Thought Leadership

Last week’s article was late.  Having missed our agreed upon Friday deadline, I could have easily apologised to Ali (my brilliant and very lovely business partner), enjoyed my weekend and moved on.

However, with the deadline no longer a factor, I discovered that I didn’t want to take that course of action.  And this reminded me of one of the many reasons I have a strong dislike for SMART goal setting.

Let’s look at writing a weekly article through the lens of SMART.

At first glance this is a perfect activity for a SMART goal.  It’s a task that is specific – write an article. Measurable – the article must be 1000 words or less on a topic related to coaching. Achievable – a week is more than enough time and Ali and I are both happy with writing. Relevant – we care about giving value and a weekly article helps us to do this and is good for our business.  Time bound – published weekly on a Friday.

Nothing could be more beautiful for a SMART goal setter.

However, having had a week to write an article and not producing one, I then managed to write a passable one (I’ll leave you to judge its quality) over a weekend whilst I was away visiting friends.

Did I just write any old thing that came to mind?  No.

Something else had shifted.

I now had choice.

I was now tapping into something beyond the external factor of meeting a deadline.

And herein lies a critical issue with SMART goal setting.

It messes with a crucial factor for well-being and optimal human function, namely our autonomy, which is one of three central components of self-determination theory.

Motivation and Autonomy

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, posits that optimal human functioning and motivation depend on fulfilling three innate psychological needs: ‘autonomy’ (control over our actions), ‘competence’ (feeling that we have mastery of skills), and relatedness (meaningful social connections).

SMART goal setting particularly inhibits autonomy because it introduces an external measure of success and failure and, when used in organisations, comes with an implied or explicit reward/punishment outcome.  This then becomes the external motivation for our actions; but only if the consequences, negative or positive, are significant enough to drive our behaviour.

Don’t get me wrong, it works and goals are important – they provide direction to your actions.  But the externalisation means that you now feel that you have to work on the goal, rather than that you want to.

This isn’t autonomy.  It’s how you treat children before they have sufficient emotional regulation, self-awareness and self-control to manage their own behaviour and internalise their motivation to behave as functional members of your family and society.

As a leader, you should be particularly concerned about this, because the system of SMART goals, annual appraisals, performance related pay, bonuses and performance improvement measures are imposed on employees and crowd out intrinsic motivational drivers in favour of compliance and transactional ‘sticks and carrots’.

In fact, you are treating your colleagues as children, driving and controlling their behaviour through a system of rewards and ‘punishment’.

You say you want employees that are ‘engaged’.  Engagement for most companies means creative, enthusiastic colleagues that use their initiative, are self-motivated to do an excellent job, preferably with a large dollop of discretionary effort.

These behaviours in the workplace come from adults being treated as adults and that means changing the way you set goals and manage performance so that individuals are empowered and able to exercise choice about how they work.

Returning to autonomy and internal drivers

Unlike my article writing dilemma, what I’ve just described are a series of systemic issues that won’t be solved by you reading this.  Although I hope it may get you thinking, I know this level of change is complex and challenging.  But there are things that you can do within the system to reduce the impact and increase your colleagues’ autonomy.

Make goals meaningful

Although Ali and I don’t use SMART goal setting, and you may not either.  It’s still easy for tasks and their related goals to become transactional.  This is definitely the case with writing the weekly articles, which I hadn’t even thought of as a goal.  If I had I would have approached it very differently.

At the heart of the way that Ali and I set goals is understanding why the goal is important and meaningful to us individually and how it connects to our personal values.

It’s easy to see how that might apply to our overall goal of growing our business, but less easy when it comes to individual tasks, like writing a weekly article.

This will be true for many, if not all, your colleagues.  The goals that are set with them don’t necessarily have an obvious personal element that gives them meaning.

It’s worth exploring this with team members when goal setting to support them finding and internalising ways that the goal can be meaningful to them.

This then enables them to focus on their intrinsic motivation for the goal and diminishes the effective of the external reward (or negative consequences).

This was the key to me discovering a newfound motivation for writing last week’s article.  For a whole host of reasons, I had lost track of the meaning behind the task and how it enabled me to live out of my values.  When I reconnected to that, I was freer to engage with the writing.

Empower the how

Wherever possible foster an environment of autonomy where you create criteria for success with individuals and then empower them to decide how they will achieve those success criteria.

When the how must be specific and can’t be in the individual’s control, discuss it and explain why.  Provide an opportunity for them to share thoughts about ways to improve your version or ways that they can make it their own.

Celebrate initiative, even when outcomes aren’t perfect

As leaders, we’ve all been there.  An employee comes us with an idea or takes the initiative and it’s less than brilliant or the outcome is a total failure.

It’s essential to celebrate initiative and explore the outcome in an ‘us against the problem’ way, not a, ‘what you need to learn from this’ way.

Try to use impersonal language, ‘what happened here?’, ‘what was the main issue?’, ‘what could be done differently next time?’ before moving to personal learning.

Support individuals to value their personal strengths and contributions

Finally, in discussions about goals, tasks and organisational activities, ask individuals to identify the personal strengths they think they will be using and the contribution they will be making.

Encourage them to be bold in their assertions about what skills and strengths they have and discourage language that negates their abilities.  This is very difficult for people to do, especially in the UK where we find it incredibly hard to own our excellence.  Remind someone who is struggling that saying that something is a strength of theirs isn’t the same as them saying they think they are the best at it, or that they don’t need to improve.  It’s ok to own it.

Of course, what I really want to do is challenge you to let go of traditional ways of leading and managing and start to develop a coaching culture within your organisation. You will never see the full, incredible and glorious manifestation of human beings working at their most brilliant without relinquishing control and changing the way you provide direction, set goals and foster high performance.