Let's all chill a little bit with our goals
Red != Dead. How I approach goal setting, measuring, and the psychological pit traps we as leaders need to help our teams through
Thanks for coming back to another edition of Rough Terrain!
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Q4 is upon us, which means it annual planning season! Which also means everybody and their uncle is talking about goals. I figured I would share some of my opinions about goals. Hopefully some of you find this helpful!
I’m a big goal guy. Love setting them, love figuring out how to measure them, love debating the finer points of reporting on them. But most of all, I love meeting them.
I pride myself on achieving the goals I set for myself, both personally and professionally.
True story, when I was in 5th grade, I visited the US Military Academy for a friend of the family’s graduation. I decided then and there I would also go to there for school. I got a copy of the admission requirements, pinned it to my bedroom wall, and methodically worked through the check list for the next decade.
Captain of a varsity sport? Check.
Student Body officer? Check
Eagle Scout? Check
GPA over 3.7? Check
Peak in High School and never emotionally move on? Check Check Check!
Yes, I understand how utterly psychotic that sounds. My mother should have made me see a professional. But I made it into West Point, by gawd!
As you might imagine, I’ve gravitated to organizations that take goals seriously. Take Ranger School for example.
Every day at Ranger School, you have to recite the Ranger Creed. It’s a powerful ceremony that cements each student with the lineage of the Ranger Regiment. The Creed is a deeply emotional and potent call to action. Let me share a verse of the Ranger Creed that resonates strongly with me:
Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger objective and complete the mission though I be the lone survivor.
So you want me to complete the goal no matter the cost, even if all my buddies are killed? Sounds like my kinda goal setting, sign me the f up. This is the kind of hardcore commitment to goals that only guys who fight tigers underwater (incredibly un-PC warning!) would be willing to do.
At Amazon, the boss that most shaped my technology career was also a big goal guy. Not Ranger Creed level (Amazon probably wouldn’t be cool about fighting to the death. Or at least they wouldn’t publicly admit they were cool with it. Pretty sure Bezos would dig it tho…). But he was deeply passionate about meeting commitments. When we were facing long odds to hit an important goal for our organization, he went into overdrive, with a borderline allergic reaction to the idea of not reach our objective. When new folks joined our team, he would jokingly greet them on their first day with “welcome to the team, you’re now red to goal”.
You can see why he and bonded so well.
I went on to build WeWork’s goal tracking system (the less said the better, but let’s all agree that it was a bit too late to make an impact). At Flexport, I wrote out our tech org’s OKR tracking policy. Seeing a pattern here?
Goal setting, measuring, and the process of getting an organization to center itself around goals has been a repeated part of my life.
Why am I telling you this background? Why does any of this matter?
I’m sharing all these bona fides because I want you to understand that even somebody like me, a hardcore goal aficionado, can learn to appreciate a greater degree of complexity and nuance to the role goals play in a healthy organization.
If I can do it, so can you. And trust me, from what I’m seeing, we all need to add some nuance to our goal setting.
In other words, everybody just chill a little bit about goals, okay?
It should surprise no one that Marty Cagan has excellent writing about goal setting, which I regularly reference. It was his work that opened my eyes to the opportunities a thoughtful set of goals can provide.
He divides goals into 3 types:
Moonshots
Roofshots
High Integrity Commitments
Moonshots are the wild ass crazy ideas that are likely not going to pan out. That’s okay, because you knew going into the journey that odds of success were low. Whether it’s for morale, publicity, or the sheer fun of trying to hit the stars, moonshot goals serve a valuable purpose. They INSPIRE.
Roofshots are your bread and butter goals. It’s the type of goal you set an achievable target, then get after it. Pitter Patter.
High Integrity Commitments are the ABSOLUTE MUST DO, CANNOT MISS type of goals. These are often in the domains of financial accounting and reporting, payments, compliance, etc. You will make these goals, so help you God. Not sure why he couldn’t think of a name that included “shots” in it to better fit with the other two?
By providing three classifiers to goals, you can immediately start to imagine how this additional nuance influences decisions and behaviors.
Don’t hit the target on a moonshot goal? No matter, we didn’t think it would happen anyway, but maybe we built something awesome we can find another use for!
Didn’t hit the target on a high integrity commitment? The CFO would like to have a word. You should probably bring all the stuff from your desk.
What it means to have three classifiers is that all goals are not the same. You wouldn’t compare performance against a moonshot to a rooftshot to a high integrity commitment. That’s apples-to-oranges. Different time horizons, different expectations, different everything.
If there’s different types of goals, then there’s different types of effort to hit those goals.
As I’ve gotten wiser (lol), I’ve developed a greater appreciation for this fact. Different types of goals require different types of mindset. And I’ve seen the repercussions of others who don’t appreciate this fact and reinforce negative behavior as a result.
Here’s an observation I made a few weeks ago:
The trauma I notice when it comes to goals is the belief that there’s only one type. And overwhelmingly, that type is like the High Integrity Commitment.
I see it when people start to squirm when they get challenged on their goal status. If you point out how certain parts of their product/project/whatever aren’t in a state that you consider “On Track” or “Green”, they start panicking.
This is because they’ve been conditioned to never NOT be On Track. They are not permitted to be behind their target. They will be On Track or else. To be Off Track is tantamount to admitting failure and whoever their manager was, that person did not allow failure. So they bend and twist, finding every possible way to justify their position of On Track even though they aren’t.
Now, if it’s an actual High Integrity Commitment, being a zealot about staying On Track is a good thing.
But the other types? Being At Risk or Off Track can be okay. You already have admitted that failure is an option because of the type of goal they are - Moonshots or Roofshots. Moonshots fail most of the time. Roofshots typically don’t fail, but if you’ve set yourself an aggressive target, maybe you will fail. But getting most of the way to an aggressive target is pretty good, no?
So why do folks get bent all out of shape when they aren’t actually On Track? What’s with the fear of being red, not green?
There’s something happening in the minds of the people who must be On Track.
Are they scared of failure? Have they been punished in past roles when they weren’t On Track? Was performance against goals directly tied to their performance as an employee and compensation?
There’s a lot of psychological challenges going on here if any of these questions are true. I’m not a professional by any means, so I can’t solve anyone’s fear of failure with a newsletter.
So let me at least tell you how I approach things:
Performance as an employee and performance against organizational goals are not tied together. If we do this, we encourage people to set unaggressive goals because their incentives are to always hit goals and so those goals are made easy. This is a toxic culture that rewards mediocrity. You’ll never have employees willing to take on High Integrity Commitments or Moonshots, and those types of goals are critical to the success of a company. Your best people will only work on Roofshots. And their Roofshots will be tepid.
Sounds a great way to drive your company out of business.
Instead, you want a healthy blend in your org across the 3 types. Mostly Roofshots, a few Moonshots and High Integrity Commitments. Over the course of time, people should pick up different types of goals so they get exposure to the different types. Managers should have a bucket of goals which includes all 3 types so they learn how to balance resources and effort across the types.
The targets for the goals depend on the type, but should be aggressive yet obtainable. You won’t make all of them, but that’s okay.
Aggressive goals combined with healthy management gives you aggressive employees who WANT to hit those hard but obtainable goals and give it their all. Too aggressive of a goal and they lose faith. Too tepid a goal and nobody is performing at their best.
What you want is a team that embraces challenge, hates failure, but also isn’t afraid to admit when things didn’t work out.
And to make that kind of team, you have to be that kind of manager. Are you?