Now that a new year is upon us, you may find yourself swept along the 'New Year's Resolution bandwagon and tempted to set personal, professional or HOSA organizational goals. We have all heard this advice: Set goals if you want to accomplish anything substantial. That advice comes from teachers, coaches, self-help gurus, administrators, and bosses and is deeply imbedded in leadership practices.
In professional organizations, “stretch goals” or “hairy audacious goals” as a management, motivational and performance strategy, is widely practiced. Yet, there is evidence that goal setting may actually be counter productive if not a waste of time.
Our society, at both the individual level and in organizations, has an obsession with goal setting, particularly "stretch" goals or "audacious goals." We tie goals to accomplishment. In our culture, an individual or organizations cannot be considered successful unless goals are achieved. And the usual motivation method used by leaders to achieve these goals is the continual focus on "improvement," "bigger and better," through harder and harder work, and increased productivity. And the way to measure that success is to measure goal attainment.
The following is a typical template for goal setting:
- Write down the goals;
- Make goals specific and clear;
- Indicate how you’ll measure goal accomplishment;
- Have goal timelines and deadlines;
- State goals in terms of specific outcomes or results;
- Attach rewards, incentives for attainment and punishment for failure.
The support for setting goals has reportedly come from both academic/research sources and popular self-help sources. With the respect to the first, researchers reportedly surveyed the graduating seniors from the class of 1953 at Yale University. They asked if the class members had written goals for their future. Three percent did. The rest did not. Twenty years later, researchers were said to have gone back to the surviving members of the class. They discovered that those with written life goals had accumulated more wealth than all their classmates put together.
The only problem with this powerful finding is that there was no such study. Researchers at Yale and members of the class of 1953 all swear they never conducted or participated in any such study.
Despite the popularity of goal setting, there is compelling evidence that regardless of good intentions and effort, people and organizations consistently fall short of achieving their goals. More often than not, the fault is attributed to the goal setter. But the real problem may be in the efficacy of goal setting itself.
What’s Wrong With Setting Ambitious Goals?
Aubrey Daniels, in his book, Oops! 13 Management Practices That Waste Time And Money, argues that stretch goals are an ineffective management practice. Daniels cites a study that shows when individuals repeatedly fail to reach stretch goals, their performance declines. Another study showed ten percent (10%) of employees actually achieved stretch goals. Daniels argues that goals are motivating people only when they have received positive rewards and feedback from reaching them in the past.
Maurice Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania and Lisa Ordonez of the University of Arizona, co-authors of Goals Gone Wild, have studied the psychology of goal attainment, and in several experiments have shown that when people self-report their achievement of goals, if they are not entirely successful, a significant percentage of them lie to make up the difference.
One inherent problem with goal setting is related to how the brain works. Recent neuroscience research shows the brain works in a protective way, resistant to change. Therefore, any goals that require substantial behavioral change, or thinking-pattern change, will automatically be resisted. The brain is wired to seek rewards and avoid pain or discomfort, including fear. When fear of failure creeps into the mind of the goal setter, it becomes a “demotivator,” with a desire to return to known, comfortable behavior and thought patterns.
Examples of Goal Setting Gone Wrong
In the early 2000's , General Motors had set a goal to capture twenty-nine percent (29%) of the American auto market. It even produced corporate pins for people to wear with the #29 on them. Needless to say they never achieved that goal, and without a government bailout, GM may not have even survived.
In the early 1990s, Sears gave a sales quota of $147 per hour to its auto repair staff. Faced with this target, the staff overcharged for work and performed unnecessary repairs. Sears’ Chairman at the time, Ed Brennan, acknowledged that the stretch goal gave employees a powerful incentive to deceive customers.
Or take the Ford Pinto. Presented with a goal to build a car “under 2,000 pounds and under $2,000 by 1970, employees overlooked safety testing and designed a car where the gas tank was vulnerable to explosion from rear-end collisions. Fifty-three people died as a result.
So What’s The Alternative?
In his classic article, “Small Wins,” psychologist Karl Weick argued that people often become overwhelmed and discouraged when faced with massive and complex problems. He advocated recasting larger problems into smaller, tractable challenges that produce visible results, and maintained that the strategy of “small wins” can often generate more action and more complete solutions to major problems because it enables people to make slow, steady progress.
In their recent book, The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer build on the same argument and clearly demonstrate how even the smallest, most mundane steps forward — for example, achieving clear consensus in a meeting — can motivate and inspire workers. Ever wonder why people will so often write down an item they’ve already completed on their to-do-list? It’s so that they can have the satisfaction of immediately crossing it off and experiencing the sense of progress.
Focusing on small personal, professional and HOSA wins in combination with process improvement will drive you forward without the negative consequences of stretch goals. This approach requires a subtle — but critical — shift in focus from improving outcome metrics to improving the process by which those outcomes are achieved.
Source reference: Why Goal Setting Doesn't Work
