Mark Murphy

Editor’s Note

When I first read Mark Murphy’s research on SMART goals being dumb, I was struck by two responses. First, I thought, “Of course, this feels correct.” And second, I thought, “Wow, most people are inadvertently doing it wrong!” This is a great chapter and one that can instantly help you catalyze better team member performance and engagement.

Virtually every company sets goals for their employees, and what manager hasn’t set a SMART goal (most commonly defined as Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound)? But right now, only 13 percent of employees believe that their current goals will help them maximize their full potential, and only 15 percent think that their goals will help them achieve great things, so there’s obviously a big problem.

You may have been told that smart managers use SMART goals, but new research indicates that SMART goals are actually pretty dumb. Leadership IQ conducted a study of 4,182 workers from 397 organizations to see what kind of goal-setting processes actually help employees achieve great things. And what we learned is that SMART goals often act as impediments to, not enablers of, bold action, actually encouraging mediocre and poor performance.

As part of our study, we wanted to find out what aspects of goal setting really predict whether an employee will achieve great things. After all, the purpose of goals isn’t to help people achieve mediocre results; goals are supposed to help us achieve extraordinary results. And we wanted to know, for example, do achievable and realistic goals drive people to great achievements, or does greatness come from having goals that are really difficult and that push us out of our comfort zone?

To answer these questions, we conducted a stepwise multiple regression analysis to discover what kinds of goals were most likely to drive people to achieve great things. Stepwise multiple regression is a statistical technique that predicts values of one variable (e.g., achieving greatness) on the basis of two or more other variables (e.g., whether goals are achievable or difficult).

This analysis revealed the top eight predictors of whether somebody’s goals were going to help him or her achieve great things. In other words, if we want employees to say, “Wow, my goals this year are really going to help me achieve great things,” there are eight characteristics that their goals should have.

Here are the top eight factors, in order of statistical importance:

1. I can vividly picture how great it will feel when I achieve my goals.
2. I will have to learn new skills to achieve my assigned goals for this year.
3. My goals are absolutely necessary to help this company.
4. I actively participated in creating my goals for this year.
5. I have access to the formal training I will need to accomplish my goals.
6. My goals for this year will push me out of my comfort zone.
7. My goals will enrich the lives of somebody besides me (customers, the community, etc.).
8. My goals are aligned with the organization’s top priorities for this year.

Now, when you really think about what this analysis is saying, a few things should immediately jump out at you. First, issues related to SMART goals do not appear on this list. Whether goals were specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, or time bound had no unique predictive power in this analysis. In fact, when we conducted a separate correlation analysis, we found that the question about SMART goals (i.e., “We use SMART goals as our goal-setting process”) had no meaningful correlation with employees achieving great things.

The second thing that probably hits you is that for people to achieve great things, their goals must require them to learn new skills and to leave their comfort zone. This is quite the opposite of what SMART goals tell us (goals should be achievable and realistic, etc.). “Hold on a minute,” SMART goals seem to say. “Don’t push beyond your resources, don’t bite off more than you can chew, but play it safe and stay within your limitations.”

And once again, using a correlation analysis, we found that the question about achievable goals (i.e., “My goals are achievable with my current skills and/or knowledge”) had no meaningful correlation with achieving great things.

If we pause here for a minute, we’ve just learned that the typical goal-setting processes companies have been using for decades are not helping employees achieve great things. And, in fact, the type of goal setting we should be doing (assuming we actually want our employees to achieve great things) is pretty much the opposite of what organizations have been doing for the past few decades. If your people don’t have to learn new skills, and they don’t have to leave their comfort zone to achieve their goals, those goals probably won’t drive them to achieve greatness.

Another insight from the regression analysis is that goals need to be much more than just words on a little form. For a goal to help people achieve great things, that goal has to leap off the page. It has to be so vividly described that people can feel how great it will be to achieve it. It has to sing to them, to touch the deepest recesses of their brain. When is the last time your goals did that?

