GOALS ARE EVERYWHERE AT WORK

it’s hard to find many companies that do not engage in some sort of annual or semi-annual goal-setting regimen. At some point in the year, the organization’s senior leaders set their goals for the upcoming six or twelve months, and then share them with their teams. Each team member looks at each of the leader’s goals, and figures out what he or she should do to advance that goal, and thus sets a sort of mini-goal that reflects some part of the leader’s goal. This continues down the chain, until you, and every other employee, has a set of goals that are mini-versions of some larger goal further up in the organization. Then, at the end of the year, you’re asked to write a brief self-assessment reflecting how you feel you’ve done on each goal, after which your team leader will review this assessment and add her own. After HR has nudged her a couple of times, she’ll input all this information into the company performance management system, whereupon it’ll serve as a permanent record of your performance for the year, and will guide your pay, promotion opportunities, and even continued employment.

Across all the different technologies and methodologies, massive amounts of time and money are invested in this goal-setting. Companies shell out close to $1B on them every year, because goals are seen as a stimulator, a tracker, and an evaluator—and this is precisely where the trouble begins.

In terms of goals as a stimulator of performance, one great fear of senior leaders is that the work of their people is misaligned, and that effort is being wasted in activities that drag the company hither and yon, like a rudderless boat in a choppy sea. As it happens, no research exists showing that goals set for you from above stimulate from you greater productivity. In fact, the weight of evidence suggests that cascaded goals do the opposite: they limit performance. They slow your boat down.

How about tracking performance—do goals allow companies to do that? Hardly. Even though so many companies ask employees to write down their yearly goals and track their progress using some sort of software; none of this tracking data does what it is intended to, for the simple reason that your progress towards a goal is not linear. All goals, at least in the real world, are binary: you are either done, or you are not done.

Finally, what about evaluating employees? Can we evaluate a person based on how many goals he or she has achieved? Many companies do, for sure. But here’s the snag: unless we can standardize the difficulty of each person’s goals it’s impossible to objectively judge the relative performance of each employee. To compare and evaluate based on goals, we need to be able to perfectly calibrate each and every goal for difficulty – we need each manager, with perfect consistency, to be able to weight the stretchiness or slackiness of a given goal in exactly the same way as every other manager. And as it happens, this sort of calibration is a practical impossibility, so we can’t.

So what on earth are goals for? Intuitively they seem so useful to us—really, who in their right mind doesn’t think goals are useful?—and yet our experience of them at work feels so non-intuitive. Mechanical, fake, demeaning even. Why is that?

In the real world there is work—stuff that you have to get done. And then, in theory-world, there are goals. But it doesn’t have to be this way – Goals can be a force for good.

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Excerpt from Buckingham's book 9 lies about work