Why your business goals are holding your team back
Working towards concrete goals can leave employees resistant to exploring superior ways of achieving results
Articleat a glance
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Setting concrete goals can backfire by locking people into sub-optimalways of working, according to research by Assistant Professor of Marketing GuyVoichek
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Making progress towards a goal increases perceived effectiveness ofestablishedapproaches, reducing openness to better alternatives
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Leaders can counter this bias by building in structured reflection
Targets matter, but so does the means of pursuit
Every year we make resolutions. Every quarter we set targets. Everywhere we measure progress. Setting concrete goals can motivate people to stay on track towardsbecoming healthier,wealthierand happier.But sometimes thetrackwe chooseis not the best way to get there and our focus on achievementcan backfire because we undervalue alternative routes.
DrVoichek’spaper reveals a surprising way in whichsettinggoals cango wrong. When peopleaim for a specificgoal and begin pursuing it via a particular path, early progress inflates the perceived effectiveness of that path, making people less likely to adopt a superior, alternativeroute.
Progress creates a bias in effectiveness
Through a series of studies spanningdiverseareas suchashealth, finance and work, the authors saw a consistent pattern of behaviour. In one study, participants committed to earning a specific amount of money before beginning a task. After making initial progress using one type of task and earning some money, they became less likely to switch to an easier, higher-paying task, compared to participants who did not set a goal before beginning work. Making progress towards a concrete goal led participants to view theinitialapproachas a more effective way to earn money, and alternative tasks as less effective. As a result, participants with a concrete earning goalultimately earnedless than those without a specific goal in mind.
Thankfully, there isa simple wayto overcome this: rather than focusing only on whether your current actions advance your goal, also consider howdifferent pathsmight advance it.A reminder to consider the advantages of both current andalternative ways of working mitigatedtheentrenchmentcausedby concretegoals, one study revealed.
Once people made progress, they judged their chosen approach as more effective.
The risk of overly specific targets
Once progress metrics are embedded into dashboards, performance reviews and incentives, flexibility becomes even harder. Teams that are“on target”are rarely encouraged to question how they got there.Yet markets, technologies and competitive conditions change constantly. The danger is not onlypoor goal setting but rigidly sticking to the old methods that have worked in the past foracquiringthose targets.
What can business leaders take from this?
Organisations often become more rigid than the people that create them.It'sa powerful tendency: when we are satisfied with how things are going, wedon’tquestion our methods.
This research adds an important dimension to our understanding of how concrete goals can produce entrenchment.
Howorganisations cancounteract this:
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Institutionalise reflection:Build in regular checkpoints that require teams to explicitly evaluate alternative ways of achieving their goals. Instruct employees to ask not onlywhether they are on track, but whether they are onthebesttrack.
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Reward course correction:Incentivise employees to change direction when doing so makes sense, rather than implicitly rewardpersistence for its own sake. Consistency should not be confused with efficiency.
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Maintain high-level goals:remind people that most goals can be pursued in multiple ways, and that any given method is a means–not anend.
