Case study #18: Goal Failure
Don't make goals generic, bare minimum.
Look at your goals. What do you see?
Something you know you won’t achieve? Something you don’t care much about? Something you need more time than you allocated?
Goals are great to keep you motivated. Yet, many goals are written for the sake of having some in the HR system. What happens if you fail them?
Probably nothing. Except, you feel you yet again achieved nothing. Eloise had that feeling looking at her Q1 goals.
At the beginning of the year, Eloise and her boss put down a couple of goals:
“Deliver X projects by Q1.”
“Collate ideas for process innovation.”
“Improve report quality of the team by X points.”
At the end of Q1, she looked at them and realized she failed her goals. She had just one big project that was complex and ongoing. She did not have time to speak with the team and run a workshop about processes. Lastly, her team continued making mistakes in the reports. Since, they did not have knowledge or quality processes in place.
It sucked. What was she supposed to talk about with her boss during the Q1 goal review?
Have you ever been in a similar situation? What did you do?
Goals for goals
You might have been in a similar situation. You have to set some goals to make your boss or HR system happy. Ideally, something that can be measurable and your boss can evaluate.
The usual suspects are, for instance:
Feedback from clients (on a satisfaction scale of 1-10)
Quality evaluated by points
Team collaboration
No. of projects
Admin sorted
Budgets kept
Sales closed
etc.
But some of these goals are not goals at all. They are the bare minimum that jobs require.
It is ridiculous to set goals for work itself. Would you find motivating to be an accountant, and your goal would be to deliver accountancy reports? Wouldn’t you do it anyway?
Goals should not feel like babysitting.
Some leaders use them to make sure that people do their jobs. But this approach makes people bored. They lack challenges and a sense of development.
Why would you want someone to deliver 10 projects by Q1 when you know this person has one strategic project that will eat their capacity?
Like Eloise’s case. She failed her goal of delivering X projects. It could make her feel sorry and inappropriate. No one wants to fail. If you then tell them: “Don’t worry, it does not matter.” You undermine the whole process of goals and their importance for your career development.
Doing goals for goals and not reflecting a person’s skills and capacity is rubbish. Likewise, when you give the whole team the same goals. No more of the same crap, please.
Why people fail to achieve their goals
Speaking from managerial experience, most people do not set goals for themselves. You ask them to come up with something, but in the end, you “give it to them”.
The problem is in the understanding of the goal-setting process. Many people believe goal setting is putting goals on paper or in the system, setting their completion, ticking them or not, and then it starts again.
They play it safe to get their bonuses and mingle around if they do not achieve the numbers. So it happens goals miss depth and quality for one’s career. People don’t usually ask:
“Who I want to be?”
“What do I want to achieve?”
“Why is it important to me?”
Managers want to have it quickly done, so they focus on the basic work requirement instead of considering long-term development and personal skills and preferences.
There are five classic reasons for goal failure:
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