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Management Services Winter 2012


The folly of


et’s dispense, once and for all, with the managerial absurdity known as ‘stretch goals’. While it’s true that renowned psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham described goal setting as “the most effective managerial tool available,” it’s also true that no less a thinker than W E Deming insisted that companies “eliminate management by objective.” In my opinion, there can be no such debate over the lack of usefulness of stretch goals.


L


Stretch goals can be terribly demotivating When stretch goals seem overwhelming and unattainable, they sap employees’ intrinsic motivation. The magnitude of the problem causes people to freeze up, and the extrinsic motivator of money crowds out the intrinsic motivators of learning and growth. In his classic article Small


Wins, psychologist Karl Weick argued that people often become overwhelmed and discouraged when faced with massive and complex problems. He advocated recasting larger problems into smaller, tractable challenges that produce visible results,


Stretch goals


stretch goals


and maintained that the strategy of small wins can often generate more action and more complete solutions to major problems because it enables people to make slow, steady progress. In their book The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer build on the same argument and clearly demonstrate how even the smallest, most mundane steps forward – for example, achieving clear consensus in a meeting – can motivate and inspire workers. Ever wonder why people will so often write down an item they’ve already completed on their to-do list? It’s so that they can have the satisfaction of immediately crossing it off and experiencing the sense of progress.


A dangerous tendency to foster unethical behaviour


In the early 1990s, Sears gave a sales quota of $147 per hour to its auto repair staff. Faced with this target, the staff overcharged for work and performed unnecessary repairs. Sears’ Chairman at the time, Ed Brennan, acknowledged that the stretch goal gave employees a


By Daniel Markovitz


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