Setting objectives that are meaningful
This is my 50th post and there are two weeks left to fulfill my 2024 New Year’s Resolution to publish every week for a year. After fifty posts it feels apposite to consider the power (or potential power) of objectives and how they can drive us towards to achieving goals that are important to us. I also want to challenge some of the orthodoxy around objectives and why they might not be very effective.
Firstly, why do we need objectives? We may from time-to-time stumble into a routine that feels good and leads to good outcomes. But it is hard to place reliance on this method of development that relies heavily on luck. At their foundation, objectives are signposts towards an outcome that is perceived to be beneficial or at least better than the alternatives. The act of writing objectives down crystalizes them in our conscious mind in the moment, but perhaps more importantly allows them to live somewhere in our memory or sub-conscious, and to be drawn upon when needed to check that we are heading in the right direction. Socializing and sharing objectives with others gives them an existence separate from ourselves and helps to reinforce and support them. Above all else, objectives should be motivating, which in turn makes their achievement more likely. If an objective doesn’t motivate you, then it’s probably time to choose a different objective.
Objectives allow others to understand what to expect from us. What are we striving for and what do we want to achieve? For employers this is important as it can be aligned with company objectives and used as a baseline to assess performance. Within personal relationships they can reveal compatibility. This doesn’t mean a couple’s objectives need to be the same, as different objectives can happily co-exist and help reinforce the relationship. But objectives shouldn’t be in direct conflict, and if they are, perhaps this is why things aren’t running as smoothly as you hoped.
The idea for this blog came from a mentoring relationship and the thought that my experiences and thoughts may be useful to others as they navigate their careers. To use current business jargon, it was an attempt to scale up from a 1:1 conversation to one-to-many conversation. When thinking through the idea I realized that to feel successful at the end of this project I would need to achieve certain outcomes, and to achieve those outcomes, I would need to approach the task in a specific way. To build an audience, I decided to publish the blog on Substack, promote it on LinkedIn and publish a post every week. The decision to publish weekly transformed the project into the challenge it has become. At the time I had no experience of publishing. I was making a commitment without a full appreciation of what that entailed. Looking back now, my commitment is what brings me the most satisfaction. I have published through busy times, vacation, illness and not missed a week. Substack emails me every Monday to inform me of how many consecutive weeks I have published and what percentile that is of their authors using their service (better than 94% since you asked). It is the feedback, both from Substack’s stats and more importantly from readers that has provided the greatest motivation through the year.
There are two moments in my life where I can look back on a challenging, and entirely optional, personal objective that I went onto complete. This blog is one of those moments and the other one was running the London Marathon at the age of 29. Optional goals hit differently when you complete them. They are usually dependent on hard work and dedication rather than luck. Neither this blog nor the running the marathon in 4 hours 51 minutes (a full 2 hours and 51 minutes off world record pace) netted me any additional money, the reward was solely in the doing and the experience. These challenges changed me. At the superficial level I can take full ownership of the achievement by stating proudly “I ran a marathon” and join the club of individuals that have challenged their bodies over the distance that killed the original Athenian courier from Greek legend. At a deeper level I pushed through the mental inhibitions that exist when you confront something you haven’t done before. When I got to mile 20 of the marathon I started crying. The emotion came to the surface suddenly and took me by surprise. It was triggered by being overwhelmed by my thoughts, and the primary cause was the knowledge that even if I injured myself, I would be able to walk the remaining 6.2 miles and complete the challenge. Thankfully I didn’t injure myself and ran the whole distance. I was wearing an Apple iPod Shuffle (original model) during the event and had an 8-hour playlist on random. That day, as if the universe was willing me on, the Shuffle was perfectly in tune with my mood. I started the marathon listening to Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack that put me in a determined and focused mood. After my emotional outburst, the shuffle picked out Annie I’m Not Your Daddy by King Creole and the Coconuts. I went from crying with joy, to laughing with joy as I hit the Embankment and the long home straight.
With all of this personal exposition out of the way, how should we shape our objectives for maximum impact? The old orthodoxy of SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely) should be dropped as the well-intentioned garbage it is. If you are that specific in your objectives you will either make them so easy that you have probably already banked them, or they will be out-of-date a few months into the year because circumstances have changed. The only SMART objective should be the financial objectives of your business unit. Out of habit I tend to include these as objectives, but the numbers on their own don’t really say what I intend to do to achieve them.
Objectives themselves can be output objectives, performance objectives or career objectives. More simply put what do you want to achieve, how do you want to achieve it and what do you need to do to move to the next stage in your career? Different companies have different opinions on the relative merits of these. I really like the idea of performance objectives. No one ever writes a performance objective that says “I intend to muscle my way past my colleagues, and position myself so that the projects I am working on are prioritized above everyone else’s even if they are less important”. Yet this behavior and other similarly disruptive practices can be observed in most workplaces and may be encouraged if the focus is purely on output objectives. The performance objectives help establish the culture you want in your company. Regardless of which objectives you want to set yourself or which objectives your company insist that you use, make them a source of motivation. If you have always struggled on a particular task, then either craft objectives that enable you to achieve your goals whilst avoiding this area (i.e. leveraging support from experts) or make it your objective to tackle these areas head on and turn a weakness into a strength. Read through your objectives and ask yourself if you would get personal satisfaction from achieving them, if the answer isn’t yes, I would go back and change them.
The next awful corporate invention is the objective cascade. It starts at the top and each manager dutifully absorbs their manager’s objectives and cascades these together with their own to their teams. Most managers don’t keep adding, but instead prune and modify their objectives before passing down to ensure that the new intern doesn’t end up with 55 unachievable targets on their back. But even so, whilst the idea of aligning objectives throughout the organization and linking them back to company goals sounds good in theory, most jobs in most companies focus on a specific area which is a subset of the overall company’s stated targets. Rather than shoe-horning your process into an objective about “putting the customer first” or “driving up average deal size or margin”, it would be much more impactful and motivating to state what your objective is. Once you have drawn up objectives that motivate you, cross-reference them into the company values to make sure there is alignment. This last step is important. If your passion is for an area of the business that isn’t a priority, then you have some tough decisions to make. You want to avoid the awkward situation of feeling proud of some work that no one wanted or needed to be done.
I knew my marathon career would be summarized as “one and done”. I wanted to experience the feeling once and then retire permanently from the distance. Watching the New York marathon earlier this year briefly made me reconsider my retirement, but it doesn’t motivate me in the same way. This blog, when it finishes in two weeks, will leave a void that needs to be filled. My objective for 2025 is to try and turn it into a book. I have no idea if I will be successful, but the idea motivates me in the same way as the idea of writing the blog did last year and it feels like a natural next step.
In conclusion, objectives can be treated as a tick-box exercise or as a source of motivation. To be honest I have considered them both ways in the past and there is no shame in admitting that a process that runs on corporate deadlines doesn’t excite you. Objectives are a tool that you can use to drive your own performance. I suspect that most successful people routinely set themselves challenging targets to hit. If you want to get the most out of an objective, the most important quality is that it needs to be motivating.
Next week I am indulging another passion of mine and creating a pre-holiday list of the best bourbons and American whiskeys I have drunk this year. This will not include any helpful advice for the workplace unless you are gifting whiskey to colleagues and want some recommendations. But it is an enjoyable rabbit hole that I have wandered down since moving to America that I wanted to share with you all. See you next week!