Lead Better - When Leaders Set Unrealistic Goals

0:00Good afternoon, Scott Baker, Emily Blackburn. Good to see you both. Good to be seen. I'm Mikey. Here we are, time for another edition of Lead Better. It's a thing that we do every day, 15-minute conversation. We do put them into even shorter versions that are on things like, you know, YouTube shorts, TikTok. I think we have had, what, 15,000 on a TikTok before, something like that. Yeah. So I'd like us to do 1.5 million today. Okay, Emily is our secret to the kind of magic conversation that's going to make this just go everywhere like crazy. I didn't prep for going viral today, Scott. Geez. Well, listen, that's the way we roll. And I'm known for turning unrealistic goals into magic. Well, I'm setting this up for just, you know, it's a dad joke kind of thing

1:01because the headline is when leaders set unrealistic goals. And I think we've all been in a situation like that, haven't you? Where you've just had somebody who's like, this is what we're going to do. And here's what you're expected to do. And then you go, does not seem to match a reality that I understand. Yeah, I took this as a great backhanded compliment when I read the best performers are typically the first to disengage. And so I'm like, I'm disengaged from a lot of it. Thanks for the compliment. Right? Yeah. Right. Good point. So Emily, what do you think about this one? It happens all the time, right? I think it's a mistake that leaders often make when they're trying to inspire those high performers, right? To go above beyond the shortfall is that they don't understand the right constraints, the obstacles that are in place for those people that they're up against in order to meet those goals. Right? So there's a challenge, which is feasible. It's within reach.

2:03It might be a stretch, but it's there. It's within line of sight. And then there are those unrealistic goals where to your point, Scott, that individual is saying, are we on the same planet? Are we speaking the same language? In what world do you think this is possible? And that unfortunately is the sign of a leader that's out of the loop. That's not understanding what their people are going through and what they're up against. Well, and before we dive into the meat of the field note, Mikey hit actually something that comes up early in the field note, which is like who disengages. And you know, I was thinking about it as I read it. We don't do a whole lot in a field note. I feel note that you can read in one or two minutes in the morning around. Well, let's take a look at the literature and go, you know, citation by citation. I don't know that there's a theory or a study or research specifically around our best performers, the first to disengage, but it makes sense. Doesn't it? Like if you have people that kind of like know the territory, and they know, like even on an athletic field,

3:04if you're best performers, they know how their bodies work. They know what the opposition is like. So if the coach or the person kind of setting the game strategy is totally out of whack with reality, it does make sense that people would disengage. So obviously we're going to try to get to the point where we're calibrating the leader, but shouldn't the leader at least be in sync with those best performers? You know, we talked a few weeks ago with Eric, I think, around the idea of like when you know that your team is definitely not going to win this weekend and how you approach them in the locker room to say, like, like you're going to get your butts kicked, right? Is that the way that you inspire? Like, but there is this realistic nature that you want your coach to be able to say. Sure. There's a, there's a different thing that we're shooting for, and it probably won't include a win. That might be out of stretch, but here's where I really want you to focus on. For your game time. Yeah.

4:04Yeah, something very respectable about that kind of coach. What you could say about that coach is, we're going to, look, I hope you guys, I hope we pull off a miracle, but what we're going to do in this game is we're going to run a particular kind of play 10 to 12 times. And my goal is that we're going to get really good at this play, and that we'll be able to use this in subsequent games, because we're going to test it out against top level competition this weekend. That's something people can wrap their minds around, right? Even if you know the overall battle, you're still going to lose, lose the, that particular battle. Right. So Emily, let's then dive in here on the field note itself. One of the things I want to ask about just right at the beginning is, we're talking about unrealistic goals in terms of like, I just can't pull that off. Yeah. Give some examples about, you know, one of the major banks that was pressuring people on their team to, you know, just create accounts and all kinds of illegality went on. Is there a difference between a leader's unrealistic goal and an unrealistic strategy,

5:05where it's not like an actual like here's like, like the strategy itself is out of map with reality, not just the goals of performance we're trying to drive into. Yeah, it's a great question, Scott. I think I don't know that there is much of a difference there, right? It's a difference between the means and the end in a way. And I think it's important to, to be able to unpack, you know, ask yourself the question, whether it's a goal, whether it's a strategy, does my team have the bandwidth, the capability, the resources, the means in order to get this done, whether it is a strategy, whether it is a goal, whether it is a distinct deliverable. And I think those questions apply in both situations. So I would say that they're probably pretty similar in that way. If your team can't get it done, it doesn't matter if it's a goal or it's a strategy, it doesn't matter if it's the end game or the how you sit there, it's not going to happen.

