Private Goal Alignment (Premium)

Private Goal Alignment allows employees to connect their private goals to other goals in the organization while maintaining confidentiality. This feature enables strategic alignment without exposing sensitive goal details to colleagues who don't have permission to view them.

How Private Goal Alignment Works

When goal alignment is enabled for your organization, employees can align their private goals to other goals they have visibility into. This creates a connection that is tracked for reporting and planning purposes while respecting the privacy settings of individual goals.

When creating or editing a Private goal, the Goal Alignment selector will display:

• Goals where you are the assignee
• Goals that have been shared with you (both Public and Private)
• All Public goals in your organization

When creating or editing a Public goal, the Goal Alignment selector will display only Public goals. Public goals cannot align to Private goals—this restriction ensures that alignment relationships don't inadvertently expose confidential information.

Note: If you change a goal's transparency from Private to Public after setting alignment, the system will validate that you are not aligning to a private goal and flag any conflicts.

Viewing Aligned Private Goals

When you view a goal's details or explore the Alignment page, you may see entries labeled "Private Goal." These represent goals that support the parent goal but which you don't have permission to view directly.

Private Goal entries appear with a lock icon and cannot be clicked. Each private supporting goal appears as a separate entry—for example, if three private goals support a parent goal, you will see three separate "Private Goal" entries.

The supporting goals count always reflects the total number of aligned goals, including private ones. This allows managers and administrators to understand the full scope of work supporting each objective, even when some details remain confidential.

When to Use Private Goal Alignment

Private Goal Alignment is useful when you want your work to connect to organizational objectives while keeping details confidential. Common scenarios include:

Sensitive projects: You're working on an acquisition that aligns to the company's "Expand into new markets" objective, but the deal details are confidential until closing. You can create a private goal for your acquisition work and align it to the public expansion goal.

Personal development: Your goal to "Develop skills for promotion to Director role" aligns to your team's leadership development initiative, but you're not ready to share your career plans broadly. Aligning privately keeps your development connected to team objectives without broadcasting your intentions.

Performance improvement: A manager creates a private improvement goal for a direct report that aligns to team performance objectives. The alignment ensures the work is tracked appropriately while keeping the individual situation confidential until the manager and employee are ready to discuss it.

Private Goals as Top-Level Goals

Premium customers can also designate Private goals as Top-Level goals. This allows confidential organizational objectives to serve as alignment targets for other work. When a Private goal is set as a Top-Level goal, it will appear on the Alignment page only for users who have permission to view it—others will not see it listed among the organization's top goals.