From Intent to Impact: How Great Goals Turn Motivation into Momentum

Everyone has goals whether they know it or not. Everything we do has a motive—and a motive is a goal. The difference between drift and progress is whether those motives are chosen, written down, and organized. Great leaders make goals intentional and turn them into fuel for the team.

Two simple goal frameworks (and when to use each)

SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound—shine when the work is known and you need crisp execution on clear priorities. Think: “Increase customer retention by 10% in Q3.”

OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—pair a qualitative Objective (the inspirational “where we’re going”) with quantitative Key Results (the measurable “how we’ll know we’re getting there”). Born at Intel in the 1970s and famously embraced by Google in 1999, OKRs keep purpose attached to the numbers. 

Here’s an Example: 

Objective: “Delight our customers with exceptional support” 

Key Result: “Achieve a Net Promoter Score of 65 or greater by year-end”

Full disclosure: OKRs are my personal favorite because they blend the head and the heart. If you haven’t read John Doerr’s book “Measure What Matters,” consider this my 5 star recommendation.

A quick story from my own team

In 2022, I joined Elite Entrepreneurs, a coaching group for business owners. Elite teaches a specific adaptation of OKRs that require every person in the company to own their “Big Three” results—their contribution to the larger company vision. In concept it seemed obvious, straightforward, even. I thought we could come home and knock it out in a couple of hours.

In practice… it proved complicated. As the team talked around our conference table, we struggled with what, exactly, we should measure. Customer Success could track the number of help tickets they close, except that we knew great work often meant fewer tickets. If we measured how much time it took to close tickets, we risked rewarding speed over quality. With our Learning Design team we struggled to quantify writing quality and doubted whether measuring it would even be useful. Many of our contractors were simply paid for deliverables. The only obvious metric was 100% or zero—they either delivered or they didn’t… So it went.

In summary, we discovered something unglamorous and true: good metrics take time, and frameworks must fit real work and real people.

Where good goals go sideways

Here are a few pitfalls you may encounter when you’re using these frameworks. If you know to look for them, you’re more likely to course correct quickly.

SMART pitfalls

• Over-measuring can lead to tunnel vision. When the number becomes the point, teams optimize what’s easy to count and miss what actually matters. 

At one point I got really excited about how our webinar audience was growing impressively—until I realized the attendees weren’t our buyers. Right metric, wrong crowd.

• “Achievable” can also mean “uninspiring.” Safe targets rarely energize a team. 

I remember a time when we were concerned about morale on our Customer Success team so we set a customer outreach goal that was comfortably doable. We later learned we’d quietly lost some big customers we never had managed to connect with.

OKR pitfalls

• Too Many Objectives 

Unless you have a singular overarching purpose, focus fractures and departments row in different directions. Siloed teams with unrelated OKRs can end up chasing contradictory targets and competing for resources internally.

• Ambitious Stretch Goals Without Psychological Safety. 

If missing a metric is punished, even indirectly, people will have a good reason to sandbag with weak goals or hide inconvenient facts. Bold objectives require a culture that treats misses as learning, not shame.

• OKRs Tied to Compensation. 

While there are times when it can align incentives, it can also kill ambition. Most experience and research on the subject recommends decoupling OKRs from bonuses so people can aim high without gaming the system.

Two Problem amplifiers that merit special attention: 

• Big Teams

Large teams require more attention to goal alignment and clear individual ownership. Social loafing (slacking individual effort thinking someone else will compensate) is a real and well documented phenomenon. 

• Top-Down Cultures

Hierarchical cultures can suppress needed candor and big picture thinking from people who are not the top. A lot of waste happens when people shrug at problems that are “not their job” or wait around for someone to tell them what to do.

The good news is that you can design your goal practice with those realities in mind.

Paradox-awareness is key

You’ll also notice that managing these pitfalls requires attention to paradoxes.

• You need to pay attention to customer outcomes AND internal morale.
• You need to measure speed AND quality
• You need to reach for the nearly impossible AND have a steady rhythm of execution

Teams that succeed don’t choose one or the other. In the abstract that seems obvious. But in practice, it is very often what we do.

Paradox-aware leaders know how to look for those paradoxes. They know that all the creative, innovative, and durable solutions are found in the productive tension between those opposing poles. They don’t whiplash or overcorrect, instead they hold open a space where the best solutions can emerge.

What follows are several engaging, research-based techniques you might want try to enhance your own goal setting:

Four practical ideas you can try right away

Each of these is simple enough to pilot with one team—and human enough to keep people engaged.

1. Team Vision Boards (45–60 minutes)
   Make the future visible. A vision board is a collage of images, words, and symbols that represent and remind us what success looks like. Make an activity out of building a vision board together with your team. Post it where people can see it often and reference it when prioritizing. If the board reflects the real aspirations of your team members, it keeps purpose in the room in a way no motivational poster ever could.
   
   
2. Off-Site Goal-Setting Retreats (half-day to one day)
   Step out of your routine by gathering the team somewhere their inbox won’t follow. In that separated space you can review outcomes, name lessons, brainstorm objectives, and then reduce to 3–5 total goals. Draft your Key Results in breakouts; reconvene to pressure-test for measurability and ownership. (Pro tip: you don’t need to go to Vegas to get “off-site” quality experiences. I’ve made them work with a conference room and a good catered lunch. The key is to help the team gather and block out distractions.)
   
   
3. Role-Playing Future Scenarios (60 minutes)
   This is a way to rehearse adversity before it arrives. Assign one team member to be a “market disruptor” and another to play a “defender” role. Test how you’d adapt goals, for example if a technology change made your service obsolete, a major client disappeared, a supply chain hiccup hit, or demand spiked. After the role play, debrief: What would we change in our OKRs tomorrow? What signals would trigger it?
   
   
4. Backward Goal Planning (45 minutes)
   Start by imagining yourself having achieved a near impossible goal then work backward: What must be true at 6 months? 3 months? Next week? What are you going to do differently starting immediately? This exercise will surface milestones and dependencies, giving bold goals a practical runway.
   
   

Two supporting habits that punch above their weight:

• Fewer, bolder goals. Jim Collins: “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.” Stretch goals act as a filter—there may be many ways to hit a modest target, but usually only one or two viable paths to a truly high one, which clarifies what to pursue (and what to stop). When you really commit to stretch goal, you’ll need to stop most everything else to make it happen.
  
  
• Culture checks (LPC Step 2: Identify Barriers). Here are some useful discussion prompts for your team: 
  • What happens if we fail? 
  • What conversations are we avoiding? 
  • What critical info isn’t being shared? 
  • Are we rewarding motion or results? 

Our most limiting barriers exist primarily in our own minds. I, for example, have sometimes had a false belief about how much I need to be directly involved in the daily work of my teams. I’ve learned that capable colleagues perform best when I give them space to work and make meaningful decisions. I have to let go to make that happen.

Transparency beats politics. Alignment beats friction.

Two closing thoughts:

When goals are public, simple, and few, internal politics lose oxygen. Visibility exposes cross-purposes early so leaders can realign before trust (or budget) erodes. 

And when a team truly aligns around SMART goals or OKRs, execution becomes magnetic—like a crew rowing in rhythm toward the same horizon.

My invitation to you: pick one team and one idea from the list above (vision board, retreat, scenario role-play, or backward plan). Run it for a cycle (a week, a month, a quarter…). Keep goals human and visible. Then write what you learn and tune the system.

Because the frameworks are just maps. It’s your people—their courage, focus, and shared intent—that turn everyday motivation into momentum.