And statistically, to achieve greatness, a goal also has to be bigger than the doers of that goal. We have to identify whose lives will be enriched by our goals. And those goals had better be absolutely necessary (and also aligned with our organization’s top priorities), or they just aren’t going to help employees achieve great things.

Right now, most employees are falling short of their goals. And our study shows that it’s because the goals they are being given are too easy. It’s time for an entirely new goal-setting process, one that meets the all the top criteria that most inspires employees to achieve great things. And toward that end, we created HARD goals: goals that are Heartfelt, Animated, Required, and Difficult. Here’s a breakdown of how HARD goals work.

HARD Goals

HARD goals are for every manager who believes that people have more potential than they’re presently using. Unlike SMART goals, HARD goals push employees beyond their current self-imposed restraints and help them discover where their limits, if any, really exist. You don’t have to be a world leader to issue a HARD challenge, nor do you have to have thousands of followers. Every business plan, sales presentation, customer interaction, budget request, and financial approval provides an opportunity to push employees toward, budget request, and financial approval provides an opportunity to push employees toward untold greatness.

But what are HARD goals? In a nutshell, for any goal to inspire greatness, it has to be:

• Heartfelt: Employees have to feel an emotional attachment to a goal; it has to scratch an existential itch.
• Animated: Goals need to be motivated by a vision, picture, or movie that plays over and over in your employees’ minds.
• Required: Goals need to feel so urgently necessary that employees have no other choice but to start acting on that goal right here, right now.
• Difficult: Goals need to drag employees out of their comfort zone, activating their senses and attention.

These four factors likely ring true with your own experiences. Think for a moment about the most significant professional or personal accomplishment in your life. Maybe you invented the coolest product in your industry, doubled your company’s revenue, got that big promotion, or even lost 30 pounds or ran a marathon. Whatever it was, I’d be willing to bet that the goal that drove that great achievement was incredibly challenging, deeply emotional, and highly visual. I’ll bet it was a bit scary, pushing you out of your comfort zone and forcing you to learn new things. It was the kind of goal that flipped some internal switch that made your mind alive and buzzing with the thrill of it. And when you finally hit your big goal, you felt as fulfilled as you’ve ever been. And even now, months or perhaps years later, you still feel highly satisfied just thinking about the experience. And I’m not talking about some temporary high like you get from eating chocolate; I mean deep, life-altering, perspective changing fulfillment. Let’s dig a little deeper into each of these four components.

Heartfelt

The typical approach in most organizations is to create goals that are measurable. Employees are asked to translate goals into a simple number that’s easily trackable—not get all warm and fuzzy about them. And that’s exactly what’s wrong with the way most managers train their workforces to set and achieve goals. Because whenever employees are asked to take goals they might “feel” good about or have an emotional connection to, and translate those into a simple number that analytically fits their spreadsheet, it can actually reduce motivation to achieve that goal by 50 percent.

Animated

A necessary part of making a goal compelling—so motivating, inspiring, and necessary that your employees will move heaven and earth to achieve it—is making the goal imaginable. This works thanks to a concept called “pictorial superiority effect,” whereby if we can imagine a goal, see it, picture it, and so on, we’re a lot more likely to process, understand, and embrace that goal. In fact, when we hear only information, our total recall is about 10 percent when tested 72 hours later. But, add a picture, and that number shoots up to 65 percent. Animating a goal creates a lasting visual image that helps sear that goal into your employees’ brains. And that goes a long way to inspiring people to say: “I am going to sacrifice whatever it takes to achieve this goal.”

Heartfelt and Animated Are Great Friends

While it might seem a little strange, or even too easy to be true, visualization activities (and that includes drawing pictures) really do significantly improve emotional attachment to a goal (and thus dramatically increase goal achievement).

I recently conducted an experiment with employees at a large healthcare company. I was training folks on goal setting, and while most of the course was work-related, the CEO asked me to show his team how to apply HARD goals to their personal lives (specifically, saving for retirement).

