American View: Why SMART Goals are Great, But Work Better When They’re DUMB

Management

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. I hope, for your sake, that you’ve avoided the usual horrific relationship blunders that traditionally mar this holiday like forgetting to buy your sweetheart flowers … or buying them the wrong flowers … or forgetting to include a personalized card with your flowers … or giving them gifts like wine and/or chocolate without flowers. All ill-advised choices that demonstrate how miserably inept you are and why you should be dumped. On a totally unrelated note, I’d like to thank this week sponsor, Emotional Blackmail Florists of 13 Eyre St Hill, London. [1] If you’re thinking, “Hey! That sounds like bias in favour of a specific outcome,” you’re right! I’ve found Valentine’s Day to be one of the (if not the) most annoying holidays of the year. No matter what you choose to do for your significant other on VD, you always get it wrong.

No matter how thoughtful, well-reasoned, timely, or insightful your plans are, you’ll discover – too late – that you’ve blown it, and must wait a year to try again, all the while working off a black mark. In that respect, Valentine’s Day is exactly like annual performance goal setting time: every year, workers struggle to craft intelligent, comprehensive, and (most important) achievable goals that their supervisor will accept and use responsibly to measure their subordinate’s worthiness for the next 12 months. If a worker succeeds in writing goals that they can reasonably pull off, they’ll be in prime position in the following year to score a promotion, pay rise, or even a big honking bonus.

There’s huge pressure to predict the unknowable future and accurately prognosticate what activities should be realistic in a fluid, chaotic, and barmy office environment. If they blow it … Just like with trying to plan a dramatic romantic surprise in the dead of winter, most everyone learns only too late that their guesses about what would make the biggest positive impact were wildly off base and/or that they’ve inadvertently done something horribly wrong that retroactively invalidated everything that they’d done right. No smooches for a Valentine’s Day failure, no bonus for a goal crafting failure. Bad luck; enjoy being miserable for another year. You’d think this wouldn’t be necessary.

Once a person has come to know their significant other, they should be able to accurately predict what their partner likes, dislikes, and responds well to. Likewise, once a worker knows their job, they should be able to predict what elements of their work will have the most meaning to their organisation and to their supervisor. By five years in, this should be a straightforward process. By ten years, it should be easy. And yet … it never is.

No one looks forward to this season; the universal reaction to “annual goal setting time” is a weary sigh and the phrase “*@#&$, not THIS again.

The first major obstacle to this process is that supervisors frequently misunderstand what “goals” are. Goals are not performance standards.

Performance standards are what most workers need to be evaluated against. For example, a Help Desk tech should be graded on their customer service skills, troubleshooting expertise, and problem-solving ability. Those are not “goals.” They’re success thresholds that need to be consistently met or surpassed, not one-time achievements. That’s why the annual obsession with “goals” is counterproductive; just as a Grand Romantic Gesture™ on Valentine’s Dare supplements a long term healthy romantic relationship; a one-time gesture doesn’t replace long term respect, support, or affection.

A job goal like “get the XYZ certification” isn’t a meaningful substitute for sustained performance over a year’s time. Still, managers worldwide are obsessed with “goal writing” instead of performance standard because an isolated, singular goal is much easier to evaluate. There’s nothing subjective or nuanced about a context-less, one-time, binary objective. The worker either does it or doesn’t. Check the box and move on. What makes the goal setting process doubly frustrating is that most modern organisations employ the same set of universal best practices for structuring their workers’ goals. Ever since George Doran first published the article “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management’s Goals and Objectives” in 1981, organisations worldwide have gleefully embraced the “SMART goals” system. Taken for what it was, Doran’s creation was a godsend for supervisors; it codified and clarified how to write effective goals. Not performance standards, mind; just singular goals. If you’re not familiar with the model … How I envy you!

Per this lovely summary from Project Smart, the original disco era version of the SMART system was to ensure that every performance goal met five criteria (I’m paraphrasing their article, by the way):

· Specific: the goal must target a specific area for improvement.

· Measurable: find a way to quantify the goal or otherwise set a way to measure progress

· Assignable: specify who will do the work that counts for the goal.

· Realistic: state what results can realistically be achieved given available resources.

· Time-related: specify when the desired result can be fully achieved (assuming everything goes as planned).

A decent example of a SMART goal done right would read like this: “No later than 15th August 2023, Jane Smith will design, document, and publish a new procedure for configuring executive laptops for the French office and teach the new process to all Help Desk staff in Leon.” You have the who, the what, and the when (which can all be measures and tracked), while ignoring the how and the why (which can’t).

