Target Setting: Is it impediment in exploring full potential? - An experiment
Tarkesh Gupta (PCC - ICF)
Chief HR Officer @ Fresenius Kabi, South Asia | PCC - ICF I Top Leadership Award I Top Employer Certification I LinkedIn Top Voice I Student of Psychology I Loves Technology I Building Culture. All views are personal
I have done an experiment to understand the impact of targets on mindset and overall productivity.
A group of 10 people (randomly selected) were given target to do squats. They were communicated that
- Their target is to do 10 squats
- They can do more also, if they wish
Later, after every one hour, same instruction were repeated 3 times with changing target of 20, 30 and 40 squats.
Results are tabled below-
What it indicates
- Target limits achievement – most of the people stop doing more after achieving target (sense of false accomplishment!)
- Certain category of people will stop before target, no matter how easy the target is (matter of mindset)
- Certain category of people will always go beyond target, no matter how difficult the target is (driven by sense of over achievement or being competitiveness)
- From above table, it emerged that
When target was 10, people as group overachieved but productivity was just 101 squats
When target was quadruplicate, with same set of people, productivity also increased to almost 4 times
Question is whether do we really set the target and limit human potential?
Should we focus more on processes and challenge mindset / push beyond comfort zone and create more possibilities?
What do you say?
Director at Brugu Business Consulting Pvt Ltd
4 年Second, thought provoking Analysis We see no much difference in number of people in two categories- over achiever and under achiever. But certainly there's is drop in category - Achiever as the target increase from 7 to 5 number. Does it indicate that while trying to push beyond their comfort zone to achieve their full potential, we are actually pushing them to Under Achiever category? How do extract a person's full potential without having a negative impact on the him/her? - A million dollar question.
Director at Brugu Business Consulting Pvt Ltd
4 年Hi Tarkesh, Thank you for a such an interesting and a thought provoking Analysis. ?I have been working to break the 80/20 Rule at workplace i.e 20 percent of employees are driving about 80 percent of productivity and success. It holds good especially for sales. How big the productivity / success rate would be, if 60/40 or 50/50 rule was developed? Before setting the target, we must seek answers for these questions - What is the purpose of setting Target? Are we trying to identify the capability/potential of an employee? How does setting target increase the capability/potential of an employee? OR Is "Target" merely a tool to measure the productivity? I have drawn a few more thought provoking analysis for your results, 1) Target was 10 squats , resulted in 101% productivity . As the target increased, there's slight drop in the productivity percentage and it could dramatically drop even further if the target is increased. 2) What would be the results if the target was less than 10 squats or NO target was set, would the productivity increase or decrease or would have no impact? Looking forward for you thoughts...
Founder & Director at StrengthsVectors
4 年Nice study, Tarkesh. The crux of the matter is what motivates people to give their best. I feel there is no one way of bringing out the best in people. Some respond to stretched targets, some react to comparison, some crave for appreciation, some are just self-motivated & so on. The big challenge for leadership (at work & home) is to identify these & provide a conducive environment to bring out the best. One size doesn’t fit all.
Chief HR Officer @ Fresenius Kabi, South Asia | PCC - ICF I Top Leadership Award I Top Employer Certification I LinkedIn Top Voice I Student of Psychology I Loves Technology I Building Culture. All views are personal
4 年I have a question whether you would like to give target to your kid to secure 95% Marks or motivate her to give her best to the.best of her abilities.
G
4 年Target is always required to drive people and it's important to make organisation goals clear and need to re check on time to time on achievement of goals.. Secondly there must be realistic target and if it wont possible then there must be provision of mid year review Different type.of activities and motivation can add flavor in that.