6:06Right. And either way, your best performance will check out. Like, either this is not a thing I can do on the road to this legitimate goal, or if they say, you're actually your legitimate goal is not even legitimate. So I'm not even going to worry about what the performance, you know, requisites are. Exactly. We talked about, you know, reasons why high performers might disengage. And I think the one that we touched on is, is, they're being a disconnect, right? The team player knows the strategy, knows the field, whatever the analogy is, right? And the leader's not speaking that same language. But the other issue is, high performers are used to being successful. They're oftentimes perfectionists. They're used to meeting goals. They're used to meeting them with excellence. So if you're a leader and you haven't applied those screens that we talked about before putting a goal or a challenge in front of your team member, you're setting them up for failure in a way that's very real and very. Impactful and a negative way for that team member, because you're giving them something that they can't achieve.

7:08Yeah. So we had a comment, come in on the. A comment section underneath the post itself today from Matt. And Matt says, the early assigned a goal has tipped from hard to impossible. Is rarely open pushback. It's a forecast that stays green while the numbers underneath it stop moving. Right. So before a leader sets a stretch target for the team, maybe it's best to ask them to name who below them could explain the path to it. And if that is an empty list, then maybe that is your indicator that you've gone past hard into impossible. Well, let me just pause the conversation because you know, I think maybe you weren't taking me seriously at the beginning when I said that, you know, I wanted to do 1.5 million as a. Right. But you didn't have a coach asking you to explain the path. But right now we're about halfway through our lead better conversation. So you're looking right now at the, you know, we have, you know, 125,000 field notes subscribers.

8:12We've had 62 65 million views of field notes over the last five years. So clearly, probably we're getting pretty close to even 1.5 million live right now, right? No, closer to just 1.5. Okay. Right. I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, that's a great illustration with the idea that like, like if some leaders just don't have the nitty gritty practical stats that are underneath how this works. Yeah. Then it's difficult to be able to say, but and some leaders who are used to setting impossible goals like that. Again, a lot of people will have the tendency to just kind of climb up, right? Emily, have you seen in your experience actual impossible goals that have been set by some of the organizations that you work with? No, absolutely. And I think that the response is oftentimes like sitting back in your chair and saying, yeah, let me know how that goes. Right. Right. Yeah. There's an eye wrong. I'm not even going to try because you're, you're crazy. You're cuckoo.

9:15So we see that a lot. And I think a part of one of the, the slip ups that that happen for you to get to that point is that leaders aren't engaging their teams. They're key stakeholders in the creation of the goals or the strategies begin with, right? There need to be conversations about, hey, is this within our reach? What do you think about this? Push back on me here. Look at it in our way of this kind of success. You have to bring your leaders, your team along in the creation of those strategies of those goals. So you can recognize where there might be some movable obstacles along the way, but you're also setting, setting challenges that are realistic and achievable. Well, and that's a, that's a very good point in the field. And you actually expanded on something that the field note points at. But let me ask you to, there's one point that comes up in the field note a little bit earlier that I think probably you've seen because working in large organizations that a lot of times the field note is positing when you have a leader setting these kinds of unrealistic goals.

10:17They're under pressure. Maybe the division is underperforming. Maybe their job is on the line. Maybe they've had a competitor come into this space. And so when that dynamic hits, they kind of go, all right, and then they throw out a goal that's impossible because they're behind. And the field note is saying the irony is that the organizations that are under pressure are least equipped to absorb the risk and failure that these kind of goals can bring. And that does not sound like a good spiral. No, it's absolutely the trickle down effect is very real. And it's, it can be detrimental for for cultures, for organizational success. You're absolutely right. When the stakes are already that high, the impact of failure is just exponentially worse in those types of environments. And it's often kind of like you can't have one without the other. So we see we see this happening a lot in terms of confounding variables and things that are if you see one thing happen, if there's a lot of organizational pressure to succeed, right.