I began by asking everyone to take our HARD Goals Assessment to gauge the effectiveness of their current financial goals. Not surprisingly, they felt their financial goals were required and difficult, but they had low heartfelt and animated scores. Like too many folks these days, they struggled with feeling a strong emotional connection to, and visualizing, their financial goals.

So I asked everyone to draw a self-portrait of how they felt about the current state of their financial goals. There were a lot more stick figures than Picassos, but even the folks who claimed to have zero artistic ability were able to adequately animate their goals. For the most part, the drawings vividly depicted people who were frazzled, struggling to carry a large weight, or missing some important aspect of their lives. Then I asked everyone in the group to draw another self-portrait, this time showing how they would feel if they received $500,000 (tax free). This time the pictures showed people who were relieved, happy, and decidedly less stressed.

After our fun drawing exercise, the group again took the HARD Goals Assessment, and the scores went up significantly. The exercise of animating how their lives would look with the addition of $500,000 (an achievable number, we’re not talking millions here) allowed people to envision themselves less worried, less anxious, happier, and more carefree. And that helped every person in the group to gain a greater emotional connection to his or her goals—the kind of heartfelt connection that HARD goals require.

But OK, I know what you are probably thinking right now. So we did an exercise and got some test scores to go up, but does that actually change anything in the real world? The answer to that is a big yes. Six months after this training, we emailed the participants and asked them to complete a brief survey about their progress toward their financial goals. Of the 147 managers who completed the survey, 141 of them said that they had made “significantly more progress” toward their financial goals in the six months following the training than they had in the six months prior to the training. With those kinds of results, I’d say we definitely had an impact.

When it comes to financial goals, whether personal or work-related, most people don’t struggle as much with the required and difficult aspects as they do with the heartfelt and animated parts. The media certainly do a good job driving home the fact that saving for retirement is required and non-negotiable in this age of uncertain Social Security. And we know it’s difficult because while almost two-thirds of workers say that they’re saving for retirement, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s 2011 Retirement Confidence Survey, more than half of them have less than $25,000 banked.

It’s a challenge to have an emotional attachment to something that is so far away, much less visualize it. Why pass on the new shoes that you can wear tomorrow, or the fancy dinner you can eat right now, in favor of an extra $100 toward a retirement that is 10 or 20 years in the future?

It’s also tough to get excited about goals that are expressed purely in numerical terms. If someone says you have to save money, you usually don’t think, “Why do I care about this?” or “Why am I emotionally attached to this?” It’s just an abstract money goal—here’s a number, and that’s it. But people don’t care about the numbers per se.

But by animating a goal through the drawing of a simple picture, the reasons behind why we do care about our goals (reasons that may not otherwise have come to light) suddenly become quite apparent. In creating an animated goal, people take the time to think about what saving that amount of money would mean for their lives—for example, more time with grandchildren, a few days a week on the golf course, sunny vacations with their spouse. And that takes the goal out of the practical and into the emotional. And as I’ve said, when we’re emotionally connected to a goal, we become far more inspired to move heaven and earth to achieve it.

So how can you use that retirement experiment to your own benefit? First, estimate how much you’ll actually need for retirement. Then imagine a retirement funded by that amount. What will you be doing in your retirement? What will having that money at your disposal mean for your life? Draw it out, in detail, including visual representations of yourself engaged in the experiences that kind of money could buy. Then hang it where you’ll see it every day, like near your mirror, by your computer, or on the fridge. Jean Chatzky, my favorite TV financial guru and financial editor for the Today show, has written quite a bit about our experiment. She had the brilliant idea to make smaller versions of your drawing to keep in your wallet—including wrapping one around your credit card.

Finally, take the time to revisit your animated goal every couple months or so. Are you making progress? Has your vision changed? If so, make the necessary tweaks and keep reenergizing the emotional connection you have to your goal.

