Creating a plan with public and private goals

At Tability, we value cooperation and communication. We believe that public goals get better results and promote collaboration and accountability. That said, we also understand that not all goals are meant to be public, and have included plan-level permission settings to control who has access to your sensitive goals.

Sometimes, however, you’ll want to have a mix of public and private goals within the same plan. Imagine: You’ve set up your top-level company goals– these should be public for the organization. However, the CEO is working on sensitive goals that will directly impact the rest of the company goals and wants to see these private goals alongside the rest of the company plan, but doesn’t want anyone else to see them yet. You can’t control the visibility of individual goals within a plan, we can still achieve this result through some careful planning and linking of goals.

We’ll go through creating this type of plan so that everyone sees only what they need to.

Understand how Tability works

Before we can create our plan, let’s review how Tability works.

What are plans for?

Plans are just where a group of goals live inside of Tability. A plan allows you to set a specific timeline for your goals and control who has access to edit or even view your goals. Many teams create their plans based on their goal meetings– when a group of people at your organization look at their goal progress, what goals do they look at? If your organization works by function (sales, marketing, engineering, etc.), plans will often mimic this structure. If your organization is more cross-functional and you create pillar-focused teams, you’ll likely set up plans by those pillars instead of by function.

Can I show a goal in multiple plans?

We can link your goals to goals in other plans. Doing this allows you to see the goal in multiple places without duplicating it. You’ll update a single goal, and that update will show in the other plans where the goal is linked. This is great for dependencies and for cross-functional work where part of a goal is owned by a different team. Even when linking goals, however, the goals will honor the privacy settings in their original plan. A private goal will only be visible to people who can see the private plan– anyone else won’t know it’s there.

Does having multiple plans make my users’ experience worse?

Your users have a single place to update all of their goals, regardless of what plan they’re in. So no matter how many plans you create, your team will use their My Focus page to update all of their goals. And when we link goals to other plans, even reviewing their goals will be the same as if you only had a single plan.

Building your plans

Start with the public plan

First, create a new plan and leave your permissions to Everyone can edit (or Restrict editing to only yourself). Either way, this will allow anyone in the organization to see this plan. Add your public goals the way you would with any other plan and hit Publish.

Create your private plan

Create another new plan and this time change the permissions to Keep this plan private. Add in your goals again, but before we hit publish, click on the lock icon at the top of the plan and add in editors and viewers by clicking the Add editor button and selecting who you want to be able to see these goals.

They’ll be able to see this entire plan, as well as any goals from within this plan if they are linked to other visible plans. Once you’ve chosen the people you want to be able to see the private goals, we can close the permission manager and publish this plan as well.

Link your goals

The goals that you would like to make visible in the other plan need to be linked to goals within that plan. Check out our guide to linking goals here.

If you want your private key results/outcomes to show the same as the public key results/outcomes in the public plan, link your key results/outcomes to an objective and we’ll display it like so:

If you want to have the objective and all of its key results visible, you can just link an objective to another objective or key result/outcome. This will make everything connected to the objective visible:

That’s it!

Check out your public plan and you should see any of the goals that you linked in that public plan. Have someone who doesn’t have access show you the public plan– you’ll see that even though they’re linked to the public plan, they won’t be able to see the private goals since they weren’t given access to them.

Questions about how to set up other types of plans? Want to see more permissions? Reach out to us at [email protected] or use the messenger in the bottom right of Tability to let us know!