Why Employee Goals Suck

by Seth Brown

“The Master’s power is like this. He lets all things come and go effortlessly, without desire. He never expects results; thus he is never disappointed. He is never disappointed; thus his spirit never grows old.” — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Everyone has been through the hollow ritual before. You sit down with your manager at your annual review and write down a bunch of goals. These concise, measurable objectives are dutifully recorded and put in your employee file so that a year from now they can re-emerge like a revelatory time capsule to shed the light of judgement on your past performance. You might even have an arbitrary number of goals you’re supposed to have, say five, or subsets of goals neatly outlined on an important looking form with titles like “Professional Attribute Goals” and “Business Impact Goals”. Everyone gets the same goal forms to fill out, and each year, the same onerous ritual is observed. Below each goal ‘statement’ is a line to write in the measurable, quantitative unit test by which future you will know whether you’ve met your goals or not.

Goals aren’t inherently bad. After all, a goal is simply a desired result or the destination of a journey. What could be more quintessentially human? Why heap invective on such a benign and natural part of being human? I contend that employee goals that take the pernicious annual, bi-annual or quarterly review format are a waste of effort, and, worse yet, they impede freedom, efficiency, flexibility, dignity, and, basically, all that’s good. Let me explain.

Why goals aren’t so S.M.A.R.T.

Most people have heard by now that good goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Most employee annual reviews last one to two hours, and maybe if both manager and employee are fantastic they put in 2–3 hours of preparation. In reality, though, an overwrought manager, jumping from one meeting to the next, will look at their schedule and realize, ‘Okay, time to do goals for Joe. What does Joe do again?’ about 2 min before the meeting starts. (For this reason, I think conversations are better than goal setting exercises for employee reviews, but I digress.)

Let’s start with specific. Specific usually means the goal needs to be tactical. Why tactical? Well, strategy — as distinct from tactics — is difficult. Strategy should be both simple and brilliant. Both simplicity and brilliance are hard. Strategy should take into account the entire picture of an organization, not just an individual. Strategy should be razor sharp and closer to a guiding principle than a tactic. Tactics are specific measurable actions taken in a timely manner to achieve an immediate end. Tactics are ephemeral. Typical employee goals are more like tactics than strategy, but they're rarely conceived of in the context of a broader strategy. So, what often happens is someone ends up listing a tactical “task” that won’t take that long to complete outside of the context of the organization’s strategy. Because tactics are ephemeral, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to wait a year before revisiting them.

What about measurable? Often the most important things my employees need to work on are soft skills. For instance, let’s say a technically superb project manager who crafts fastidious Gannt charts and can decompose technical requirements with the best of her developers needs to focus on being more decisive and succinct in her spoken communication, as well as to be less soft-spoken. That doesn’t seem easy to measure, but it’s still vital. Requiring everything to be quantitative and measurable eliminates many soft skill goals. Slow down your speech 20% and use 20% fewer words to say 20% more, while being 50% more decisive. “Okay, I'll get right on that.” To me this type of “goal” should fall into the category of ongoing feedback and dialogue. A good manager should be a feedback loop for their employees, gently nudging them in the direction they need to go, but not being overly prescriptive.

What about attainable, and realistic? Good goals should stretch a person. When you sit down once a year to reel off 5 or 6 goals for the coming year, are you really able to consider how something could both stretch you to the point of discomfort and still be attainable and realistic? In pedagogy, this is the kind of thing that professors and teachers perfect over the course of a lifetime iterating on a single course for a single subject. A great course must stretch the students to discomfort, while ensuring that most will finish. Too attainable and realistic, the course is boring. Too much of a stretch, the course loses the students. And there’s one hour for you and your manager to figure out 5 to 6 of these?

Autonomy and Competence

“Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor

The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov tries to convince Christ, who has paid an unexpected visit to medieval Spain, that the gift of freedom was a huge mistake and that human beings desire to be fed and directed more than they desire free will. Christ famously responds by not saying a word and, in the end, simply kissing the Inquisitor’s brow and walking away, leaving him the gift of existential freedom he so despises. To me employee goals are the managers way of stripping their employees of both the burden and gift of autonomy. Goals stem from a well-meaning but anachronistic version of carrot/stick style management that doesn’t trust the employee to make the right decisions unless steered. That’s fine if your employee is a teenager, but our employees are grown men and women who somehow have guided their own lives and choices to the point where they’ve successfully gotten a job at my company, Lullabot. To me, that means a lot. In their blog Signal vs. Noise, the 37 Signals crew wrote:

When you’re hiring, seek out people who are managers of one. What’s that mean? A manager of one is someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc. — but they do it by themselves and for themselves.

As a manager, we hire people to competently execute on the things we, as a team, can no longer get done given our other roles and responsibilities. I trust the people we hire to do those things. Why should I try to prescribe the manner in which these things are done? We're discussing professionals, not students. These people know how to learn on their own, and set goals for themselves, or they wouldn't be at Lullabot.

Goals Create Lock-in

At the end of the day, my company’s client services business exists and succeeds because people put hours into projects, which clients in turn pay for. We don't always know what those projects will be but we have a great sales team, and some solid principles around how they're selected. Still, no amount of estimation and sales effort will make something as fundamentally complex as a software project predictable. Goals create lock-in. Tactical goals are brittle, subject to break under the capricious twists and turns of time and commerce inherent in software development. Tactics need be fluid, subject to the changing chess board of reality. Giving them an arbitrary one-year or one-quarter shelf life in someone’s HR file is spurious. For instance, let’s say my quarterly goals are to finish a Coursera course, work on a continuous integration system I’ve been developing to add CSS regression tests, and to complete an Angular.js single page app as a learning opportunity. These goals may have to go on the back burner if a particular project demands it. In that scenario—and given that time is a scarce resource—not completing your goals and doing what the project requires may be the best thing for the health of the company. But I still have those pesky goals hanging over me and providing the benchmark upon which the company will take my measure. Or, what if I start the Coursera course on Python, and quickly realize my time would be better spent learning Go so I can rewrite my continuous integration system. These pivots shouldn’t be an issue. If a goal no longer makes strategic sense it should be immediately discarded. Goals created in hour-long annual review sessions tend to be tactical not strategic, and, if they’re measurable and timely, they are also fundamentally prescriptive.

The Journey’s The Thing

Just as many software development companies have abandoned the conceit that we can predict the future and abandoned Waterfall development in favor of Agile, we should shift our focus from annual goals to adaptable processes. Good time management processes that allow for flexibility like Mark Forster’s Do It Tomorrow will do more for an employee than a six-page annual review summary enumerating a bunch of overly prescriptive tactical goals. Spend time with your employees, provide gentle, unflinching and authentic feedback. Let your core values be the compass your employee uses in the field to navigate their own path. It’s not your job to prescribe the path for them with a bunch of hastily wrought, ill-begotten tactics that represent the right thing to do based on a snapshot of the terrain at a particular moment in time. It’s a waste of time for the manager and a waste of time for the employee. Furthermore, it infringes on the employee’s autonomy, flexibility, and development. Give your employee’s a figurative kiss on the brow and compassionately leave them to find their own way unsaddled by annual goals.

illustration by Justin Harrell