Required

Procrastination is the killer of many a goal, so you need to give every goal a deep sense of urgency. There are lots of ways to do this, but one of the easiest (and most successful) is a technique I call “cutting in half.”

The first step is to take an objective long view of your HARD goal and approximate its end date. Some goals are more naturally time-bound than others, but as accurately as you can, estimate the timeframe by which the goal will be completed. To keep things simple for this example, I’m going to pretend that your HARD goal will take you a year to accomplish (but again, the “cutting-in-half” technique works with goals of any duration).

Now, cut that yearlong timeframe in half (six months in this example) and answer this question: What must be accomplished at the six-month mark to know we’re on track to achieve the full HARD goal?

Now, cut that six-month timeframe in half (i.e., three months) and answer this question: What must we have accomplished at the three-month mark to know we’re on track to achieve the six-month targets?

Of course, you know what’s coming next. Cut that three-month timeframe in half and answer: What must we have accomplished at the six-week mark to know we’re on track to achieve all of the three-month targets? When you’ve got it spelled out, do it again: What must we have accomplished at the three-week mark to know we’re on track to achieve all of the six-week targets?

Once you’ve gotten to a timeframe that’s under a month, do this exercise two more times. Ask: What must we have accomplished within this next week to know we’re on track to achieve all of the three-week targets? And then ask: What must I have accomplished today to know that I’m on track to achieve all of my one-week targets?

The purpose of the “cutting-in-half” exercise is threefold: First, it shows you exactly where and how to start pursuing your HARD goal. Second, it monitors and keeps you on track to achieve your HARD goal (and intensify your efforts where necessary). And third, this exercise shows you that every single day needs to contain some activity in pursuit of your HARD goals.

Difficult

The idea that difficult goals lead to better performance seems counterintuitive, but there’s decades of research to back it up. Difficult goals demand our attention and engage the brain. And with that extra neurological horsepower comes enhanced performance. But it’s a challenge to create goals that perfectly hit the sweet spot of difficulty—that place where people feel right between “so hard I want to quit” and “so easy I can’t be bothered to try.” Here’s a quick way to test whether your goals are difficult enough to inspire optimal performance. Ask your employees to think about a recently set goal and determine whether or not the following three statements apply:

• I’m really going to have to learn new skills before I’ll be able to accomplish this goal.
• This goal is pushing me outside my comfort zone; I’m not frozen with terror, but I’m definitely on “pins and needles” and wide awake for this goal.
• When I think about the biggest and most significant accomplishments throughout my life, this current goal is as difficult as those were.

If your employees can’t answer yes to all three statements, the goal isn’t difficult enough. Remember back at the start when I asked you to consider your own great accomplishments, and how those achievements demanded serious work, got your brain buzzing, and made you feel like you were perched on pins and needles? It was the challenge of that goal—not the reassurance that your goal would be a piece of cake—that inspired you to push past stubborn roadblocks. And it was the challenge that made you embrace (instead of dread) honing your knowledge and learning new skills.

OK, so setting difficult goals leads to better performance, but how difficult is difficult enough? One determinant of an adequately difficult goal is that it will demand the doer of that goal to have two to four major new learning experiences. This stretches the brain and excites the neurons so the brain is focused and anxious to achieve that goal. The ability to say, “This goal is a breeze, I don’t need to learn anything to ace it,” is a clear sign that goal is under set. Just as if more than four new things need to be learned, that goal is over set.

The best way to determine whether a goal is in the sweet spot of difficulty, or if it’s under or over set, is to ask your employees how much a goal is requiring them to learn. The following two tests will give you the information you need to determine if a HARD goal is hard enough.

Test #1: Ask your employees what new skills (if any) they have to learn to achieve a goal. If they aren’t learning all sorts of new skills, then the goal is probably not hard enough. Try making the goal 30 percent harder (more on this in a minute) and then evaluate again in three months (using this same test). Otherwise, if employees are learning a lot, move on to Test #2.

