Why Goal Setting Fails

Are you setting goals this year? Not the New Year’s resolution kind. The kind that are tied to the ongoing strategy of your company or organization. The goals that make a difference in the way your team members connect to and engage with that strategy. The week-to-week conversations about stretching to achieve. The kind of goals that empower the individual. These conversations, done well, are one of the crucial elements in making performance conversations energizing and enjoyable. What could go wrong?

For many of Cascade’s members, goal setting is an integral part of the performance review process. As you dive into the goal-setting conversation with your team, you may want to consider some of the things that can get in the way. Things that, as we envision the future of success and progress, keep us from realizing our goals.

Here are four things that can hinder us from achieving our goals:

Lack of a Shared Sense of Importance or Urgency. Many goal-setting conversations are really an exercise in “checking a box;” getting something on our goal-setting worksheet so we can move on with our lives. Take a minute and consider how your goals are truly pushing the success of the team’s larger strategy. Encourage team members to fully connect with the “WHY” behind their goal and how their behaviors support the team’s strategy.

Lack of Structure. SMART is the acronym used by so many organizations to anchor the process and the conversation. Make certain your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable (some like Ambitious for the A), Relevant, and Time-Bound. Insist that you have more than just a nice conversation by connecting on all 5 levels. Dig into specifics. Look for ways to measure success. Check that we are stretching and not breaking. Tether the goals to larger organizational strategy. Pull out a calendar and agree on time frames.

Fear of Failure. Behind the goal-setting conversation there may be an unexpressed fear (on one or both sides) that your team member won’t be able to deliver on their SMART goals. Good managers listen for this fear, anticipate it, and weave it into the discussion. This is an opportunity to check in on your blame-vs-credit culture. Great teams know how to fail so they can learn and ultimately succeed. Failure, for all of us, is a prelude to success that we should acknowledge, discuss, and celebrate with our teams.

Goals Invite us out of our Comfort Zones. The art in this goal-setting process is to stretch without breaking. We should experience at least a little bit of stress and discomfort around our goals, but not so much that we are left frozen and ineffective. Over time, great workplace coaches learn to pay close attention to just-enough stretching.

The other advice we get from the goal-setting gurus is to find ways to focus on strengths, the things your employee was born to do and will ultimately charge their goal-achievement battery. This is easier said than done, as most of us push for improvement in peoples’ weakness zones. It may very well be that humans are hard-wired this way. We have outlived this hard-wiring, however. Avoid the temptation to focus on the C’s on your employees’ report cards when the A’s are telling you what makes your employees come alive. Goal setting should not be a conversation about fixing sub-standard performance. That is a separate talk.

What other things are getting in the way of your goal-setting success? We would love to hear from you about how goals have connected your team to the improvement train or what other hurdles you have had to jump to make stuff happen.