Wording cannot save poor goals

If the only challenge with goals was how to phrase them before setting, every leader would be an English graduate. The secret to successful goals is mindful and realistic selection, not proof reading.

When growing companies struggle with meeting goals, the main question asked is often: are we wording goals clearly enough? Perhaps our goals are too vague, or too restrictive? Businesses often respond with workshops, training, templates, or perhaps yet a new SAAS product. And of course, the inevitable reminders for everyone about SMART goals (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-bound).

The temptation to focus on the words is high, but is the resulting correction (focused on the wording) superficial? Simple problems lend themselves to simple solutions – but are goals a “simple problem”? In my view is that this solutions has roughly the same chances of success as for the person who, on struggling to be understood, simply repeats themselves at a louder volume.

The issue with most goals is not whether they are understood, but whether they are capable of being executed well. Inherent to every goal’s surface-level meaning is a raft of tacit assumptions about the business dynamics which will determine how that goal is pursued. Whether various teams are aligned around the gaols, whether people have capacity or authority or incentive to act as needed, whether they understand why the goal is important, whether the business strategy is clear – all these are hugely impactful in how organisations perform against their stated goals.

The best-expressed goal will still fail to be achieved if it is not rooted in a real-world understanding of how the business and its employees actually function.

‘Goal’ means a multitude of things

There are various challenges in setting effective goals, and the first is caused by the unexamined use of the word ‘goal’ itself.

Taken on its own, the term refers to a broad category of concepts. Goals can describe what a business intends to accomplish over the next three years, what a department wants to achieve by the end of Q3, or what an individual employee wants to attain by their next performance review.

The scope, impact, and ownership of these goals are all radically different.

Attempting to align the business around ‘goals’, therefore, is like sending an employee to visit a car dealership in search of a ‘vehicle’.

Found in translation

Given this variation in goal relevance and scope within an organisation, there is a temptation to view goals as a starry expanse – an undifferentiated sea of aspirations and ideas painted across the organisational heavens. Yet goals, like stars, can form constellations.

The strategic goal to become the number one customer-preferred provider in a chosen field might be delivered, in part, by operational goals to drive down support waiting times and increase complaint resolution. This may facilitated (in part) by individual goals to upskill in managing an AI-native platform brought in to transform the customer support experience. In this way, specific Individual Goals serve and reinforce Operational Goals which in turn serve and reinforce Strategic Goals.

Cascading is the process which helps to organise these connections by formally identifying the need for inspirational but loosely defined strategic goals expressed at a higher level to be translated to a lower level. This is not mere message-passing; it involves reframing intent from the C Suite and having leaders and managers understand how to frame that intent in a more specific and direct context. A properly cascaded goal explains what a more general aspiration means for this specific person, in this team, at this time. A good performance management system is the ideal vehicle for cascading operational goals into the working lives of the individuals “at the coal face.”

Cascading fills the gap between an employee knowing what a goal is, and knowing how they can contribute towards it.

Goals are more than metrics

A goal expresses what an organisation wants to achieve. A metric defines how to know whether this has successfully been accomplished. Yet it is startlingly common for the two to be confused.

Tracking progress against goals is crucial for understanding whether the right actions are being taken based on what the business is trying to achieve. The HGP 101 Goals Model explicitly distinguishes between a goal, and the evidence used to measure success. Setting a goal based purely on hitting a number is a common problem (and one that focusing purely on better wording won’t fix).

The danger comes when the metric is substituted for the outcome it was merely supposed to be an indicator for and this can be very problematic. The call centre that optimises for the “highest volume of calls handled” tacitly incentivises employees to end calls prematurely whether they were resolved or not – leading to higher call volumes instead.

Fixation on a single, oversimplified number risks counterproductive outcomes.

Key performance indicators (KPIs), targets, and dashboards can all track performance, but they do not represent goals in and of themselves. Town hall meetings where leaders present green numbers may appear to signify success but are frequently just performative management. Only when leaders and managers understand the intention behind a goal – and stand behind that intention – can goals thrive.

In other words, the people involved in executing a goal need to be able to exercise judgement rather than jumping to convenient conclusions.

Goals must be achieved at all costs?

Another common tendency is for businesses to approach the amendment of goals defensively, as though this signifies a failure in decision making. Original goals are often stuck to longer than is healthy. When change becomes unavoidable, it is treated with embarrassment, in the hope that no one notices – or worse the goal is ignored as no longer relevant in the hope that it will simply “go away.”

Yet every business that survived the Covid pandemic did so by pivoting their goals: adapting to remote working, switching from growth to survival, and responding to radically different customer, supplier, and competitor behaviour introduced by distancing practice and lockdown enforcement. No one would suggest these businesses failed by abandoning goals set before the world changed overnight.

