Goals gone wild

Nov 3

Gospel, gorillas, and go-getters | 4-min read

“Much of what passes for popular wisdom about goals, goal setting, and motivation, alas, is wrongheaded at worst and simplistic at best.”
- From Mastering the Art of Quitting: Why It Matters in Life, Love, and Work

I wish I could claim the cheeky wordplay in this post’s title as my own, but alas, even the proudest of punsters must give credit where credit is due.

“Goals Gone Wild” is the title of an actual research paper published in the Harvard Business Review by a group of also-actual academics. Released in 2009, the paper argues that we are currently and chronically obsessed with goal-setting in the workplace and that this obsession is causing more harm than good, both to us as humans and to our organizations.

As I read the piece twelve years and one global pandemic later, the argument felt even more relevant today.

So relevant, in fact, that I’ve decided to share its pearls of wisdom over a two-part series. This week, I talk about the roots of our goal-digging and why well-intentioned targets can often backfire.

Why we’re so obsessed with goals

Contrary to what many productivity gurus would have us believe, goal-setting is not an innate human tendency. Instead, it barged into the workplace fifty years ago via a management guru named Edwin Locke. In a book published in 1968, he argued that setting and sticking to specific, challenging goals is the best way to motivate employees and increase performance in organizations.

Well-connected in the business world, Locke didn’t have a hard time convincing major CEOs that his theory would bring them all the profits and efficiency they hoped for, and it quickly spread across corporations large and small.

Fifty years later, the gospel of goal-setting continues to rule nearly all our workplaces. As someone who has survived far too many full-day, tragically-catered “strategy meetings,” I can attest that there is a deeply entrenched belief that nothing can truly be achieved at work without a set of “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound” goals (The gospel known as S.M.A.R.T.).

Here’s the problem:

As the research demonstrates, goals themselves aren’t bad, but our overly rigid and simplistic way of setting and pursuing them is.

Here are the three main issues with our goal-setting ways:

Missing the forest for the trees:
The emphasis on setting specific goals and sticking to them rigidly, from sales targets to blog posts, tends to limit our focus; though this can serve the aims at hand, it also creates blind spots.

Think of the classic study of “inattentional blindness,” wherein participants watch a video of a basketball game and are told to focus on players in white jerseys. The participants concentrate so hard on the specific task at hand (the white jerseys) that they completely miss a human in a gorilla suit walking across the court in the middle of the game.

When we focus too intensely on a small set of targets, we miss the gorillas (which, in business terms, could be crucial new growth opportunities or major red flags).
Hard goals and bad behavior
While research shows that goals do need to be sufficiently challenging to motivate us, making aims too difficult encourages unethical behavior, risk-taking, and toxic competition.

The most obvious example is that of a sales team whose targets are set so high that they’re more likely to engage in unsavory tactics in order to close the deal and declare the mission accomplished. But perhaps the most common example is the reach goals we too often set for ourselves, putting good habits like sleep and health on the back burner.

In sum, beware of “reach goals” (aims that are higher than feasible and end up pushing us to sacrifice everything from good behavior to…our own wellbeing).
Shoot for the moon, land in the gutter
Another problem with reach goals is that the fallout from failure can far outweigh the benefits of trying. Research shows that failing to meet a goal has a profoundly negative impact on both an individual’s self-esteem and, consequently, their actual performance.
Studies of people trying to lose weight have shown that those who set overly specific and ambitious goals (such as a precise number on the scale by an exact date) tend to feel failure more often and take longer to re-engage with the goal after a slip-up; those who set more flexible aims (such as “lose a little bit every week”) recover from “cheats” much faster and ultimately attain their end-goal sooner.

In sum, goals and goal-setting aren’t bad; but the overly prescribed approach we are trained to take at work is holding us and our organizations back.

Worse, the belief that S.M.A.R.T goals are the sole path to achievement has taken root in our personal lives, reinforced by a well-funded industry of self-help books, habit-tracking apps, and x-step plans promising us fulfillment through structure and sacrifice.

Next week, I’ll return with a follow-up piece on how to distinguish between good goals and bad goals, and what to do when a goal has just gone too wild.

Until then, consider this permission to ease up on the goal-digging.