5 Evidence-Based Ways to Make Your Goals More Successful: A Guide to Goal-Setting Theory for Managers

Learn how to use research-proven methods to achieve better results at home and at work

When you write down a goal with a clear vision and detailed milestones, you instantly give yourself a decent chance of success. However, even the most inspirational goals aren’t always successful. If you’ve ever failed at a New Year’s Resolution, a business startup, or missed out on a promotion, you’ll know what I mean. This can be frustrating, disappointing and discouraging.

Fortunately for you goal-oriented self-starters, there are things you can do to boost your odds of success. Renowned researchers Dr. Edwin Locke and Dr. Gary Latham discovered 5 scientific principles that determine whether a person’s goal is likely to be successful or not. They call this their ‘Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance’.

In this article, I’ll show you how to use Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theories and principles to set better goals and achieve more.

What is Goal-Setting Theory?

In the late 1960s, Dr. Edwin Locke pioneered research in motivation that gave us our modern understanding of goal setting. Locke’s research concluded that:

1. Individuals who set specific, difficult goals performed better than those who set general, easy goals.
2. The more difficult and specific a goal is, the harder people tend to work to achieve it.
3. Working toward a goal is a major source of motivation, which further improves performance.

Locke found that in 90% of cases, people achieved higher levels of performance when given specific and challenging goals as opposed to “do your best” style goals. For example, asking someone to “do your best” is less effective than saying “try to make less than five errors” or “beat your personal record”.

What are ‘The Five Principles’?

In 1990, Locke teamed up with Dr. Gary Latham to publish their seminal work, ‘A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance’. In this book, they built upon the need to set specific and difficult goals, and outlined the five characteristics that every goal should include to be successful; these are clarity, challenge, commitment, feedback, and task complexity.

Here’s how you can incorporate these principles into your personal and team goals:

1. Clarity

When your goals are clear, it’s easy to measure results, track progress and celebrate wins. This works to drive progress towards a goal because humans are drawn to small wins — often harmfully so (think of cell-phone game or gambling addictions). In this case, you want to harness that human trait to your advantage.

In contrast, vague goals (like “save money” or “exercise more often”) are hard to quantify and won’t give you frequent feelings of accomplishment. If progress towards your goal doesn’t give you plenty of joy along the way, it’s unlikely that you’ll stick to it all the way to the finish line.

Tips:

• Write down your goal in detail; use a goal-setting framework like S.M.A.R.T.
• Link your goals to your mission statement; if it can’t be, consider why you are pursuing this goal.
• Define the metrics and milestones you’ll use to measure success, space them out so you’ll always have a milestone coming up, and make sure that the metrics are understood by everyone who’s involved (this goes for individual and team goals).

2. Challenge

For a goal to be motivational, it needs to be difficult. Overcoming a challenge is what gives a person a sense of achievement, and makes them want to keep working towards it. However, don’t set a goal that’s so challenging you can’t achieve it.

Tips:

• Try to create some friendly competition between yourself and a peer, or between team members or departments. Competition can motivate people to work harder and better, and can even make the challenge fun.
• Find ways to reward yourself or your team when progress is made; incremental rewards for reaching milestones can help motivate a person to get through challenging tasks.

3. Commitment

Commitment means putting consistent effort into meeting a goal, and accountability measures to support your efforts. For example, you might share a fitness goal with someone who you know would push you, or set automatic bank account transfers for a financial goal.

To gain commitment to team goals, the whole team needs to understand and agree to the goals. Be sure to involve everyone when you set team goals — people are more likely to ‘buy-in’ to a goal if they were involved in setting it.

This doesn’t mean that every team goal needs to have a consensus. People are likely to commit to a goal as long as they feel that their ideas were given due consideration, they are seen as being an important member of the team, and they understand how the goal supports the objectives of the organization.

Tips:

• Visualize how your life will look once you’ve achieved your goal.
• Have team members set their own developmental goals that are linked to the responsibilities of their job — this will increase their sense of commitment and empowerment.
• Ensure that your personal goals align with your values and personal mission statement.
• Make sure that team goals align with the organization’s goals.

