Performance Goals – Great If You Use Them Wisely

 

Goals are as Valuable as the Care You Put Into Them

Goals can be powerful things.  When used well, they can produce startling increases in performance; used badly, they can damage and destroy; used half-heartedly, they typically have hardly any effect at all.

The evidence of the benefits of well-set goals is hard to ignore.  Studies comparing goal-users against those with no goals or “do your best” instructions show consistently better performance by the goal users.  This is true for individuals, teams, and enterprises.  Studies of athletes regularly show improvements of 50-100% in the best responders.  Locke’s original landmark review of goal-setting studies in enterprises showed that 90% enjoyed material performance improvement from using goals.  The same review identified an average 40% performance improvement when goals were combined with monetary incentives.

The disastrous effects of badly-set goals are also hard to ignore.  Ordonez et al’s “Goals Gone Wild” gives an attention-grabbing selection of negative case examples of gaming, conflict, irresponsibility, and issue blindness from poor goal-setting.  These include Sears’ auto repair sales goals, which resulted in company-wide behaviour of overcharging and making unnecessary repairs.  The paper also includes the inevitable Enron example of sales targets that ignored profitability measures, with results that we all know.

Goals applied half-heartedly are just a waste of time.  Long-term goals have no performance enhancing effect if not combined with more immediate goals.  Goals, of any time frame, have no material performance-enhancing effect if not combined with feedback on results.

In a nutshell, the effort and thought you put into goals is rewarded in proportion.

How Goals Work

A major effect of goals on the mind is to focus the attention, something I’ve talked about before (here) as being critical to performance improvement.  Done well, goals help you direct your attention to what’s important, at the expense of what’s unimportant.

Studies that record multiple aspects of performance consistently show improvement in the aspects with goals, and little or none for areas where no goals are set.  This is as true in day-to-day life as in corporates: one study of collegiate rugby players showed between 26% and 118% improvement in pre-selected goal tasks over a season with negligible improvement in non-selected tasks.

Done badly, goals direct your attention, possibly inadvertently, onto damaging or unproductive work, which Goals Gone Wild illustrates at length.  

Without goals, you don’t just flounder; but you are more likely to get drawn into a range of nice-to-haves and ought-to-dos, with no prompt to choose how to prioritise your limited time, money and energy.

A second effect of goals on the mind is mobilising increased effort and persistence.  In observed field experiments, when people are allowed to control time, they prolong effort to hit goals.  When faced with tight deadlines, they increase work pace.  

Hard goals produce higher effort even than people’s self-directed attempts to work as hard as they possibly can.  In a study of cyclists, participants given hard goals actually performed at higher levels than those asked to cycle until they literally couldn’t pedal any more.

A third observed effect of well-set goals is to stimulate use of new or more productive strategies: prompting the mind to work smarter as well as harder.  This is a characteristic of planning, which I’ll cover in a separate set of future posts.

My favourite characterisation of the extremes to which focused attention and persistence exhibit themselves in pursuing a critical goal, and how ingenious strategies become, is from the documentary March of Penguins.  Natural world examples aren’t for everyone, so I’ve summarised this separately here.

Good Goal Habits

Given the enormous potential benefits involved, it’s worth investing some time to set and use goals well, taking on board the lessons that enterprises, sportspeople, scientists and others have learned and captured over the years.  The commonly-espoused SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable/Agreed, Relevant/Realistic, Time-based) goal-setting protocol is a good start; but it misses some critical steps, without which you’re wasting your time.

I’ll therefore use the next series of posts to lay out some Good Goal Habits, which summarise much of the accumulated knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.

Areas I’ll cover include: whether and how to use longer-term and shorter-term goals; how difficult should goals be; whether to use outcome goals or process goals; where to use multiple goals, and how to manage them; how explicit goals should be; the role of feedback and evaluation; the importance of goal commitment, and how to increase it; who to include in goal-setting; special characteristics of group and visionary goals; and characteristics of a top goal-setting and goal-hitting environment.

Next post, starting with the big picture: using long- and short-term goals together for an excellent goal structure.

Sources

Locke & Latham, 2002.  Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal-Setting & Task Motivation

Ordonez et al., 2009.  Goals Gone Wild

Locke & Latham, 2009. Has Goal Setting Gone Wild, or Have Its Attackers Abandoned Good Scholarship?

Mellalieu et al., 2006.  The Effects of Goal Setting on Rugby Performance

Dimitrova, 1970. Dependence of Voluntary Effort Upon the Magnitude of the Goal and the Way it is Set in Sportsmen

Botterill, 1977. Goal-setting and Performance on an Endurance Task

Copyright Latitude 2011. All rights reserved.

Latitude Partners Ltd
19 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JN
www.latitude.co.uk

Penguins & Performance

How Goals Work (Briefly)

This post is an add-on to my introductory post [here], which was about the consistently major benefits of well-managed goals, and about how goals work.  Well-set difficult goals work because they (1) focus attention onto what’s important and away from everything else, (2) motivate greater effort and persistence than simply doing your best, and (3) stimulate use of better strategies to reach them.

These characteristics are personified in the extreme by the stars of the documentary “March of the Penguins”.

A Difficult, Important Goal – Keep the Chick Alive

Emperor Penguins choose a breeding ground on ice that is solid year round.  At the beginning of the Antarctic summer, the breeding ground is only a few hundred meters away from the open water where the penguins can feed. By the end of summer, the breeding ground is over 60 miles away from the nearest open water, and gets further away every month.

The female lays a single egg each breeding season, and the goal is to keep the chick alive for eight months in one of the most hostile environments on earth, miles from food sources, until it can fend for itself.

Focused Attention – Chick First; Food and Everything Else Second

The males and females are together on the breeding ground for two months after mating until the eggs are laid.  If the egg is to survive, it needs to stay warm.  So after the female lays the egg, she transfers it to the feet of the waiting male, minimising exposure to the intense cold that would kill the developing embryo.  The male tends to the egg while the female returns to the sea, now even farther away, both in order to feed herself and to obtain extra food for feeding her chick.  For an additional two months, while the female make the return trip to the sea, the males huddle together to stay warm enough to incubate their eggs.

(Just Unbelievable) Persistence

The females have not eaten in two months by the time they leave the hatching area, and have lost a third of their body weight. They then need to travel 50 miles to reach the open ocean.  The males meanwhile endure temperatures approaching −62 °C (−80 °F), with falling snow their only source of water. By the time the females return, the males have lost half their weight and have not eaten for four months.

When mother penguins come back and feed their young, the male penguins take their turn to go to the sea, now 70 miles away, to feed themselves. 

The parents continue this shuttling back and forth to the sea for an additional four months, until finally the parents can leave the chicks to fend for themselves.

Ingenious Strategies to Survive and Keep the Chick Alive

The Emperor penguins have devised a multitude of ingenious strategies to keep the chick alive in this crazily hostile situation.  In addition to the female-male-female tag game and the keep-warm huddle, memorable strategies include the males taking turns on the cold outside of the huddle and, in desperate near-starvation circumstances, feeding eleventh-hour nourishment direct from the father-penguins' throat sacs.

Here’s my point in this example.  If an important goal can stimulate this phenomenal focused attention, persistence and ingenuity in a penguin, I would hope that goals can be helpful for us too.

Copyright Latitude 2011. All rights reserved.

Latitude Partners Ltd
19 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JN
www.latitude.co.uk