Every high-growth business is already in the position of constantly evolving, with teams growing and being reorganised, budgets shifting, and markets responding. To pretend that a fixed goal can be set in these conditions and never revisited is for leadership to bury its head in the sand.

Even worse is the cultural impact of responding to change with dishonesty or enforced silence which can easily  combine to undermine psychological safety.

Having the discipline to re-evaluate goals when conditions change is a sign of resilience, not weakness. This is a key way for leaders to drive organisational culture from the top.

Goals are delivered by people

Every single action needed to deliver an organisational goal needs to be taken by people. And every person in an organisation has a specific set of actions they are capable of taking. It is bizarre therefore that while person-role fit is discussed heavily in the context of recruiting, precious little consideration is given to ‘goal-role fit’ when allocating ownership of outcomes.

Making an employee accountable for progressing a goal when they lack the agency to achieve this is an unforced error that jeopardises goals and frequently leads to burnout and staff churn.

Even when people are able to move goals forward, it is often achieved through escalations, unsanctioned workarounds (such as ‘shadow IT’), or working out of hours because there isn’t enough time allotted for the role as described on paper to do the work that is needed in practice. Teams become combative as they try to subsume responsibilities not reflected in the org chart. Each of these approaches impacts on BAU in their own way, and each leads to increased management oversight as an unintended consequence.

Proper allocation of responsibility for delivering goals has to include consideration for what each assigned individual or team is capable of owning. One of the most common, and frustrating, challenges with goals is owning a goal which depends on others (often more senior employees) to play their part. If they don’t the result can be resentment and a loff of confidence in the goals system itself

Goals are set organisationally, but received personally

One of the biggest dangers is confusing strategic goals for individual goals. There is a common misconception that goals are purely an organisational concern, or that goals must always be strategic, grand and concerned with the big picture. Whether it is acknowledged or not, every employee experiences goals as a perceived set of management expectations, team pressures, and indicators of organisational priorities. And not every employee is in a position (or has the skills and inclinations) to deliver strategy.

Even worse, since most performance management is heavily based on Business as Usual (BAU), unrealistic goals have the unavoidable side effect of making employees choose between underperforming in their daily tasks, versus failing to achieve a goal they were not set up to succeed in achieving in the first place.

Business research routinely finds that when goals cannot be achieved, the result is impaired employee morale leading to reduced motivation and buy-in to both BAU and future objectives. Talk about an own goal.

When people perceive goals as fairly designed, attainable, and institutionally supported, this creates a space where they naturally want to participate.

Goal-setting for success

Mindful shaping

When it comes to crafting goals, careful consideration and systems thinking are vital. Successful planning considers each goal as an objective that will affect people throughout the organisation, in various ways, and that will be interpreted by people with numerous and disparate worldviews.

People, like goals, come in many forms. One size rarely fits all. Healthy respect is needed for the ongoing attention needed to sustain BAU, coupled with a need for leaders to translate goals down through departmental, team, and individual levels. Alignment of ownership with authority to take action will unblock individual agency and enable everyone to contribute without this coming as a sacrifice of other priorities.

Perhaps most important is the vigilance and willingness to notice when things aren’t working, and to course correct. People tend to afford greater tolerance when they trust that problems will be found and fixed.

That can make the difference between building morale, and expending it.

Continual tracking and feedback is vital

Monitoring goal progress, and using this to steer work, is a crucial part of managing by goals. Merely setting them is not enough. It takes concerted effort to actively embed goals in operational leadership of a business. The alternative is that goals are announced conspicuously and then slide into corporate irrelevance. When the only measure of attainment occurs during employee appraisal, the only goals that get tracked are individual ones.

The failure to attach suitable tracking to strategic and organisational goals ensures that they can only succeed through good fortune, and luck is not a business strategy.

Continual observation of goal progress is what creates the opportunities to change goals when the need arises.

Conclusion

Challenges with goal management are rarely only a matter of improving the way they are written. How goals are articulated is important, especially when cascading them down through the organisation to the individuals that need to act, but this is not the most important driver of success.

Goals, like projects, need to be actively managed – from inception all the way through to delivery.

The first critical step is to formulate goals with care, being mindful of the non-negotiable BAU work that has to continue being done. Leaders need to ensure that goals reflect the ability, capacity and authority of those they choose to be accountable for delivery. Then it is time to translate strategic goals into operational ones.

The second step, once goals have been set, is to continue to monitor them and to respond when necessary. High growth businesses can experience any number of events that would merit updating a set goal: economic head- or tailwinds, a competitor going into administration, a new market entrant, or a new AI system becoming mainstream.

Setting easily understood goals is table stakes: the real management challenge is building team that can set and execute goals in that organisation in its current form, with its current resourcing, and without coming at the expense of the work it is already delivering.

Make goals achievable because of their design, not in spite of it.