Audacious Goals are Better than Achievable ones. Here’s Why

Welcome to Leading Disruption, a weekly letter about disruptive leadership in a transforming world. Every week we’ll discover how the best leaders set strategy, build culture, and manage uncertainty all in service of driving disruptive, transformative growth. For more insights like these, join my private email list.

A few years ago, I was listening to a university’s development officer explain how they’d successfully raised $1.5 billion dollars in five years and now they wanted to set their goal a little higher. They set a goal to raise $2 billion over the next five years, because they were confident they’d hit the mark.

I said, “That’s great. So why not make the goal $3 billion?”

“Well, we thought we could get to $2.7 billion,” the officer said, “but not three. So we took it back down to two because we knew we could achieve it.”

Interesting, I thought.

You know what this comes down to?

How you think about your goals. Do you think of goals as something you can achieve? Or something that inspires you to be ambitious — audacious, even?

On Tuesday’s livestream, I revealed why designing goals that inspire you to aim HIGH always leave you in a better position than if you aim to achieve something you know you can do. And it starts with:

Making your SMART goals smarter

You’ve heard of SMART goals – they’re specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

SMART goals are wonderful because they’re clear and come with a built-in checklist.?

But I encourage you to take your SMART goals one step further and create objectives and key results, or OKRs.?

In his book Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains that OKRs are what allow you to take your big, hairy audacious goals and break them down into smaller units. For example, your five- to ten-year vision, your one-year plan, a group plan, and even your individual goals.

Here’s how to make them work for you:

1. Make your goals aspirational and a little uncomfortable

If you’re designing your goals the right way, they should make you uncomfortable. Just a little bit. ??

As leaders, we’ve been trained to achieve 100%, to cross the finish line, to get an A+. Falling short of our goals isn’t where we want to be, which makes it really difficult to set goals we know we’re not going to achieve — gulp!

But you're going to try your darndest to reach your goal no matter what — so why not stretch yourself a little, to test what you’re capable of?

If you set your sights HIGH and hit 70% of your big goal, that's a huge win. You're performing at a really high level – even though you didn't hit 100%.

How will that change your mindset? How does that change the things you do every day? Does it change your team? The way you lead and manage your team?

It does.?

Which is why your audacious goals should:

2. Measure your impact and reward the effort

When we set audacious goals, it’s tempting to link compensation to the outcomes: close this many deals or sign this many accounts. After all, a lot of us are compensated for hitting our goals!

But what if you fall short of 100%, is it a failure because you didn’t get the precise outcome you hoped?

No, absolutely not! After all, if you set a stretch goal, you’ve probably made more of an effort than if you’d set a goal squarely in your comfort zone.?

Objectives and key results work best when you decouple compensation from achievement. If you’re trying to hit your stretch goals but you don’t, you shouldn’t be penalized. You should be rewarded for your effort and the activity you’re doing — because your impact on the business is greater if you take on audacious goals.

Think of this like the difficulty bonus in gymnastics – you get credit for taking on more difficult, audacious tasks and for going above and beyond what is expected of you.?

3. Be transparent and aligned

I’ve talked about the importance of transparency, and it applies to your goals and OKRs, too.

As leaders, we want our employees to be aligned and clear on how everyone is working toward the same big, audacious goal. Everyone should be clear on how success is measured and defined so they know and understand the company’s motivations, focus, and priorities.

It can be daunting to announce your goals because if you fall short, everyone will know. But if you create transparency, employees, teams, and departments can support you and each other. They can find synergies in their efforts and work together to get as close to 100% as they can.?

So how can you start setting bigger, more effective goals?

Four keys to successful goal-setting

If you want to look back on 2022 and think, “Wow, it was a great year because I focused on these huge, audacious goals,” I encourage you to do four things:

1. Incrementally increase your change capacity. Instead of trying to figure out how much change you should be aiming for, understand how much change you’re capable of creating. Then, push yourself to do more, knowing there are limits and you won’t hit your goals. The big, transformative goals come from making small incremental goals.
2. Focus on three goals. If you have too many objectives, you’ll spread yourself too thin and nothing sticks. Figure out what’s most important. What do you really need to accomplish to achieve your big, hairy audacious goal?
3. Check in on your goals. Write your goals down and check in on them on a regular basis, whether that’s every quarter, every month, each week, every day. Ask yourself, “What will I do today to achieve this goal? Am I on track?”
4. Define success. If you’re clear from the beginning, you won’t waste time and effort clarifying things along the way. Everyone will know what you’re doing and how you’re going to get there because you’ve defined success using clear objectives and key results.

Remember that university development officer? A few weeks after I encouraged him to aim high, he told me the university had increased their goal to $3 billion. They knew they’d need to change the way they operated, how they made decisions, and how they invested – but they were excited to chase that big, hairy, audacious goal.

That’s the difference it makes: even if your goal is impossibly audacious, merely aiming for it will change the way you do things. And that ensures that you’re making a greater impact — and bringing yourself closer to that high goal — than aiming for something achievable.?

Today, he and his are team are still excited to be chasing that audacious goal. And that’s what we’re going to talk more about next week: the right mindset for pursuing your goals.?

I’ll discuss the distinction between perfection and excellence – and what we should be striving for every day. See you on Tuesday, January 25 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET.

Your Turn

I think of January as a time of optimism – we’re looking at the year unfolding before us and saying, “Wow, there are so many things I want to accomplish!” I’d love to hear what some of your most audacious goals are. What are you most excited about achieving in 2022??

Thank you to Workplace from Meta for supporting Leading Disruption.