explicitly deprioritized, so everything competes for attention. As a result:

• BAU work gets taken for granted.
• Stabilization work drags on longer than it should.
• Stretch initiatives get squeezed into the margins of already-full weeks.

Execution doesn’t fail due to lack of effort. It fails when leaders don’t make tradeoffs explicit and teams are left to sort that out for themselves.

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The Tool: Goal Cascade

This week’s tool isn’t a new way to write goals. It’s a way to assign goals in which you take responsibility for reconciling the tradeoffs among them, rather than leaving that to the team.

At the scale-up stage, most teams are carrying three kinds of work at the same time: fixing what’s breaking, keeping the core business running, and stretching toward what’s next.

A healthy allocation of time and energy typically looks like this:

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Stabilize: 30–40%

If Stabilize work drops much lower, unresolved issues tend to resurface and drain attention later. If it creeps much higher, it’s a signal that the foundation needs attention before additional growth makes sense.

Sustain (BAU): 30–40%

Sustain work needs steady attention because the core business has to run well while you scale. When BAU isn’t explicitly protected, quality and reliability erode.

Stretch: 20–30%

Stretch work is intentionally capped. Future-building only compounds if it’s protected, focused and resourced realistically. When Stretch work exceeds the team’s available capacity, it either stalls or cannibalizes BAU, both of which increase burnout risk.

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Nailing the mix is only half the work. The real leverage comes from how you use it to assign goals across departments and roles.

That’s where the real leadership work happens (aka: tradeoff reconciliation) — making the hard calls, narrowing the asks, and giving the team the focus they need to deliver without burning out.

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The Technique: Cascading Goals with Clear Tradeoffs

Cascading goals at the scale-up stage isn’t just about assigning based on functional relevance (marketing goals to marketing, ops goals to ops), it’s about deciding at the forest level.

Most of the time, you’re lucky to be in the branches. Some days you can barely escape the xylem and phloem. But in this process you get to zoom out and make the call — what is the most important work, where must we invest, what must we protect, what scaffolding must we build.

What am I going ask of my team, and what am I willing to release to enable them to deliver?

This is the point at which leadership enters the chat.

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Step 1: Make the tradeoffs at the company level first

Tying back to last week’s issue (LINK), before goals are finalized, you decide on the target mix.

What percentage is being allocated to Stabilize, Sustain and Stretch?

On a quarter-by-quarter (sometimes department-by-department) basis, you’re making a call on how the team’s capacity is allocated:

• how much goes to stabilizing what’s fragile,
• how much is protected for running the core business
• how much is reserved for stretching toward what’s next

This isn’t theoretical. Every mix carries a tradeoff. Lean too hard into Stabilize and you’re consciously slowing momentum in exchange for shoring up the foundation. Overweight Stretch and you’re increasing execution risk.

The mistake founders make is letting this mix emerge accidentally.

Your job is to decide it deliberately.

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Step 2: Cascade goals to departments

When you assign goals to departments, don’t just do it based on functional relevance.

Ask: “Do we have the capacity and resources to do this without breaking something else?”

For each department, you need to determine (ideally with a strong department head)

• Which Stabilize work they own, and what support or temporary capacity it requires
• Which Sustain (BAU) responsibilities must remain fully resourced and protected
• How much Stretch work the team can take on once time, attention & capacity are accounted for

This is where resourcing decisions live.

If a department’s goals exceed the agreed mix, you have three options: reduce scope, add capacity, or defer work. What you don’t do is assume the team will figure it.

When resourcing is left implicit, teams end up stretching roles, borrowing time, burning out, taking shortcuts or degrading performance to make the math work.

When resourcing is explicit, tradeoffs stay visible and execution stays on point.

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Step 3: Protect BAU by making it non-negotiable

Sustain work only holds if it’s explicitly protected.

When BAU isn’t explicitly resourced, quality and customer experience erode while the team is focused on other things. BAU can’t be something teams are expected to “hold” no matter what. If performance slips (a BAU metric shifts to Yellow or Red), it may mean the workload isn’t sustainable in light of other priorities. Get curious.

Pause new asks, explore the issue and revisit the mix.

If it proves to be a bandwidth issue, decide whether to adjust scope, shift timelines or add capacity before expecting performance to recover.

Don’t let BAU compete silently with Stretch work. You need to reconcile that tradeoff and resource against it.

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Step 4: Translate tradeoffs down to individual roles

This is where the cascade either holds or collapses.

At the individual level, goals only work if people are clear on what they are responsible for right now and, just as importantly, what they are not.

That means each role should reflect an intentional mix:

• Sustain (BAU): The core responsibilities that must be delivered consistently
• Stabilize: Any time-bound work to fix what’s broken (with a clear end date)
• Stretch: A limited set of future-building efforts, assigned selectively

Not everyone should be stretching every quarter.

And your strongest performers should not automatically inherit the overflow.

When individual roles aren’t bounded this way, people compensate by working longer hours, cutting corners or silently reprioritizing—none of which you’d choose if the tradeoffs were visible.

Actionable step: For each of your direct reports, explicitly name what takes priority this quarter and what is deprioritized or paused. If you can’t articulate that tradeoff in one or two sentences, the role is carrying more than it should.

Clarity at this level is what turns goals into focus and focus into delivery.

Now, have your direct reports repeat this step with their teams. Now you’re firing on all cylinders.

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Why This Works

If tradeoffs are unclear, the team will make them for you, often in ways you wouldn’t choose.

This approach works because it forces the hardest decisions upstream, where they belong. Instead of leaving teams to reconcile competing demands in real time, you decide what gets focus, what gets protected and what gets released before the work begins.

When tradeoffs are explicit:

• BAU is protected instead of taken for granted
• Stabilization work actually resolves instead of dragging on
• Stretch work gets the space it needs to compound

Owning the tradeoffs upfront is how you protect focus, performance and people all at the same time. Win win win.

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Your Turn

Take a look at your 2026 Goals and ask yourself:

• Where have I assigned goals without reconciling the tradeoffs between them?
• Which teams are quietly absorbing overload because capacity was never explicitly decided?
• What am I asking for that I’m not willing to release?

If those questions feel uncomfortable, that’s not a problem, it’s a signal.

If your goals are clear but the path to execution is murky, a Signal Session can help. We’ll pressure-test your goal cascade, surface the tradeoffs that need to be made explicit and rebalance the mix so your team can deliver without burning out.

Defining the goals isn’t the hard part.

The hard part is operationalizing them in a way that won’t break the team.

If this resonated, there’s probably another founder in your orbit who needs it too. Please forward.

-- Nicole