In 99% of cases, the “why” behind every annual goal is “because HR said we’re required to come up with something.” Be careful delving any deeper into the subject … The more you question why you’re at work, the closer you get to triggering the epiphany that you’re a meaningless cog in a fabric-walled

My first encounter with the SMART system came in the Army in the early 1990s when a new colonel attempted to apply it to our Officer Evaluation Reports. The colonel’s idea didn’t work, but not for lack of effort; the OER process wasn’t flexible enough to make SMART goals work. I ran into the SMART system again after I mustered off active duty and joined a consulting firm; the shiny suits running the American arm were obsessed with “extracting maximum sustainable value” from the system (just like they did with everything else). Looking back, every organisation I’ve worked for has employed some version of the SMART system. It’s how things are done now. That’s not just my experience; my mates in other companies come to me every January for advice on how to craft effective SMART goals. I tend to always give them the same advice:

Understand that these are one-time tasks. Business-as-usual goals don’t require a “Specific area for improvement.” Steady state means that you’re delivering your work on time, on target. changing your performance standards to be more difficult just for the sake of having a new goal is sabotaging yourself. Your goals should complement your performance standards, not undermine them.
Goals are rarely ever compatible with long-term or subjective measurement. When bosses attempt to force a Measurement component onto an activity that’s qualitative (e.g., “deliver effective service”) rather than quantitative (e.g., within ten minutes”), the natural impulse is to sacrifice what matters for meeting an arbitrary metric.
Fight back against goals where the Assigned part depends on someone upstream in a process that you can’t control.Such a goal allows another person or workgroup to tank your performance rating and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Any goal that requires an unproven new technology, future hire, or untested process to deliver the goal’s results is not “Realistic.” Run!
Finally, deadlines assume that nothing unexpected will interrupt a goal’s timeline. Time-related goals must be flexible so they can change as the world changes. After all, your boss’s boss’s boss doesn’t’ know (or care!) what your goals are. When they interrupt your day with a “critical project,” that’s what you’re going to work on. Your goals then go unfulfilled … that’s normal. Plan for it.

To re-cap: the SMART goals system is an excellent way to write goals. That said, it’s neither intended to nor suitable for writing occupational performance standards. That’s not a failure of the SMART system, any more than being unable to fly is a design failure for an anvil. Ain’t what it was made for, bud.

Just like us, an anvil only finds purpose in its existence when it’s getting hammered.

I’m with Duran on this: if you’re going to make people set goals, then make them SMART goals. That’s fine. I do, however, recommend customising the SMART goals system to mitigate its inherent weaknesses. As such, I believe that organisations would benefit from expanding the SMART system to include a DUMB component. In my proposed model:

· Every goal must be Dismissible once circumstances change such that it can no longer be accomplished. Suppliers fail to deliver. Products leave the market. Standards change. When your goal depends on external elements that unexpectedly vanish, the goal needs to vanish along with it … or, if possible, be measured only up to the point where the endeavour became nonviable. It isn’t fair or useful to hold people “accountable” for factors outside of their control.

· No goal should be allowed unless the goal is demonstrably Useful. I’ve seen far too many SMART goals that were written solely for the sake of having a goal to measure, not because they added any value to the organisation. Like when a boss increases a production quota even though the additional output doesn’t help anyone. All goals must, I believe, be worth doing on their own even if they’re not tied to an HR process.

· Every goal must be Mature in its construction, design, execution, and evaluation. That is to say, the work and its results must be crafted considering how people and groups really behave, not based on some business school theory about how all workers are totally obedient, emotionless, machines. Remember: publishing a new process doesn’t mean that anyone will follow said process unless the new process is enforced by management.

· Finally, every goal must be Benign in nature. By that, I mean that a goal that will harm some other worker, process, or output – actively or passively – must not be allowed. Far too often, I see bosses insisting on imposing “goals” that would degrade an existing process by implementing unnecessary tracking, delays, or administration just to that “evidence” can be collected to support evaluating the goal owner’s work performance.

Think of the DUMB component as the protective scabbard that protects both the wielder and everyone else from the potential sharp edged of the SMART sword. A good SMART goal is meant to be a useful tool, not an impediment or a threat. My goals shouldn’t inadvertently hurt you while I’m pursuing them, and vice versa. Lastly, remember that performance standards and goals can happily coexist and even support one another. They’re two markedly different tools, not interchangeable terms.

Write standards that define how a worker is to perform their job all year; write goals that will deliver useful improvements … if there’s time. This is the same model that wise adults apply to Valentine’s Day: you strengthen a relationship by demonstrating respect, affection, and adoration for your partner all year long, deepening your connections. That’s a performance standard. The Grand Romantic Gesture on one arbitrary day of the year is a goal for entertainment’s sake … a box checking exercise, just so you can say you did it … but the quality, timing, or expense of the one-time teddy-bear-and-champagne what-not doesn’t determine whether you’ll be spending the night in the doghouse.

[1] I’m pulling your leg. I’ve never had sponsors for this column. Also, that address belongs to a gastropub, not a florist. I searched for “London pubs that serve tacos” and this place came up. Is it any good? I have no idea. Try it and let me know.

Improving Business Performance