I’m not a big fan of SMART goals. For as long as I’ve been involved in goal and objective setting for myself and others, I’ve been advised that the right way to construct objectives is to make them SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound. None of this sounds bad on the surface, yet I recall in the early 2000’s making an impassioned plea to my VP at the time against SMART objectives, and I’ve brought up concerns (though less passionately) to other managers since. Why would I argue against such a widely accepted best practice?
Good intentions
There’s no question that there are good intentions and good concepts behind the idea that goals and objectives should be SMART. If you don’t make goals specific, you risk them being misinterpreted. If you don’t make them measurable, how will the person or team know if they are meeting their goals or not? If you don’t make them attainable, then the goals will tend to be de-motivational – which is the opposite of your intent. If they aren’t obviously relevant then people will feel like they are working on something that doesn’t matter – again de-motivational. As for time-bound, deadlines are known to improve focus.
The reality
In practice, what I tend to see coming out of the goal setting process is something that seems less than ideal. In a quest to make goals Specific and Measurable, I most often see goals that fail to express motivation and intent – the why behind the goal. Typical SMART goals instead tend to focus on a specific set of actions, a process, a how.
Even when a SMART goal is worded in way that seems outcome-focused and not process-focused – such as “Reports showing test case failures by functional area over time will be available on the intranet by May 2016” – the outcome listed is so specific that it leaves almost no room for flexibility to solve the underlying problem in a different way. It also leaves out the all-important reason for wanting to achieve the goal in the first place.
Perhaps in this case the underlying problem is that, to improve code quality, we want to identify which areas of the code should be targeted for refactoring or review. Or perhaps it’s to see how well pre-release test case failure metrics correlate with beta or post-release user bug reports in order to gain some insight into how well our tests cover functionality that is important to users. Depending on the problem that we’re really trying to solve, it’s likely that an intelligent knowledge worker will realize – sometime after goal setting – that there are better ways to solve the problem.
Things change. People learn and get new ideas that are better than the old ideas. As time progresses, even high level priorities often shift. As German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke famously said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy”.
If people were just better at writing goals
There is nothing about SMART goals that forces people to fall into the trap of focusing on a method for solving a problem instead of the problem itself. That said, I’m a firm believer that if most people can’t get something right, it’s not a people problem, it’s a process problem. The simple instruction to use SMART goals doesn’t seem to be serving us very well. It seems to me that we need something different and more effective.
Wise advice
I’m writing this article now because I was reminded of my dislike of SMART objectives recently while reading The Open Organization by Jim Whitehurst – the CEO of RedHat. He stated that you should “Tell your team members about a problem you are trying to solve” and “Create some space for your team to innovate by purposely leaving some ambiguity in your direction on a specific process or task”. Sage advice to my way of thinking – and quite different from the Specific and Measurable prescription in SMART.
I firmly believe that if you want to harness the intelligence and the inventiveness of your people, you need to give your people room to do what they think is best. Your job as a manager and leader is to help ensure that these decisions are informed decisions. It isn’t your job to dictate the best approach – or worse – to hold your people to a “commitment” they made that no longer makes sense.
What’s next?
So if SMART goals are counter-productive, what should you do instead?
First, I absolutely do believe that discussions around goals and objectives are useful. To quote General Dwight D. Eisenhower – another famous military figure – “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”. Do have regular discussions about goals at all levels of your organization – personal, team, department, business unit, and company. Discussing these higher level concepts helps to ensure that your company is aligned and the various departments and teams are not working at cross purposes. It improves the likelihood that your continuous improvement initiatives will lead to global optimizations, not just local optimizations. Discuss goals regularly and write them down.
Second, if you aren’t required to formulate SMART goals and objectives, focus instead on working with your people to identify what problems need to be solved. Ask for volunteers to take the lead (as individuals or teams) on solving the most important ones, and track progress against those. Provide people with the freedom to come up with innovative ideas to solve the identified problems and show appreciation for sincere and dedicated efforts and continued progress and determination.
Finally, if you’re a manager who is required to set SMART goals and objectives with your people, be sure to express the problem you’re trying to solve and to focus more on the why behind the objectives than on the specific plans themselves. Let your people know that when it comes time to evaluate, you’ll be looking not at adherence to the plan, but at the efforts, actions, and results with respect to these more fundamental goals. Be flexible if your people change their approaches – and encourage them to come to you if they feel that another problem has become more important and a shift in focus is required.