http://www.flickr.com/photos/shakespearesmonkey/
…at least if you are not careful with the points discussed below. If you read books about leadership and management, it is common to see Goals setting as a fundamental tool for motivation and improvement. When you use Goals you need to be careful with several aspects of this practice or this will backfire against you. In this blog post, I want to discuss several characteristics of Goal settings.
Acceptance and Commitment of Goals
In order for goals to be truly motivating, the employee must accept and commit to the goals. Now you are thinking “Of course, what a stupid observation”, but if you think a bit how many of us were involved in Goal setting sessions where the boss came and said that we need to improve this or that by x%? I guess it happens quite often..
Not long time ago, I had a talk with a friend, her boss told her the company needs to increase the productivity in 40%. Do you think there was any discussion on that topic? Of course not, the goal was imposed. As Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins refer in their book “Abolishing Performance Appraisals” Without acceptance and personal commitment, goals are largely ineffective.” But beware, if your boss involves you in a discussion, it does not mean that he will accept your commitment. You can accept the goal or create your own goals but most probably it will always be something within your boss scope, therefore, acceptance does not guarantee commitment. Commitment will come only if the person truly believes on the goal. The employee should know exactly what is the vision and the goals of the company and create his or her own goals that are aligned with the company. Many people think that this is the role of the manager, but unfortunately everyone knows that this rarely works.
Multiple and Complex Goals
Another way to make Goals ineffective is setting too many goals or make them complex. Being an Agile Coach, I always coach my teams about the work in progress they take. I always tell them to define single topics of the work to stay focused. When they take too many items, usually they do not deliver anything. The same happens with goals, when someone sets too many goals, people tend to be distracted and they end up not delivering much of what was supposed to be done. Another common mistake is to set complex Goals; complex goals usually do not depend only on a single person. Many times they are system problems making problem solving almost impossible by the single person that has the goal. Focusing on a limited and simple goals should be the approach.
Quantity Goals
I still get surprised when I listen that we should always enter numbers into Goals. There are several studies demonstrating that quality suffers when employees are given quantity goals. Somehow companies still believe that giving high numbers will motivate people to perform well but reality is different. The book “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivate us” , written by Daniel Pink, explains and presents several studies that show how numerical goals are quite harmful. Let me present you an example that Tom and Mary refer in their book: Sometimes companies give targets to their employees to reduce errors by 2%, is this good? What kind of image is the company passing? The objective is to have 0% errors, if you say to your employees that they should improve defects by 2%, you are telling them that is fine to have errors. Instead, you should give goals to understand where the problems are and help them to correct the process to achieve 0% defects.
Tom and Mary also refer in their book:
“Individual goal setting brings unintended consequences. When individual performance goals are imposed on people through appraisal, invariably there are prescribed targets, measurements, deadlines, surveillance, and evaluation. These features undermine intrinsic motivation because they cause people to feel pressured and controlled. Individual performance goals often impede cooperation and the natural sense of teamwork.”
Next time you establish/impose goals to your employees, please take this blog post into consideration.
This blog post is part of my new book: Get Rid of Performance Appraisals that you can find here. Below you can get a free chapter of the book…
|
