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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’ll also notice that managing these pitfalls requires attention to paradoxes.
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:
Each of these is simple enough to pilot with one team—and human enough to keep people engaged.
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.
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.