Setting High, Empowering Goals

For the last two days, I’ve been talking about situations in which leaders said, seemingly impossible goals that their employees fail at accomplishing. This typically sets into motion a disappointment cycle in which the employees are demoralized by their failure, the leader is disappointed, and re-assesses the employees as being less competent, the employees are further demoralized, and therefore, their performance drops, and so forth.

It is indeed a vicious cycle. Yesterday we talked about how to rehabilitate a team that has been demoralized to the point of the disappointment cycle. But, whether you interrupt the process of setting impossible goals, and demoralizing your team—or you have the tools to rehabilitate them once you have done that—we are still begging the most important question.

How can you set goals that will produce unprecedented results, but that your team will not be demoralized by; and instead, will be excited to meet the challenge of achieving them.

There are two parts to this question. The first is how to set the right goals. The second is how to present those goals to your team, in such a way that they are in empowered and enthusiastic rather than daunted, cowed and demoralized.

Goal-Setting

There are several ways that we set goals. They all have problems.?

The three basic kinds of goals that leader set are:

• Extrapolated: These goals come from historical performance. You simply look at the past, apply some kind of calculation to it for the future, based on a seemingly random level of belief in the strategy, and apply that to the future. So, if growth in the past was 5% for year, you declare that you’re going to grow by 7% per year for the next five years because of your exceptional strategy. Obviously, that additional 2% is an arbitrary number.
• External: The second method of goalsetting is essentially pushed on the leader from outside forces. It comes from investors, from the Board of Directors, or from some heuristic about how companies “like yours” should grow. And then you take that proposed model and apply it to the future. Again, it is entirely arbitrary as it does not take into account, your organization, its capacities, pipeline or resources.
• Future Based: The third method of goalsetting is my preferred approach, which is based on a long-term future vision. In this case the goals are set through project management backtracking. Starting from that future quantified state you extrapolate the incremental growth needed to close the gap between the present and the future.

None of these methods of goal-setting actually provide any level of certainty to your team that they can be accomplished.

Confidence

From the standpoint of what the appropriate level of confidence is in the teams, ability to achieve, they are all arbitrary. So to add a degree of reality we need to utilize tools of probability to assess the likelihood of success.

Ideally, your organization is doing this all the time about every decision. Since any goal, and any decision, is fundamentally based on a prediction about the future, they should be based in some sense of the probabilities of other events in the future and their impact on the decision at-hand. That means applying a great deal of logic and looking at a variety of different forces and variables to decide anything.

But it’s especially important that when you set goals, those goals have a high probability of success. That isn’t to say they shouldn’t be stretch goals. But even stretch goals should be based on a careful assessment of how they can be achieved.

Are there the tools, skills, resources, time, people, organizational processes, and so forth to ensure progress toward the goal. Often, employees are demoralized, because they are viscerally connected to the lack of those elements. For example, they may know that they can’t possibly hit a sales goal because there is not a lead generation engine for them to have enough conversations with enough prospects. So foisting an impossible sales goal on a team that knows about the fundamental lack of tools to achieve their goal is a recipe for demoralization.

What all of this means for setting your goals is that they need to be based in reality and you need to share that reality when you give them to your team.

If you are going to charge your sales team with doubling revenue this year, then you need to be able to demonstrate to them that you were making the investments necessary in increasing lead flow, or outsourcing prospecting, so that there is pipeline. Then you can genuinely say to them that the goal is achievable because these elements are in place to support progress. The key to goals is calibrating your confidence in the ability to achieve them.?

Low Confidence

Of course, you may not have confidence. And if your goal is truly a moonshot, and the likelihood of succeeding is 17%, then tell your team that. People are empowered by knowing that they are undertaking something difficult and unlikely. But they are only empowered when they know the truth. Not when they are tasked with achieving the impossible and essentially gaslighted about it’s difficulty.

Assigning Hard Goals

People to the expectations we have for them.?They also descend to the expectations we have for them.?So to alter another person’s performance you may have to first deal with your own belief structure and the mental ceiling you have assumed of that individual’s potential.?

I realize this isn’t the kind of magical fix that you expect. After all, if you are not the problem, why does the solution come back to you? Well, because?you’re the one whose problem it has become, and you’re the one committed to altering it.?But in this case, there is some significant research that shows that when under-performing workers are provided with “stretch goals” and coaching that presumes their competence and ambition,?they exceed their past performance.

Create a game. A game that demands more of that person.?This is counter-intuitive, because when people under-perform we are inclined to give them less work and easier goals.?This coaching is opposite to that. Raise the bar. Assume their greatness. And tell them so.

As always, every case is difference. But the more entrenched your belief that this will not work, the more I suggest it will.?Your entrenchment is one of the reasons that it stays as it is.??So try it.?Elevate your lowest performing team member, raise the demand for them to excel, and have conversations in which you assume they are completely able and delighted to do and deliver more and better results

But as we discussed above, add the context of the confidence level you have in the goal. Give them the entire set of assumptions and the way you are looking at the goal. Bring them into the work you see. When they can see that world with its variables, they can share your confidence. Then, they will overshoot their own (and your) expectations.

One of the most critical tools you can give your team is executive coaching to build their skills and their confidence. Schedule a call to chat with me about how Beyond Better Coaching-as-Service can increase your confidence in hitting the toughest goals!