While I am a personal advocate of goal setting, I've thought hard and deep about an instructive piece of research by Max Bazerman and colleagues on goal setting that goes bad. Although the research focuses on the relationship between leaders and their organizations, the research obviously applies to personal career development.
The study contains numerous examples of goals gone wild, and includes overcharging by Sears mechanics, Enron's commission program for traders, and Ford's small Pinto, a car that was found to have dysfunctional engineering that caused it to ignite on collision.
The research finds that performance goal setting is fairly easy to implement, easy to measure, and easy to document successes. But it also can readily result in undesired results. Indeed, good people, people with the best of intentions, focus so much on a stretch goal that they engage in excessive risk-taking, and on occasion, unethical behavior.
Although focus is always necessary for personal success, what the research emphasizes is that when people focus on a specific stretch goal, they often fail to perform other valued activities that are needed by the organization. So on occasion, the goal can do more harm than good.
What was most intriguing to me were the recommendations regarding goal setting. Bazerman suggests that learning or mastery goals more readily lead to better effects than performance goals. He provides us with an excellent analogy for thinking through our personal goal-setting processes.
Just as doctors prescribe drugs selectively, mindful of interactions and adverse reactions, so too should managers carefully prescribe goals. To do so, managers must consider. . . the complex interplay between goal setting and organizational contexts, as well as the need for safeguards and monitoring.
That conclusion applies just as readily to our own career goal setting as to organizational goals.
One of the firms I've consulted with for years mixes performance and learning goals for yearly objectives. We've found that though performance measures can be straightforward, mastery and learning goals need more support. The organization is very good about helping in learning goals, but they actually take more insight and commitment to implement. Over the long-term, however, the organizational leaders have also found that learning goals are more useful for the development of the firm's business. That applies to our own careers. Sure, we need measurable performance goals, but businesspeople who focus on mastery goals find that employability is rarely a problem and that opportunities often present themselves as a result of mastery-initiated successes.