The Busy Leader's Handbook

31Set Big, Bold, Clear Goals and Communicate Them to All Employees

Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.

―Norman Vincent Peale

Gentlemen, we will chase perfection, and we will chase it relentlessly, knowing all the while we can never attain it. But along the way, we shall catch excellence.

―Vince Lombardi

Goal setting seems easy enough. Set a goal, get it done. But we all know it’s not really that easy. And that knowledge can lead us to aim pretty low. In fact, I recently read about an organization that set a fairly low goal of improvement. The leader went on to explain that they set the goal low so they could achieve it.

Think about that! Will the “setting goals low on purpose” approach truly achieve what leaders want? Probably not. So why do companies and their leaders set all-too-achievable goals, or worse yet, no goals at all?

Sometimes leaders don’t set goals because they are so busy trying to manage the day-to-day workload that they barely have time to think about the future and what they want from it. They are in survival mode. Yet goals are important. Without them we drift aimlessly without a motivating sense of purpose. Goal setting is how you get intentional about accomplishing your vision.

In other cases leaders may set goals but stick with modest ones. Perhaps they had set lofty goals previously, and when those goals were not reached, they were criticized for not achieving them (even though they did show good improvement). All too often ...