Leadership Pitfalls: Confusing Goals with Outcomes
Most leaders have been trained to think in terms of goals – setting them, working for them, achieving them. But what if I were to suggest that focusing on goals is one of the less helpful, and potentially adverse, things a leader can do?
I know, I know, it sounds a little crazy. But here are two simple reasons why. First, many of the goals we set are more aspirational than practical and so don’t direct action. Second, achieving a goal doesn’t necessarily change anything. I’ll say a bit more about each of these before suggesting an alternative.
First, many of the goals we set reflect our aspirations and hopes but are too general or vague to direct action. “I want to make the world a better place,” for instance, while laudable, is too unfocused to be of any value. Even more specific goals like, “I want to get better grades,” or “I want to lead a healthy lifestyle,” while they sound like concrete goals, don’t provide any strategy for what steps you’ll need to take to achieve those goals.
Which leads us to the second problem: for goals to be helpful, they need not only to be concrete in that you can imagine them, but they need to name and describe something that will be different. That is, goals need to be defined clearly in terms that can be measured.
So when it comes to the healthy lifestyle goal, for instance, one would first need to ask, “What will a healthy lifestyle look like?” And follow that up with, “What will be measurably different about a healthy lifestyle than the one I am living now?” Well, that might mean that because you have a sedentary job you need to make time to walk. Or it might mean that because you typically eat fast food, you’ll need to eat more fresh vegetables. Now you have defined the goal, named what will be different – you’ll be walking a lot and eating more fresh vegetables – and therefore be able to measure these differences: “Last week I walked one mile everyday and had salad instead of a sandwich four times.”
But measurable goals aren’t quite enough either. For instance, “I want to get better grades” seems on the surface the very definition of something that is measurable, but it still doesn’t direct action. Here the challenge is to think about what will need to change in order to accomplish this goal. In order to get better grades, for instance, you may need to put in more time studying, do some work on each subject everyday rather than wait until just before the test, and seek out the teacher or some classmates to review your work. Only by focusing on what will be different in terms of your actual actions and behaviors can you come up with concrete action steps.
All of which is why I prefer the word “outcomes” to “goals.” While goals can be aspirational, outcomes specify what the end result will be, what will be different, and how we will tell. In short, an outcome – which I’ve also heard described as a “smart goal” – always answers the following question, “If we are successful, how will we know?”
Outcomes have the advantage of keeping you focused on action. When we think of goals, we tend to think forward. Here’s where I am; there’s where I want to go. Which sounds fine, except that at the out start you may have no clear idea of what you need to do differently to achieve that goal. With an outcome, however, you start at the end – the outcome – and think backwards: “If the end result (outcome) is going to be different, what will need to change?” Or, to focus it even more, “what is the prior step that will need to change in order to set up this outcome.” In fact, you can keep backing up all the way back to where you are now: “To get better grades, I’ll need to perform better on tests. And in order to perform better on tests, I’ll need to study more. And in order to study more, I’ll need to make time for studying by cutting down on watching T.V. and wasting time on Facebook.” Etc.
Because of the movement from a concrete and measurable outcome back to our current practice, this approach to life and work is sometimes called “backward design.” It’s also called “outcomes-based design” because your focus on the specific outcome – what will be different, how will we know we’re successful – directs you to concrete action.
Leaders, we are often told, are supposed to name inspirational goals and move their organizations – whether a team, business, family, or church – toward them. Too often, however, naming goals that are both aspirational and inspiration feels good but actually sets us up for failure. In order to create a different reality – what I would call the actual purpose of leadership – we need to translate our goals into specific, measurable outcomes that clearly define what will be different and suggest concrete and specific steps that will lead us to change what we’re actually doing, not just what we’re hoping for.
Post image: photo by Anthony Easton, via Flickr, CC 2.0.
So I was hearing these thoughts as I listened to the TED talk posted 10/8.