The only thing I'd add (it's sort of already in there, but not explicitly) is that good goals are defined from the point of view of the people who will be expected to achieve them, whereas bad goals are written from the perspective of the people who will be reviewing (*not* writing) the performance reviews.
Example: I used to work at a place that gave my team the goal of "reducing costs" every year. No-one on the team even knew how much anything cost, because we had absolutely no involvement in any accounting. None. We could make educated guesses (if I do this faster, it will be cheaper, if I simplify a process, it will be cheaper), but we couldn't put a dollar amount to any improvements. It meant that most years, no-one on the team achieved that goal. If we did, we had to ask the people who did track the money for some details so we could make a rough calculation to include on our self-evaluation.
Agreed, Patrick. John's mental work / mental models are extremely helpful in applying it to our own local context.
I am under the assumption that John has the muscle memory to identify good or bad goals when he reads them. Thus, wanted to ask if he knew some from the back of his head.
The struggle I find is that I often see the "oh crap. We shouldn't have had that goal" ahead of time but communicating and convincing stakeholders who "birthed" the goal/idea (they are tied to making it work) to let go of the goal is a downhill battle.
Core struggle remains, how do you influence stakeholders not to set bad goals before it all crashes and burns.
Depends on the feature, how it is decided (who, how much and how this feature is believed to benefit) and how it will be measured if it did deliver the promise it is supposed to deliver beyond acceptance testing.
I'd suggest that a bad goal can lead to people actively working on something harmful. In that sense, a goal that leads to expending effort to move in the wrong direction or developing problematic behaviours would be worse than the absence of a goal allowing positive behaviours to simply emerge. That would especially be the case when there's guidance from something less explicit and directive, e.g. organisational values may be sufficient or better for achieving some outcomes. And if you tie extrinsic rewards to goals, research has shown that doing so can actually damage motivation and performance when the behaviour is intrinsically rewarding.
Love it! I still feel that often PM ends up defining goals in a restrictive, performative manners because teams feels they have "no clear directions" if the goal is ambiguous or doesn't tell them exactly what to achieve. Hence the focus on the M in SMART.
I guess the maturity of the team influences widely what kind of goal a team actually needs.
Great article!
The only thing I'd add (it's sort of already in there, but not explicitly) is that good goals are defined from the point of view of the people who will be expected to achieve them, whereas bad goals are written from the perspective of the people who will be reviewing (*not* writing) the performance reviews.
Example: I used to work at a place that gave my team the goal of "reducing costs" every year. No-one on the team even knew how much anything cost, because we had absolutely no involvement in any accounting. None. We could make educated guesses (if I do this faster, it will be cheaper, if I simplify a process, it will be cheaper), but we couldn't put a dollar amount to any improvements. It meant that most years, no-one on the team achieved that goal. If we did, we had to ask the people who did track the money for some details so we could make a rough calculation to include on our self-evaluation.
Can you please provide some examples?
Agreed, Patrick. John's mental work / mental models are extremely helpful in applying it to our own local context.
I am under the assumption that John has the muscle memory to identify good or bad goals when he reads them. Thus, wanted to ask if he knew some from the back of his head.
A goal to hit a far off delivery date violates many/most of these
A goal promoting a forcing function to get customer feedback -- perhaps sooner than immediately comfortable -- might be an enabling constraint
Helpful. Thankyou for that input. What about goal of just shipping a, b, c features?
How would that rank against the criteria in your context?
The struggle I find is that I often see the "oh crap. We shouldn't have had that goal" ahead of time but communicating and convincing stakeholders who "birthed" the goal/idea (they are tied to making it work) to let go of the goal is a downhill battle.
Core struggle remains, how do you influence stakeholders not to set bad goals before it all crashes and burns.
Depends on the feature, how it is decided (who, how much and how this feature is believed to benefit) and how it will be measured if it did deliver the promise it is supposed to deliver beyond acceptance testing.
Interesting take. I wish the good/bad metrics concept would also creep into our stakeholders inboxes/brains.
Great article on goals, John
Almost feel like the definitive piece on goals that I can use to refer to whenever discuss goals with other people
I have almost given up using the term “goal” for “intention” as used by Stephen bungay in his book 📕 “Art of Action”
How do you see Bungay’s intention in the context of your goal essay ?
I thought the closest link between bungay’s intention and your good goal characteristic is that both
- care about context
- allow sufficient flexibility and adaptability
What are your thoughts?
How would, "having bad goals" be worse off then having no goals? I would think that they are equally bad. 🙂
I'd suggest that a bad goal can lead to people actively working on something harmful. In that sense, a goal that leads to expending effort to move in the wrong direction or developing problematic behaviours would be worse than the absence of a goal allowing positive behaviours to simply emerge. That would especially be the case when there's guidance from something less explicit and directive, e.g. organisational values may be sufficient or better for achieving some outcomes. And if you tie extrinsic rewards to goals, research has shown that doing so can actually damage motivation and performance when the behaviour is intrinsically rewarding.
Love it! I still feel that often PM ends up defining goals in a restrictive, performative manners because teams feels they have "no clear directions" if the goal is ambiguous or doesn't tell them exactly what to achieve. Hence the focus on the M in SMART.
I guess the maturity of the team influences widely what kind of goal a team actually needs.