Build a better business – use the proven science of effective goal setting...

It feels frustrating when you and your business achieve less than you know it could.

• Chances are, you’ve set goals and achieved them.
• Chances are, you’ve also set goals and failed.

And because of your years of experience, it’s easy to assume you know everything you need to know about setting goals...

...BUT – could you be doing more to help yourself succeed?

A goal in hockey, football, or basketball is an obvious part of the game.

A goal in business is much less obvious.

And yet, a gold-standard review of more than 1,000 research studies into business goals suggests that “...increases in job performance produced by goal setting have important economic and practical value.”

Yes, this is understated, because it’s from a comprehensive research study not designed for social media soundbites or quick-fire podcasts. However, the conclusions, insights, and ‘how-to’ golden rules in the research can help you and your people better succeed.

The Handbook of Psychology describes this goals research as the top-ranked way to motivate employees at work.

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How do you truly test the power of goal setting?

Test it with a group of 68-year-old Scots, who are experiencing the agony of knee or hip replacement surgery.

Hip and knee surgery involves sawing through bones and severing joint muscles.

To enable a good recovery, it’s essential that patients begin moving their legs and hips as soon as they wake from surgery. If they don’t quickly start stretching, their muscles and scar tissue will clog the joint, destroying their flexibility for life.

But the agony of even the smallest movement is punishing.

It’s not unusual for people to skip out on exercise sessions.

And who would blame them?

Two groups – which would you join?

In 1992, a study inside two of Scotland’s busiest orthopaedic hospitals provided stark evidence that goal setting, when done well, works well:

Having ambitious (challenging) goals, along with daily and weekly attainable goals, clearly worked for pain-riddled hip replacement patients in Scotland.

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham suggest the same in their Goal Setting Theory (GST), based on 1,000+ research studies.

Ambitious and Attainable

These sound like they may be in conflict, but they’re not.

Organisational research on motivation shows that setting ambitious (difficult) goals results in high performance in the workplace.

Ambitious goals shift the way people think – they make thinking harder, which pushes people to grow – but behaviours have to change as well.

Ambitious goals don’t necessarily make you or your team happier, though! The research shows that difficult goals do not create as much happiness as easy goals, because the wins are fewer and take longer to achieve – delayed gratification is not popular in the 21^st century.

But you can help yourself and your team focus on more attainable, short-term, manageable goals every day or every week – just like the Scottish knee and hip replacement patients.

Attainable is personal...

Ambitious goals stretch one’s thinking and action. Seeing the ambitious goal as attainable can be influenced by timing, individual differences in character strengths, mindset, willpower, priming, and gender.

Work with your team – be clear about why the goals are meaningful and important. Also, when you’re curious and collaborative about the goals you’re working on, you’ll influence everyone’s sense of ‘attainable’ and build belief in your ambitious goals.

Back to Scotland...

Specific, ambitious, attainable, committed goals with feedback worked for the knee and hip patients.

The researchers, Sheina Orbell and Paschal Sheeran, gave the patients a booklet laying out their rehabilitation schedule. The booklet also included 13 mostly blank pages with the following instructions:

• “My goals for this week are…?”
• “Write down exactly what you are going to do. For example, if you are going to go for a walk this week, write down where and when you are going to walk.”

The successful patients completed the 13 pages with written goals and plans, often in mundane but very specific detail. It was this group that were walking twice as fast as those who did not.

Here are two typical remarks found in the patients’ booklets:

• “I’m going to walk and meet my wife at the bus stop at 3.30 in the afternoon. If it’s too painful I’ll take extra painkillers, and I’ll take my raincoat if it’s raining.”
• “I’m going to get out of my chair and walk to the bathroom. I’m going to take two steps the instant I’m stood up so that I don’t sit back down again because of the pain.”

This is really important…

The successful Scottish patients anticipated where they might fail.

They then wrote down what they’d do to handle the difficulty.

So, when you write down your ambitious and attainable goals, also write down your expected source of difficulty or challenge. Then write down your plan to overcome it.

Fine-tuning your goals approach...

Learning from the knee surgery patients, we might fine tune Locke and Latham’s proven goal setting framework:

OUTCOME and PROCESS goals can help...

Here’s another nuance that will help you to agree worthy and worthwhile goals that are more likely to succeed. Be clear about outcome and process goals:

PERFORMANCE goals and LEARNING goals are different

PERFORMANCE goals – focus on something you already know how to do, and there is little, if anything, to learn; however, you can improve performance.

When you treat performance goals as checklist goals, you start to see how you and your team might improve performance. Even a pilot who has performed thousands of take offs and landings achieves an almost miraculous safety record by using a pre-flight checklist (there are more than 100,000 flights per day across the globe). And the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist helped transform post-op recovery records across the globe as well.

How could you and your team use checklists to help support the performance goals you are seeking?

Examples: Cleaning a hotel room; driving to a destination; running a meeting; giving a presentation; making a coffee; performing a bank reconciliation. All can be done better, faster, safer.

LEARNING goals – focus on something you have never done before or where you have limited experience.

Knowledge and skill acquisition goals move you from novice to knowing, and only then can you set performance goals.

Examples: Cooking a new recipe; learning a language or instrument; becoming a parent; managing a team for the first time; taking on new responsibilities at work. On which new knowledge and skills do you need to invest time and energy and money to succeed?

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