Test #2: Ask your employees at the outset of a goal if they know they can achieve that goal. HARD goals should be a bit scary and force us to question our abilities. That’s part of what gets the brain amped up and excited about achieving the goal. If folks say they feel sure they can accomplish a goal before they even start, try making the goal 30 percent harder and then evaluate it again in three months (using this same test).

Adjusting a goal by 30 percent is usually enough to engage the brain. So if you find more difficulty is still needed—employees aren’t learning two to four new things—then take the goal difficulty level up another 30 percent. If you are over setting your goals, start by sliding them back 30 percent and reassess the situation. Stick to the 30 percent rule because if you start arbitrarily tripling or quadrupling the difficulty of your goals, they will all too quickly go from difficult to impossible.

Everyone’s sweet spot of difficulty may be at a different and unique level, but the experience of a perfectly set HARD goal is the same for everyone. The awareness of being outside the comfort zone—not so far that you are on a bed of nails, but not too comfortable either—that’s the place where each of us is driven to achieve our absolute best.

Any Goal Can Be HARD

You can improve any goal and make it HARD. So the next time you’re setting a goal, ask these four questions:

• Heartfelt: Why do you want to achieve this goal? Describe at least three reasons why this goal appeals to you.
• Animated: Think about where this goal will get you, and describe exactly what you’re doing (what kind of work, who you’re working with, what your days look like). To make this even better, put that description into a drawing.
• Required: What are the three to five most important skills you’ll need to develop to achieve that goal? How will you develop those skills?
• Difficult: What do you need to have accomplished by the end of the next six months to keep you on track to achieving this goal? What about by the end of the next 90 days? Next 30 days? What’s one thing you can accomplish today?

Conclusion

Virtually all managers set goals for their employees, but those goals just aren’t working. The goal-setting methodologies that we’ve used for decades (like SMART goals and others) don’t lead to employees achieving great things. If you want to set goals that inspire people to achieve great things, those goals have to be:

• Heartfelt: They exist to serve something bigger than ourselves.
• Animated: They’re so vividly described and presented that to not reach them would leave us wanting.
• Required: They are as critical to our continued existence as breathing and water.
• Difficult: They’re so hard they’ll test every one of our limits.

Not only do effective goals drive greatness, but people also feel better about them. An additional finding from the Leadership IQ Goal-Setting Study revealed that employees who have HARD goals are significantly more engaged than employees who don’t.

We asked survey respondents to answer the question “I recommend this organization to others as a great place for people to work” (our research indicates that this question is a very good proxy for an overall measure of engagement). We discovered that people who “strongly agreed” with the goals questions from the regression analysis had significantly higher scores on the “great place for people to work” question than those who “strongly disagreed.” For example, we found that:

• People who answered “strongly agree” to the question “I can vividly picture how great it will feel when I achieve my goals” had 49 percent higher employee engagement than people who answered “strongly disagree.”
• People who answered “strongly agree” to the question “I have access to any formal training that I will need to accomplish my goals” had 57 percent higher employee engagement than people who answered “strongly disagree.”
• People who answered “strongly agree” to the question “My goals for this year will push me out of my comfort zone” had 29 percent higher employee engagement than people who answered “strongly disagree.”
• People who answered “strongly agree” to the question “My goals are aligned with the organization’s top priorities for this year” had 75 percent higher employee engagement than people who answered “strongly disagree.”

Every manager on earth should want employees who happily come to work every day and who passionately devote 100 percent effort into making great things happen. When we set HARD goals for our employees, it leads them to achieve greatness, and that’s an amazingly satisfying experience. HARD goals make people stronger, braver, and more confident to go after even bigger and better things—to set even harder goals. That’s why successful people are always making news for achieving extraordinary success again and again. They’ve done it before, and they know they can do it again.

About the Author

Mark Murphy is the CEO of Leadership IQ (find his website at www.leadershipiq.com) and author of HARD Goals: The Secret to Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be published by McGraw-Hill (2011).