I love this:
Rather than reflexively relying on goals, argues Max Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor and the fourth coauthor of “Goals Gone Wild,” we might also be better off creating workplaces and schools that foster our own inherent interest in the work. “There are lots of organizations where people want to do well, and they don’t need those goals,” he says. Bazerman and others hold up Google as an example of a company that manages to do this, in part by explicitly setting aside time for employees to pursue their own projects and interests.
Today, as the economic situation upends millions of lives, it is also forcing the reexamination of millions of goals – not only the revenue targets of battered firms, but the career aims of workers and students, and even the ambitions of the newly installed administration. And while it never feels good to give up on a goal, it may be a good time to ask which of the goals we had set for ourselves were things we really needed to achieve, and which were things we only thought we should – and what the difference has been costing us.
That’s from an article in Saturday’s Boston Globe, on “why setting goals can backfire.” Readers of this blog will recognize the warnings — not quite simply about goals, but our over-reliance on objective and extrinsic values at the expense of subjective and intrinsic ones — i.e. “quantity over quality.” I wrote at length about pernicious cult of achievement… here’s Barry Schwartz speaking about something related, and just yesterday I argued ”there are still more systemic effects being obscured by the same technical attitude — the faith of people in business for incentives and efficiency over craftsmanship and quality.”
So I’m encouraged to see there’s actually a considerable amount of research to corroborate my intuitions. The paper is “Goals Gone Wild: The Systemic Side-Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal-Setting” by Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky, and Bazerman; of Arizona, Wharton, Kellogg, and Harvard Business respectively [via Paul Kedrosky].
There’s a more mainstream version of the article posted on the Kellog@Wharton website. Here’s the bullet-pointed meat of their case:
Schweitzer and his co-authors identify a series of problems that they say are linked to the overuse of goal setting, especially when the targets are either too specific or too challenging. For example:
- Goals that are too specific often lead employees to develop such a narrow focus that they fail to recognize obvious problems unrelated to the target. According to the authors, highly specific goals may cause workers to sacrifice safety for speed — as in the case of the Ford Pinto — or pursue misguided end results, as was the case at Enron. A typical problem is the sacrifice of quality in the interest of quantity, they note, citing the example of universities that require tenured professors to publish a certain number of research papers in particular journals, but without careful scrutiny of the quality of the work.
- Likewise, too many goals have what the authors consider an inappropriate time horizon. They refer to the well-known example of managers who are pressured to meet quarterly earnings goals, causing them to ignore long-term strategic problems. The reverse side of this practice is that employees also have a tendency to ease up when goal horizons are set too low. The paper cites a 1997 study of New York City cabdrivers who found that on rainy days, taxis tended to disappear from the congested streets because drivers met their fare target early in the day and went home, rather than working longer hours to make additional income.
- Workers with highly specific and ambitious targets will engage in risky practices in order to meet them. The authors note the case of one of the nation’s largest banks at the time, Continental Illinois, where in 1976 the CEO issued a mandate to dramatically expand the loan portfolios to match those of some rival banks. The bank aggressively pursued new loan customers and even bought packages of high-risk mortgages from smaller banks, which eventually caused Continental Illinois to fail.
- Unethical behavior is one of the more obvious pitfalls of overly ambitious goal setting, with potentially some of the most catastrophic consequences. This can happen in a number of ways — such as the safety shortcuts at Ford or the bilking of auto-repair customers at Sears. The authors also note incidents where employees offered bogus results to claim that a target was reached, such as when employees falsified sales reports to meet their quota at the vision-products company Bausch & Lomb.
They do not argue that goals are always bad. What they argue is that goal-setting is taken for granted — and in business environments is seen as a kind of all-purpose remedy…
For decades, scholars have prescribed goal setting as an all-purpose remedy for employee motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for students of management, experts need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision. Given the sway of goal setting on intellectual pursuits in management, we call for a more self-critical and less self-congratulatory approach to the study of goal setting.
An appendix to the paper proposes a set of guidelines for doing that. The last is my favourite:
Consider the ultimate goals of the organization and what type of goal (performance or learning) is most appropriate? In complex, changing environments learning goals may be more effective.
A learning goal is distinguished from a performance goal here by Ivey’s Gerard Seijts and Rotman’s Gary P. Latham, using a golf example: give oneself the goal of learning how to hold a golf club properly — rather than setting oneself the performance goal of making par or driving a certain distance. The former is more generative in that it will eventually lead to better scores in the future (not to mention fewer injuries, perhaps, and other subjective advantages like the feeling of greater control) whereas the latter may tend to generate bad form leading to declining performance (and health) in the future — not to mention cheating (and it’s amazing how people even deceive themselves in pursuit of better scores).
(For more on learning vs. performance the book to read is Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck.)
By the way, the best learning goal I’ve managed to come up with is to try and come up with the best possible sets of goals. Give it a try for a few years.
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