11:21There's oftentimes going to be leaders that are kind of pushing that pressure down onto their teams in a way that's not attainable and not realistic. So does a leader's credibility suffer when they consistently under promise and over deliver? Because I know that the credibility suffer over promise. Right under deliver. It does their credibility suffer when they I'm packing the cement when when they under promise and over deliver. Yeah, you mean they didn't sound inspirational enough. Well, not that they didn't sound inspirational enough, but maybe they can be accused of sandbagging. So it might take two or three episodes of potential sandbagging where they over deliver every single time before people are like, but I don't know if sandbagging is necessarily a credibility hit the way that over promising under deliver. Under delivery. So it makes me feel like if you're going to have a tendency to default one or the other, of course you're going to want to under promise.

12:22Right. And in the case of a massive and you know that's what your mom would tell you to do. Right, but the field note is saying don't go low. It is still saying even being realistic. You don't the answer is not just the lower. Right. The expectation. So that's my that's my pushback. Yeah. Why is it that what is the admired leadership third way here between under promising and over promising. Right. So I think the ideal state would be to dance between the two, right? And challenge people effectively and challenge people consistently, but also setting reasonable goals in a way that you might be able to surprise and delight in some situations when you go above and beyond to meet those goals. I think the term that came to mind when you first posed the question, Mikey, was mind the gap, mind the gap between what you promise and what you end up delivering, right? So don't under promise over and over and over again to the extent that you get a reputation for the person who signs up for the bare minimum, but we think we can count on them to probably

13:25get the job done with some excellence because they've done it in the past. But also don't be that person that promises the moon and you might get maybe among the stars, right? So there's a little bit of a give and take there that needs to happen. And that can't, that's ideal state, right? That's the admired admired leader approach. But I think at the very end of the day, I think it's just a little bit of a little bit of a day. I think it's just taking a beat and looking at the goals, the expectations that you're setting with people. And like I said, asking yourself, is this reasonable? Could I meet this? What margin of error might I hit if I do try to meet this and just play it forward a little bit so you save yourself the heartache on the back end if it doesn't go to plan? Yeah. So the behavioral elephant in the room for me is, and I don't know if we can get to this in one minute, but I think the optimal question is, what is the structure, the framework around stretch goals that you should operate within? Like how does a leader set a good stretch goal? Is it a percentage of like your last 90 day run rate that's like 10% ahead?

14:29Or is there some formula that you can kind of count on to say, this is how you set a good stretch goal? Join us for our three hour drive. We're going to be on accenting stretch goals. Well, let me put it this way. The old acronym, SMART. Right? Which specific and measurable and is it actionable? Right? Does that work as a short version? I think it does as a TLDR. I might add a little asterisk, a little underline of know your people and know what motivates them. Right. Know how they respond to challenges versus goals so you can kind of anticipate where they might fall on the achievement scale as it relates to the SMART goal. So that might be my one minor tweak without taking another 45 minutes. Todd chimed in in the comments here as we're closing up that he would want part of the process to include the team identifying the warning signs before we get the end of it.

15:31So not just asking how do we get there, but let the team define along the way when we see a pop-up or road bump that we can all recognize what it is. That gives leaders permission before you get to the crust. Before the goal creates a second problem bigger than the first. Very quickly. And those are two key questions when we kick off major projects with clients. The question of what needs to happen in order for this to be successful, but also what could get in the way of our successful, it's really cause of failure. And I think it's really important to have those conversations proactively to the comments point so you can see the warning signs before it's too late. Right. Great. For those of you who meant to put something in the comments or you just didn't or maybe you haven't even read what we've been talking about today, I'm going to give you the opportunity to read through the post. I just posted it here in our chat. And if you click through, I'd love to have your commentary show up below the post there and let's keep the conversation going there in the comments section.

16:33Whether you join us by way of social or hereover on sub stack today, thanks very much. We do these conversations every single day at 3 p.m. Eastern and we look forward to tomorrow's leadership, admired leadership field note and the lead better discussion around it. Scott Emily, thanks for joining today. Appreciate it very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everybody.