Goals are good for organisations and individuals
If you have read John Doerr’s Measure What Matters you will be very aware of the organisational benefits of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). Backed with excellent examples, Doerr demonstrates that focus on prioritised, specific and action-oriented initiatives that flow from strategic priorities are critical for organisational success. He highlights that an effective OKR system needs”superpowers” that include transparently connecting OKRs across teams and the careful development of stretch goals.
What is also evident is that specific and stretching goals have individual wellbeing benefits. These encompass increasing motivation, enabling higher performance and increasing mastery of relevant skills. In facilitating achievement they open up scope for more satisfaction. Goals therefore have the potential to support an individual and organisational win win. In fact, if we look wider we know the action of goal-setting can increase our positive emotions and for those with mental wellbeing challenges increases the propensity to take beneficial action.
But failure from more stretch can be damaging
Reflecting the people I support, I am interested in goals that relate to finding new growth opportunities and new products. These future orientated aims often involve more uncertainty, surprises and risk. Access to the capabilities, resources and training will improve the odds, but ambitious stretch success can be far from certain.
I am therefore sensitive to the potential for exciting and stretching goals to increase the incidence of personal failure, even if aggregate achievement is raised greatly. That failure can be highly damaging to individual self-esteem, positivity and satisfaction. It can also hinder organisational success by reducing motivation and discouraging employees from engaging in new challenges.
To ensure teams flourish in the pursuit of stretching goals there is a need to ensure the impact, incidence and share of voice of failure is effectively managed. In the rest of this article, I highlight some research-supported ways to help this.
This article focuses on managing the impact and perception of failure. The wider impact of a leader’s ‘positive relational energy’ may be of interest and according to this article is too often an underutilised capability.
1. Distinguish stretch from expected goals
I found the Google Chrome stretch result of 20 million active weekly users in Doerr’s Measure What Matters particularly helpful. It represented a potentially achievable, yet extremely challenging result within an organisation that acknowledged uncertainty and a 70% average achievement as part of delivering high growth. As Doerr highlights Google distinguishes aspirational (or stretch) goals from committed goals where full achievement is expected. Aspirational goals work where the how to solve or create needs to be discovered – they are not for extrapolation or expected improvement.
Where a team is stepping into the unknown the aspirational OKR label should support a more objective perspective of failure. For genuinely important aspirational goals failure should often mean a revised timetable for achievement. No doubt almost everyone within Google will be unhappy with shortfall, but it happens despite the best ideas and endeavours.
2. Lift commitment with learning goals
Establishing individual learning goals can expand the routes to solve a challenge and soften failure. Establishing these alongside a stretching performance goal will help sustain attention on beneficial capability and knowledge development. Multiple studies suggest learning goals can elicit higher achievement in entrepreneurial situations where fast discovery is required. (Where the capability stretch is great there is a case for only using learning goals). With learning goals representing an investment in skill mastery it is not surprising that they have been found to attract more commitment than a performance goal. Not achieving targeted results is also less likely to be seen as a personal failure (as skills can be developed).
3. Make positive progress more salient
Positive experiences (and so success) can create a build effect that increases individual resilience, confidence and access to problem-solving resources. Recognising achievement and giving a regular voice to progress towards a stretching objective is therefore highly beneficial. Regular check-ins, learning sharing sessions and coaching interventions facilitate this. When a team has been recognised for fast and expansive experimentation prior a failed test or delay they will be better equipped to objectively deal with it. For OKRs, the inclusion of comprehensive milestone results ensures actions address all that is needed for success and will support visibility of progress.
Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory states that those who continue to apply more positive thinking and behaviours are better able to adapt to their environment
4. Make friends with failure.
As a leader acknowledging past set-backs, mistakes and their benefits will normalise failure and support the shared vulnerability that builds openness, trust and safety within a team. The psychological safety to recognise and talk about failure can accelerate solutions and investment shifts that benefit a business. (Investors in Theranos I am sure would loudly endorse this point). A brilliant example of normalising failure is one of my client’s Fxxk Up of the month award which highlights failed experiments, opportunities missed with hindsight and unexpected consequences. In highlighting and explaining what has gone wrong in one market this global team is creating an opportunity for rapid improvement in other markets. In parallel, success and new learning, of course, is loudly celebrated!
The award itself is a statement that speed and rapid discovery involves mistakes and failure
In summary, stretching goals should be a force for business and individual success and wellbeing. Their framing, alignment with learning goals, the recognition of progress / learning and frequency of check-ins can all help ensure set-backs do not snap ambitious stretch.
There is a lot of research that supported this article. Alongside John Doerr’s Measure What Matters these articles were particularly influential: The ethical consequences of learning versus outcome goals, Learning versus performance goals and Goal Missed, Self Hit: Goal-Setting, Goal-Failure, and Their Affective, Motivational, and Behavioral Consequences and New Developments in and Directions for Goal-Setting Research
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