The festive time is upon us – it's the start of a new year, and if you work in the business world, you're probably being asked to create some SMART goals. Even you refugees who have fled the flood tide of corporate banality – perhaps hoping to find dry land (not to mention a sense of purpose and immediacy) among smaller, more agile organizations – yes, even those of you who have traded your 15-year inflation-adjusted salaries and lifetime security for a beer fridge, mix deck, face time with the CEO, and some speculative equity in a startup – even you have been shocked to discover that here, too, the goals have followed. You just wanted to do good work, but there is no escaping the SMART goals.
What is a SMART goal?
In today's corporate ecosystem, SMART goals have successfully outcompeted other memes of management philosophy and are now the undisputed dominant species in their niche. Like many invasive species, they have no natural predators and possess particular traits which allow them to reproduce quickly while exhausting – and eventually destroying – the resources of their host environment.
Since its invention by a criminally malicious consultant in 1981, the SMART methodology has been adapted by companies big and small to fit their needs. If you have never attempted to set a 12 month goal based on a 6th-grade acrostic poem, here is how you do it:
A goal should be:
- Specific: a clear definition of what is to be achieved
- Measurable: with quantifiable metrics to show whether the goal has been achieved or not (alternative: motivating)
- Achievable: the goal is something within your power to enact (alternative: assignable [editor's note: this early appearance of the concept of delegation may be interesting for future archaeologists of the capitalist state's ultimate demise])
- Relevant: the goal is connected to your role and is aligned to the overall goals of your department
- Time-bound: you commit to achieve the goal by a certain point.
Why are SMART goals popular?
Why do SMART goals flourish while other biosimilar memes go extinct one after another? It's simple: SMART goals provide managers with the illusion of control.
With SMART goals, your manager is comfortably encased (or perhaps entombed) in the fiction that all of your team's individual goals add up to the manager's overarching goal. That the whole is exactly equal to the sum of its parts. That a year of your professional life has been foreseen, monitored, quantified, and judged. SMART goals equip your manager with the tools to guide your daily existence. How is that KPI going? What's your percentage completion on the project? Are you on track to deliver under budget and before deadline?
As your career advances, and you are gently ushered ever deeper into the bowels of the corporate beast which has ingested you, SMART goals only become more important – not only a key to progress but a necessity for survival. They are a life raft in the acidic and enzymatic sea upon which you now find yourself. And as you will discover, their greatest promise is not to facilitate success, but to camouflage mediocrity.
What's wrong with SMART goals?
If SMART goals find such universal deployment in the business world, doesn't this show they are useful? Surely 30 trillion dollars of market capitalization can't be wrong. Indeed, haven't many of us suffered from exactly the opposite problem – having a role whose expectations and accountabilities are only nebulously defined? Isn't it better to have a SMART goal than one which is vague and indeterminable? Without clear goals, don't we risk living professional lives which are unmoored and chaotic?
The reality is that in most jobs, you will not make measurable progress toward an annual goal on a day-to-day level. And while you hope that the aggregate of your daily work will somehow equate to the annual goal, this daily work is not defined as part of the goal.
Here we see the most insidious side of annual goals: not only are they irrelevant to your day-to-day experience of work, but the things you actually do spend your time on each day are not recognized and weighted toward your performance review, salary and bonus, promotion potential, and so on. Even worse, it is quite likely that, because the world is a dynamic place, the company's priorities will shift over the next 12 months, and your painstakingly documented original goals will become sadly irrelevant. There is a fundamental disconnect, and this is a recipe for professional despondency.
Why not set the goals with shorter time horizons? you may be asking. After all, you could set goals for each quarter, or each month, or even each week! In fact, this idea has already been widely embraced, principally in the tech industry. Corporate anthropologists are not sure exactly where and when the Sprint methodology emerged or whether it arose independently of SMART goals, but like the mitochondria inside each of your cells, it is now generally agreed that the two exist in a symbiotic relationship whose ultimate form may very well be continuous goal setting on a daily or even hourly basis.
Stay tuned, and meanwhile, try this thought experiment: If we set a target and reach it early, we don't just stop – we keep pushing ahead. Conversely, if we set a target and don't reach it on time despite trying our best, we usually don't go out of business and the standard response is to reevaluate staffing or goal setting. In either case, of what use was the target?
Let's also admit here that individual goals, no matter how carefully crafted, do not add up to the overall success of a company. This is because goals which require specific and measurable results tend to make people focus on outputs rather than outcomes.
What's the difference? An output-focused worker is trying to hit their KPI for producing something. An outcome-focused worker is trying to bring a desirable situation into reality. Outputs are easily measured, while outcomes – despite being the more relevant assessment of business success – are difficult to quantify. The darkest covenant of SMART goals is the lie that the aggregation of every worker's outputs will somehow turn into a successful outcome for the business. But it doesn't work that way.
This is also why your professional circle is likely filled with colleagues who appear terminally infected with the “that's not my job” mentality. As we all focus on achieving our own specific targets, we refuse opportunities to pool our competencies, smooth out demand spikes, and succeed together. We neglect the most important factor in a company's survival: the morale, resiliency, and trust of its employees.
What would be better?
Most people who have worked in a role for a few years have developed the skills to do their job well and the professional judgment to make independent decisions in their area. Instead of holding workers to goals which have little bearing on day-to-day activity and are often outdated after only a few months, managers should ask workers what they think needs to be done to reach the shared outcome for the company.
Employees are the front line of the business battle. They don’t need you to tell them how many bullets to shoot. They need you to tell them which hill to take.
Imagine: instead of an annual SMART goal (or quarterly, or daily), workers could come to work each day with a good faith perspective on making the best contribution they can. A mantra, if you like. This could go something like this:
“While I can't predict what this day will bring, I will meet each challenge by applying the skills I have, and develop new skills to meet new challenges. I will consult with my manager on the priorities which make the most sense to give my attention to. I will use my experience and judgment to make decisions in my area of autonomy which are in the best interests of the company and our customers. I will support my teammates, share information, champion others in their endeavors, and contribute a positive attitude. And I will keep a mindset of flexibility and adaptability so that I can embrace new opportunities when the time is right.”
You will notice that while these statements are specific in their intent, they are not particularly measurable. And yet, as a commitment for how you will spend the next 8 hours of your professional life, it is hard to imagine better. Rather than being locked into narrow metrics, you are empowered to use the skills which you have honed over the years to make decisions, change course when needed, and focus on what matters.
Perhaps you have contemplated this also. Perhaps you have felt the meager warmth of this first spark and wondered if it might one day blossom into a cleansing fire. Let's get rid of SMART goals and start making the most of our greatest asset: the fundamental desire of every human being to have dignity and purpose in their work.