4. Feedback.

In addition to selecting the right goals, be sure to solicit and listen to feedback. This will help ensure that you are progressing in the most effective way possible.

Not all feedback has to come from other people. If you’ve set clear goals, you can measure your progress and give feedback to yourself.

For example, if your goal was to save $10,000 by the end of the year, but part-way through the year you find that success isn’t possible, simply adjust the goal; perhaps you will reduce the automatic deductions from your bank account, and adjust the due date. It is much better to review your goal part-way through than to give up entirely. Just don’t give up too quickly, and make sure your adjusted goal is still challenging!

It’s ok to tinker with your goals. As you push yourself and try new things, you’ll gain experience that will help inform better decision making. You are an evolving person, and you should leverage your growing wisdom to maximize your effectiveness.

Tips:

• Schedule time once a week to analyze your progress and accomplishments. Look at what has and hasn’t worked, and make adjustments.
• Break down challenging milestones into smaller steps, and seek feedback when you reach each milestone.
• Schedule time to give regular feedback sessions to your team.

5. Task Complexity.

Invest time early on to understand the full scope of the endeavor, and break the goal into manageable components and delegating where possible. Remember to account for the learning curve you’ll face early on (any goal worth doing will involve plenty of learning).

It’s critical to your success that you acknowledge your limitations. People often burn themselves out and give up when they overstretch themselves early on.

Tips:

• Set deadlines that apply pressure, but are achievable.
• If you fall behind, don’t give up; reassess and modify your goals if necessary, and get back to it.
• If a team member is overwhelmed, pair them up with a more experienced colleague for coaching or support.

So What Does This Look Like?

When setting personal or team goals, be sure that each goal accounts for some or all of the principles above. Here are some examples of what that should look like:

• “I’ll score 90% on my economics test. To achieve this, I’ll perform 1 textbook problem every night for the next two weeks. I’ll get weekly feedback from my tutor and make sure I know how to correct my mistakes”.
• “I’ll save $10,000 by the end of the year. To achieve this, I’ll automatically transfer $420 from each paycheck to a savings account. I’ll set a household budget so I can meet my financial obligations while I build my savings. Each month, I’ll review my bank account statements and make sure I’m on track”.
• “I’ll reduce my body fat percentage from 16% to 12% in 60 days. To achieve this, I’ll track my food consumption each day to maintain a caloric deficit, and I’ll spend 1 hour in the gym four times per week. I’ll check my body fat percentage every Sunday and make adjustments to my diet and exercise to maintain progress”.

These clear and achievable goals provide motivation and specific plans for receiving feedback. The research tells us that, even if we aren’t 100% successful, we will perform much better than if we had made non-specific, easy goals.

Review of Key Points

That’s it! All of these principles we covered apply to team goals as well as individual goals. Here’s a recap of the key points you need to understand when setting goals:

• Set clear, challenging goals with plenty of milestones. Reflect on your progress often, and remember why you started.
• Make goals that are difficult to achieve, but not so hard that you aren’t likely to succeed.
• Implement accountability-measures such as a work-out buddy or real-world consequences linked to your success or failure
• Seek feedback often from someone to ensure you are on track. If you are a leader, provide feedback to others on their performance as it relates to the completion of team goals.
• Minimize the complexity of the task, and break your goals down into small chunks.

Research shows that, regardless of whether you fully succeed or not, by following the Five Principles, your goal setting will be more successful, and you’ll achieve more.

My name’s Chris, and my mission is to elevate standards and skills across the Management profession. I want managers to be better, and I’m taking personal responsibility to help them get better.

I train coaches and managers to build winning cultures through trust, pride, ownership, and empowerment. I’m especially interested in harnessing and developing the power of the front-line and entry-level staff. I enjoy science fiction, 80’s hair-metal and spending time with my partner and two orange cats.

I’d love to connect with you! Find me on Twitter and say “hi”.