The Business Coaching Toolkit

CHAPTER FOUR

Making Goals SMART

Goals don’t work! That may be heresy for an industry that has at its core helping others set and achieve their goals. But it is true.

If you were flying from New York to Miami but landed in Chicago, it wouldn’t matter if you made it there on time and under budget. You would still be in the wrong city. When goal fulfillment is seen as an end in itself and not a means to an end, we eventually land in places that miss our overall objectives. This happens every day in businesses across the country and with coaching engagements that focus solely on goal fulfillment. That’s why goals, in and of themselves, don’t work, and why we need a better way to set them.

A BUSINESS CASE FOR BETTER GOALS

Goals don’t work for the following three reasons.

Goals by Themselves Do Not Provide Context

The Academy Award-winning movie, Bridge on the River Kwai, relates the true story of British soldiers in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp. Forced to work on a bridge spanning the Kwai Yai River in the jungles of Burma, the men apply their engineering brilliance designing and building the best bridge in Southeast Asia. Then, in a moment of realization, they understand they just gave the enemy a way to cross from Bangkok to Rangoon and provide supplies critical to winning the war. The movie ends with Allied forces destroying the bridge and their painstaking work.

Context is critical to goal setting. It is foolish to build a bridge—fulfill one’s goal—and lose the war. ...