I have spent enough time in growing businesses to be sceptical about the way goals are used, especially when they are over-systematised and boxed into frameworks like SMART.
When goals are not working, the first instinct in many companies is to adjust the machinery around them: the templates, goal phrasing, and SaaS products. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that; vague goals are not much use to anyone. The problem is that this procedural response can distract from a more useful question: whether the goal is actually improving anything.
Most people think that a goal only earns its keep if the result is achieved, and achieved in a way that can be shown clearly. There is a good deal of truth in that, but it is not the whole story. Goals are often time-bounded and specific. So what should we make of the less visible benefits that can come from pursuing a goal well, even when it is ultimately missed?
In reality, the effect of a good goal can be visible well before any final result is reported. It shows itself in the texture of the work: in the seriousness with which people think things through, in the way they involve colleagues, and in how readily they adjust course when circumstances change or a weak assumption is exposed. In those situations, the goal is doing something more than sitting in a system as a formal statement of intent. It is shaping judgement while the work is still underway. If that does not happen, a well-crafted sentence in a performance platform is not worth very much.
To put it another way, if an individual, a team or a company learns how to design and execute goals well, they are in fact learning how to work well.
This truth is especially important in a high-growth business where alignment with strategy is so hard to hold on to. In a smaller company, alignment comes from the immediate environment; people are in regular contact with the founder, they tend to know what other teams are trying to do, and they can usually see the need directly. As the company grows, people become more remote from the centre, and the centre itself may be fragmented. Teams multiply, dependencies and trade offs get more complicated, and there is more distance between the strategic and operational part sof the business.. Formal goals, and a proper system and training for using them, become more important. There is no doubt that goals done well can transform a company.
The difficulty is that the systems surrounding those goals often become more elaborate as the company grows. Unfortunately, the wisdom or craft needed to design and execute coherent and interconnected goals often lags behind the complexity of the goal system. It is not unusual to find a business that has become highly organised in the administration of goals whilst being much less capable in the practical use of them.
Some of the reading I have done around this issue has been instructive. One paper by Velasco, Batista-Foguet and Emmerling (2019) is interesting because it looks at a common problem in leadership development: participants often set goals that are meaningful but varied, and goal attainment can take a long time to observe and can be hard to compare across individuals. The authors therefore focus on early indicators of progress, which they call “goal-directed behaviours”. These are behaviours that help move a goal forward. Their paper is not designed to be a general model of workplace goal-setting, but it does offer a useful way of thinking about the behaviours that lead to good goal execution. The authors focus on four kinds of behaviour: sharing information, seeking information, revising the plan, and enacting the plan.
That framework is useful because it directs attention to the detail of how the goal is executed, not just to a distant final result. Are people making their goals visible to others, asking for feedback, changing course when new information appears, and taking concrete steps to follow through?
This is broadly consistent with what I have seen in companies over the years. When a goal is genuinely useful, it has a kind of logic and presence. It naturally enters the life of the work. People refer to it when they are making decisions, and it feels natural to include it in discussion and thought. A poor goal, or even a good goal in a poor goal environment, has a different character. It may still pop up at check-ins and in review documents, but it functions largely as ceremony. It remains present, but not in a way that really engages.
Leaders can use these questions to judge for themselves whether the goal they are setting are producing the kind of behaviour the business actually needs. That sort of behaviour usually depends on other conditions being in place as well: trust, useful information, follow-through, sound management, and enough safety for people to adapt or admit a problem.
Another bit of reading I have done recently, a paper by Höpfner and Keith (2021), is useful here as a warning from some controlled research about what can happen immediately after failure against a difficult, specific goal. Stretch goals are very popular in some circles and I do not doubt they have their place. But their studies found that goal failure could lower mood, self-esteem and motivation and, in one study, make people more likely to choose an easier next task rather than a harder one. Imagine running alongside someone on the 22nd mile of a marathon and asking them to produce their PB over the 23rd mile. Failure is inevitable and that failure will likely impact on the marathon time too. Stretch Goals can be really useful but it is worth remembering that the experience of failure can shape what people do next, particularly when they take that failure as a judgement on themselves rather than as information about the task.
In a high-growth company, this should encourage a more careful approach than one often sees in practice. Some businesses assume that greater stretch is always a sign of seriousness, or that tighter specificity is automatically a mark of better management. The evidence does not justify that confidence. The usefulness of a goal depends on the setting, on the kind of work in question, and on how the person involved is likely to respond to pressure, difficulty and setback. It also depends on how motivated and well trained any given individual or team is, and how safe they feel to attempt something that might not work.
Different kinds of work call for different kinds of goals. A stable operational role may benefit from a specific performance target because the work is repeatable, the route to delivery is fairly well understood, and the individual has enough control over the outcome for a target to be useful. Exploratory work is another matter altogether. Product discovery, leadership development, organisational redesign and capability-building are rarely well served by being pressed into the same narrow structure. In those settings, a more open or learning-oriented goal can be more useful because it leaves room for enquiry, adaptation and better judgement while the work is still taking shape. This cannot really sit in a template. It needs to be understood.
I think leaders should spend time asking whether goals are well written, but they should also spend time considering what those goals are actually doing to the work (as seen by the behaviours of the people doing the work). Look back at the last 12 months and assess, in whatever way you can, whether the use of goals is changing anything useful. Sometimes pruning is needed for growth and that is never more true than when there are too many goals (and too many stretch goals in particular).
One particular case in point is Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). OKRs have been fashionable for some time. Much OKR guidance focuses, quite rightly, on drafting objectives, defining key results and establishing review cycles. But one reason organisations struggle with OKRs in practice is that implementation frameworks often pay more attention to measurable goal mechanics than to the surrounding conditions that help people adopt and sustain the system. Leadership commitment, communication, employee involvement, knowledge-sharing, culture and change management all affect whether goals are treated as meaningful guides for action or as administrative targets that are quietly dropped under pressure.
I therefore take a fairly plain view of the matter. I am much less interested in whether a company can produce an elegant goal document than in whether its managers are becoming better at running the business and improving performance. Are they making sounder decisions? Are they dealing with complexity without lapsing into confusion or defensiveness? Are they translating broad priorities into coherent action across a company that is more demanding than it was six months ago? Those seem to me the more serious tests.
At High Growth Playbooks we believe that a goal-setting system has to be introduced as part of a broader approach to performance management, not as though the format alone will do the work. We believe that mature organisations need clued-up managers and leaders, with knowledge democratised through the employee layers. It is not enough just to have a well-trained C Suite. Everybody needs to get it. Our suite of goal-related Playbooks are designed to do that, but goals are only one piece of the jigsaw.
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Sources
Herkenrath, C.; Hoeborn, G.; Stich, V. (2023). Why Companies Fail With Objectives And Key Results: An Analysis Of Implementation Frameworks. In: Herberger, D.; Hübner, M.; Stich, V. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Conference on Production Systems and Logistics: CPSL 2023 – 1. Hannover: publish-Ing., pp. 301–310. https://doi.org/10.15488/13449
Höpfner, J., and Keith, N. (2021). Goal Missed, Self Hit: Goal-Setting, Goal-Failure, and Their Affective, Motivational, and Behavioral Consequences. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 704790. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.704790
Velasco, F., Batista-Foguet, J. M., and Emmerling, R. J. (2019). Are We Making Progress? Assessing Goal-Directed Behaviors in Leadership Development Programs. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1345. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01345