Three Pitfalls of Long-Term Goals
Setting long-term goals is a must in the business and personal efficiency world. But they rarely work as expected.
Strategy — map it out yourself
Setting long-term goals is a must in the business and personal efficiency world. But they rarely work as expected.
67%, or even up to 90%, strategies fail. Experts have written tons of books and articles on fixing the problem. But I know from my twenty-five years’ experience that strategic planning contains inner imperfections. And they make long-term goals hard to achieve. The good news is that you can improve your approach to planning.
Unachievable goals
Many years ago, I was a CEO. We had a strategy that I was proud of — with goals, objectives, action plans, KPIs, et cetera. It had only one flaw — it didn’t work. Our business outcomes were further from our goals than the North Pole is from the equator.
Then I tried to devise my life strategy, which turned out just as bad. I rigorously broke down my long-term goals into objectives and short-term projects, but it didn’t help much. And it happened not only because of unexpected external factors interference. Something was wrong with the tool itself. I looked at my MBA diploma hanging on my wall and thought I had missed something crucial as a student.
Then I became a strategic consultant and discovered that I was not the only one with such problems. Many CEOs complained that their long-term goals seemed to them distant stars, appealing but unattainable. Neither have I seen a person who reached their long-term targets without adjusting them many times along the way.
“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude,” said Maya Angelou, an American memoirist and civil rights activist. And that’s the approach we can employ to long-term goals to avoid common pitfalls.
Pitfall #1. The future is unpredictable
If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans
Woody Allen
The future is unpredictable because there is no evidence to the contrary (logic experts call it evidence of absence). Moreover, it doesn’t exist. It is not an episode of a series filmed but not yet uploaded to a streaming service.
Therefore, setting long-term goals is a futile attempt to make the uncertainty more predictable. But our good intentions don’t alter the fact that the universe is a highly complex system. And our ability to influence it is more limited than we believe. We can build plans, but the world has its own.
So, we may, or even should, set long-term goals. But we don’t have to take them too seriously. Setting our goals or even calculating them thoroughly doesn’t reduce uncertainty much. And this attitude will also help avoid pitfall #2.
Pitfall #2. A goal as a vow
Don’t give up. Disgrace yourself till the end
Popular joke from the internet
Characters of The Shawshank Redemption, Moneyball, and many other Hollywood movies are obsessed with their long-term goals. That’s why we love them so much and use them as role models. Such films and thousands of success stories books make us believe in a simple formula:
A dream — Consistency — Success
Dream big, chase your vision, and one day you’ll see your face on the Forbes cover.
Or you won't.
Common sense and life experience teach us that this doesn’t always work this way. We all have friends who dreamed, worked hard, and failed. It happens in the business world as well. The CEOs of MySpace, Nokia, Kodak, and Blockbuster were proactive and hardworking, but it didn’t help.
In our success-oriented world, it looks like a disgrace.
• When we set a life goal, it is a promise we make to ourselves
• When a CEO sets long-term targets for a company, they make a promise to the team, the shareholders, and the board.
So, if a goal hasn’t been achieved, it looks like a broken promise. But any objective is about the future, and the future is unpredictable. And failing to reach it is a part of your professional and personal life.
Moreover, every target is a choice:
• We choose what to do
• We choose what not to do
But when we stick to our goals, whatever it takes, we can miss many new opportunities. So, changing our long-term goals when necessary is not a shame but wisdom.
Pitfall #3. Goals vs. Daily Routine
This is the most dangerous pitfall.
Imagine you want your firm to enter the top 3 in the industry. What does your team need to do to reach it? They need to start doing some things differently than they did yesterday.
Employees need to change their daily routines to move the business towards its targets. But what exactly should they change? How? When?
Top executives usually break a big high-level target down into small tasks and objectives to solve this problem. But it rarely works for two reasons:
1. A firm is a too complicated system, and nobody can take everything into account. From my experience, something important is always missing.
2. New, unexpected factors interfere daily. And employees don’t know how to adjust their targets to the new circumstances.
So, however hard the top executive work, they can’t establish a clear cause-effect relationship between workers’ efforts and business outcomes.
I chose another tool, and it worked.
Focuses and priorities
There are two problems with goals:
1. Goals are about the future, but we all live in only one point of time — now. Thus, it is hard to connect your actions today with long-term goals.
2. The goal is about what one wants to achieve, but our daily routine comprises of actions, not results.
So, companies I work with don’t spend much time cascading the main targets into small tasks. Instead, they use focuses or priorities.
It’s easier to explain this approach using an example.
Let’s say your company decided to reach its goals by becoming a customer service leader. Priorities for employees may look as follows:
• A marketing manager priorities tasks related to collecting and improving customer experience metrics
• A customer service manager keeps in focus the idea that every customer request should be satisfied, whatever it takes
• A logistics manager priorities assignments related to fast orders delivery
If you are a big fan of KPIs, you can connect them to the priorities, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Every employee can have no more than three focuses at a time. These priorities must be in line with the strategy.
The difference between the top-down planning system and focuses is that the former implies rigid goal-setting. Managers believe they know better and tell subordinates what to do. Moreover, when the targets are rigid, employees try to achieve them even when it brings more harm than good to the business. They know their bosses will grade their performance on indicators at the next business review. Will they prioritize customer satisfaction? I don’t think so. Instead, they will concentrate on their performance bonuses.
This avenue also can’t establish a clear cause-effect relationship between workers’ efforts and business outcomes. It is harder to manage than a system in which KPIs are the primary tool. But it leaves your employees more space to find a way to do their job better.
Moreover, priorities help them make their daily decisions better than KPIs.
For example:
An employee responsible for customer delivery has a KPI — an average delivery time. Her bosses expect it to be as short as possible because fast delivery raises customer satisfaction.
But then a client requiring special delivery conditions calls. The employee knows that taking the order will lower her indicators, and it will be hard for her to make decisions. But if customer satisfaction is her priority, she won’t think twice.
Life strategy
I use the same approach for my life strategy. I have long-term goals, but in my everyday routine, I rather follow my priorities than short-term goals. Of course, it doesn’t guarantee that I will reach my targets as they are. But it definitely helps move in the proper direction.
Conclusion
• Don’t expect that your long-term goals will be met as they are now. Chances are you’ll fail to hit them or change them along the way.
• Don’t take long-term goals too seriously. They exist for us, but we don’t exist for them. They are not obligations.
• Use priorities instead of goals for your daily tasks wherever it is possible. It doesn’t negate KPIs. You can use them, for instance, to compare your current performance rate with the past one. But don’t replace strategic focus with KPIs.