Who can use this feature?
Users
Available on:
All Culture Amp subscriptions that include Performance with Goals.
Working with the Goal Tree
Culture Amp’s goal tree helps you visualize how individual, team, and company goals align with each other. It’s an intuitive way to see how your personal objectives connect to the broader organizational strategy and track progress toward meeting them. The goal tree also highlights dependencies between goals, helping everyone stay on the same page.
Why Use It
A clear view of the goal tree helps ensure that individual and team goals align with the company’s overall strategy. It enables employees to understand how their work contributes to broader objectives, increasing motivation and purpose.
Alignment to Strategy: Aligning individual and team goals with company objectives keeps everyone focused on the same direction — the "north star" of your organization’s strategy.
Increased Motivation: When employees see how their goals fit into the bigger picture, they feel more motivated and purposeful, leading to better performance (Seijts & Latham, 2000).
Prioritization: Alignment helps identify top priorities, especially when resources are limited.
When to Use It
You’ll find the goal tree especially useful in the following scenarios:
Setting Aligned Goals
Use the goal tree to help employees and teams visualize how their work contributes to overall company success.Tracking Progress
During departmental or company meetings, use the goal tree to check on progress toward key objectives.Maintaining Engagement
Regularly track and evaluate goals. The goal tree helps maintain alignment and ensures that everyone stays engaged with company priorities.
How to Use It
To access the goal tree:
Click Goals from your home page
Click Goal tree, which should appear as the second option within the Goals menu
The goals tree features several functions that allow you to customize your view and explore the goals in detail.
1. Filter the Goal Tree
Focus on specific goals: The tree initially shows company-level goals, but you can use the Group filter to view goals for departments or teams. You can also filter further via goal status, owner and due date.
2. View a single goal
Goal details: Each card in the tree represents a goal, displaying key information like:
Title
Level (company, department, team, individual)
Due date
Overall progress and status
Goal owners
To update or track progress, click on the goal card to open the drawer. The bottom part of the card shows if there are goals directly aligned to a particular goal, and if so, how many there are. Click on this section to expand or contract a branch.
3. Zoom in and out
Adjust the view: Zoom in to focus on specific areas or zoom out to get a broader perspective of how everything connects.
4. Reset to default view
Easily reset: Click the Reset tree button to return the goal tree to its default state and start fresh.
5. Pan
Move around easily: Click and drag the page to pan through the goal tree and explore goals in different sections.
Which Goals Appear in the Goal Tree?
The goal tree initially displays company-level goals. Depending on your filter settings, you can adjust what you see and focus on specific levels or other groups, such as departments or teams, by adjusting the group filter.
Visible Goals: Goals that are visible to everyone — including those aligned directly or indirectly with company objectives — will appear in the tree.
Company Goals: These always appear at the top level, directly beneath your company logo.
Collaboration Goals: Collaboration goals will not appear on the goals tree unless they are aligned to a company goal and visible to everyone. There are no filters that allow collaboration goals to appear in their own goals tree. To view collaboration goals independently of alignment, navigate to Goals > All Goals > Collaborations > [Group Name].
Filters and Alignment:
Filters affect only the top level of goals displayed directly beneath the company logo.
When you apply a filter, any group or individual goals aligned with the top-level goals will appear beneath the corresponding group goal based on the selected filter.
A goal displays twice whenever both it and its primary goal sit in the group you are currently viewing. It appears once in the top row, because it matches the filter, and once nested beneath its primary goal. Aligning a company goal to another company goal is one example of this, visible in the default company view.
Why the same goal can appear twice
If a goal shows up in two places in the tree, it is one goal being drawn twice, not two separate goals. Nothing is duplicated in your account.
The Group filter only controls the top row of the tree, the cards sitting directly beneath your company logo. Every goal in the group you select is pulled into that top row. If one of those goals is also aligned as a supporting goal to another goal in the same group, it is drawn a second time nested beneath its primary goal.
Because both cards are the same goal, any change you make in one place applies to the other. Archiving, editing or updating progress from either card affects the single underlying goal, so it will change or disappear in both positions at once.
When this happens: only when a goal and its primary goal are both in the group you are filtering by.
How to avoid it: keep one group goal as the parent, and set its supporting goals at a different level. Individual goals owned by the people doing the work, or goals in a sub-group of the department, will cascade beneath the parent without appearing in the top row.
If the visual hierarchy is the main thing you need, the Goals list view filtered to a group is often easier to read than the tree, and you can still open each goal to see its alignments and supporting goals.
Tip: If some goals aren’t showing up as expected, first check that their visibility settings are set to "everyone." Next, verify the alignment settings to ensure the goals are correctly linked to higher-level objectives, so they appear in the right place within the tree. To adjust visibility or goal alignment settings, follow the steps outlined in the Managing goal visibility with Goals article.
💬 Need help? Open a support conversation to speak with our Product Support team.