At the start of the year, the owner of a small landscaping business gathers his team of five. Last year was tough, and he doesn’t want to put anyone under extra pressure. So instead of setting targets, he keeps it encouraging: “Let’s just do our best this year and see where we end up.”
Everyone nods. It feels kind, reasonable and low-stress. By December, the business has done about as well as the year before. Nobody can quite say whether that was good or bad, because nobody knew what “our best” was supposed to look like.
It’s a generous instinct, and an understandable one. But more than half a century of research on goal-setting suggests that “do your best” is one of the least effective goals a business can set. The reason is surprisingly simple, and so is the alternative.
One Like insight: A goal you can’t measure is a wish, however good the intentions behind it.
Fifty years of evidence
In the late 1960s, the psychologist Edwin Locke began testing a simple question: does the kind of goal people are given affect how well they perform? Working later with Gary Latham, he spent decades studying it, in laboratories and in real workplaces from logging crews to office teams. In 2002, the two summarised 35 years of research, covering hundreds of studies, in a landmark article in American Psychologist.
Their central finding was consistent. Specific, challenging goals led to higher performance than vague ones, easy ones or simply urging people to do their best. Across meta-analyses, the size of the effect was substantial. In their own words, “when people are asked to do their best, they do not do so.”
The reason is that “do your best” has no external reference point. Without a clear target, people judge their own effort generously, and it’s impossible to tell whether they’re on track. A specific goal, by contrast, focuses attention, sustains effort, encourages persistence and prompts people to look for better ways of working.
Locke and Latham also identified conditions that make goals work. People need to be committed to the goal, believe it’s achievable, have the ability to reach it and receive feedback on their progress. A challenging target set without those conditions is more likely to discourage than motivate.
When specific goals backfire
There’s one important exception, and it matters for growing businesses. When a task is complex and new, and people don’t yet know how to do it well, a hard performance target can actually make things worse. Under pressure to hit a number, people tend to repeat what they already know rather than taking time to learn better methods.
In those situations, the research suggests a different kind of goal: a specific learning goal. Instead of “win R500,000 of new online sales this year” for a business that has never sold online, a better first goal might be “test three different ways of selling online by June and learn which works best for our customers”. Once the team understands the task, a performance target becomes useful again.
This distinction helps explain why some ambitious targets energise a team while others crush it. A stretching goal for work people know how to do creates focus. The same kind of goal for work nobody yet understands creates anxiety.
[Infographic placement] Choosing the right kind of goal. A simple two-path diagram. Familiar work (we know how to do it) → Set a specific, challenging performance goal (e.g. “Complete 40 garden makeovers by December”). New, complex work (we’re still learning) → Set a specific learning goal (e.g. “Test three ways to sell maintenance contracts by June”). Beneath: Avoid: “Just do your best.” Caption: Locke and Latham (2002): specific, challenging goals consistently outperformed “do your best”.
Setting goals that help
For most small businesses, a handful of good goals beats a long list. Choose two or three for the year, aligned with your priorities, and write each one so that anyone could tell at the end whether it was achieved: a number, a date and, where possible, a measure the team can track along the way. Make them challenging but believable, involve the people who’ll do the work in setting them, and review progress regularly so the goal becomes a source of feedback rather than an annual surprise.
If you’re worried about pressure, remember that a clear goal can be kinder than a vague one. People generally prefer to know what success looks like rather than wondering whether they’ve done enough.
A few questions can help:
- Could someone tell, at the end of the year, whether each of our goals was achieved?
- Are our goals challenging enough to stretch us, but believable enough to commit to?
- Which goals involve work we don’t yet know how to do, and should they be learning goals instead?
- How will we track progress during the year, not just at the end?
Which brings us back to the landscaper and his gentle “let’s do our best”. His team deserved the kindness, but they also deserved a clear target. “Complete 40 garden makeovers and sign 15 maintenance contracts by December”, reviewed together each month, would have given them something to aim for, something to celebrate and a way to know whether the year had actually gone well. As we explored in Goals Don’t Get Things Done. “If–Then” Plans Do., pairing each goal with specific plans makes it even more likely to happen.
Sources
- Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey”, American Psychologist 57(9), 2002.
