How to Balance Purpose and Progress in Goal Setting

If your job is to develop leaders, you’ve likely heard this question: “What does success look like?”

And depending on who you ask, you’ll get wildly different answers.

Some people start rattling off numbers: sales, customer counts, conversions, clicks. Others get more reflective: team morale, sense of purpose, employee growth. And then there's that one person who just wants to know if we’re still ordering bagels on Fridays.

The real magic happens when you stop thinking in terms of either/or.

The Productive Tension Between Qualitative and Quantitative Goals

Qualitative goals speak to the experience of success. They help you understand how people feel, how teams function, and whether your efforts are having the kind of impact that makes people want to stick around. They're especially good at capturing things like culture, communication, and customer or employee satisfaction.

Quantitative goals focus on the things you can count: new hires, revenue, turnaround time, survey responses, social engagement. These are the data points that bring clarity and accountability.

Set side by side, these goals help each other out. A qualitative goal like "become a top workplace" is powerful—but fuzzy. A related quantitative goal like "reduce turnover by 20%" gives it shape. Quantitative goals give direction and definition to the emotional and human elements qualitative goals represent.

When you're working with new leaders, this tension can be especially helpful. People often default to task completion and checkbox thinking. But real progress means asking: Did we just do a lot of work? Or did we move closer to the outcome we care about?

Why This Matters for Leadership Development

Without qualitative goals, work loses meaning. Without quantitative goals, it loses momentum. New leaders especially need both. They need to feel ownership of a shared purpose—and they need to see that purpose turn into tangible progress.

As you build your leadership training programs, encourage people to:

• Start with a big-picture "why" (often qualitative)
  
  
• Break it into measurable outcomes (quantitative)
  
  
• Reflect and adjust based on both feelings and facts
  
  

You don’t need perfect metrics—you need thoughtful ones. A well-phrased survey question or simple tracking spreadsheet can go a long way.

Practical Guidance for Goal-Setting Coaches

When helping new leaders shift from task thinking to goal thinking, try prompts like:

• What would success feel like to your team?
  
  
• What are three signs you’d see if this was working?
  
  
• What’s one number you could track to show progress?
  
  

Then help them link the human with the measurable.

"Better internal communication" might lead to a qualitative goal of improving trust—and a quantitative goal of reducing missed deadlines by 30%. "Stronger customer relationships" might pair with "customer stories collected" and "net promoter score increases."

Purpose Is Personal—But Progress Can Be Shared

When leaders learn to hold qualitative and quantitative goals together, they become better storytellers, motivators, and decision-makers. They learn how to connect team values to organizational outcomes. And they begin to shape cultures that measure what matters.

The Leadership Progress Cycle helps leaders build this mindset from the start. Through hands-on activities, they learn to balance intuition with insight—and bring clarity to both the purpose and the progress their teams need to thrive.