A couple of decades ago I was a very junior project manager in a multinational organisation. It was the first time in my professional life that I’d experienced proper written down rules and processes. I was marvellously impressed. It seemed like they’d thought of everything. For example, twice a year we’d set professional goals for ourselves, working closely with our line managers. I did my prep reading, read my performance reviews, and booked in my goal-setting session with my boss.
It did not go well. I went into the meeting with an ambitious list of goals and a sense of professional pride, thinking my boss was going to be terribly impressed. He was not. He took one look at my handwritten goals and scribbled something across them in red biro (it was a long time ago, as I said). His note said “Not SMART”. He explained that a goal wasn’t a goal until it was Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. None of my goals had these qualities. “Look,” he said, tapping the paper. “‘Get better at managing projects through periods of uncertainty’. How are we going to measure that? How long will it take you to achieve that goal?” With the wind well and truly taken out of my sails, I trudged away to knock my goals into shape and make them SMART.
But no matter how hard I tried, I could never hit every letter of the SMART acronym for my goals. For every one that I worked out how to measure, there was one that absolutely resisted measurement. Some were nicely specific, and some were kind of hand-wavy. Some were definitely achieveable, others I just wasn’t sure about. So I fudged it. I dropped the goals that resisted SMARTening and re-wrote the others until they ticked all the SMART boxes. It was massively depressing, and made me feel completely indifferent about them.
Recently I sat in as an observer on a coaching session, and I saw the same thing happen all over again. The coach, new to the role and eager to follow best practice, swooped on the client within a few moments of the conversation starting, and demanded to know what their goal was. The client began to express themselves, talking about a long-held ambition of theirs. The coached jumped in. “Let’s turn that into a SMART goal, shall we? You’re more likely to achieve it that way.” The client nodded, although I could see that the gleam in their eye had dulled as soon as the conversation turned from ambitions to specific and measurable. I sighed (privately, to myself), momentarily re-living my goal-setting grief of the past.
It’s understandable, and I’m not trying to demonise that coach or indeed coaching in general. Goal-setting practice in coaching has been largely imported from the corporate management toolkit, and SMART is one of those tools. I’ve come to realise that it’s often not the right tool for the goal-setting job. SMART’s five criteria don’t embrace the sheer variety and rich complexity of human goals. When we talk about what we want to achieve, we just don’t express them in those nice, neat corporate terms. We feel our goals in ways that are sometimes hard to put into words. Trying to sharpen a deeply-felt goal with a corporate tool like SMART is like trying to chop down a tree with a scalpel.
So how can we get to grips with our goals more effectively? I thought back to my “Get better at managing projects through periods of uncertainty” goal from all those years ago, and realised that it wasn’t as sloppy or vague as my manager was implying. It was a learning goal being forced into the shape of a performance goal. I was trying to get better at something. The SMART form of a goal wants evidence that I performed something. That’s not the same as learning something.
Ruth Price’s chapter on goal-setting in The Coaches’ Handbook lays out a total of sixteen dimensions along which goals actually vary: approach/avoidance, proximal/distal, concrete/abstract, conscious/unconscious, and a dozen more. When I read it for the first time, I began to understand the beautiful and rich complexity of human goals. I was going to surface them all in this article, but in all honesty sixteen is too many to hold in your head at once. So I’ve picked out the five I think will help the most when you - or your client, if you’re coaching - need to get to grips with your goals.
1. Is this goal actually mine?
Make a distinction between goals chosen freely by you in pursuit of an ambition that’s actually yours, versus goals you’ve adopted because someone else wants you to do them. We’re always more motivated by goals that have come from within.
Watch out for adopted goals that get under your skin and begin to feel like they were chosen by you all along. If a goal was handed to you in a 360 review or a 1:1, and you check in on it once a week with the boss, it’ll quickly begin to feel like it was yours all along.
This is the question I’d ask first, because if the answer is no, the other four don’t matter much. There
2. Am I moving toward something, or away from something?
Approach goals name a state you want to reach. Avoidance goals name a state you want to escape.
Stop being so disorganised and run my week in a way I can be proud of really describe identical behaviour, but they don’t feel the same when you’re trying to achieve them. Goals phrased in the language of avoidance tend to keep your attention on the thing you’re trying to get away from.
If you find yourself expressing goals in terms of escape or avoidance, try to invert them and express them instead in terms of what you want to move towards.
3. Am I trying to perform, or trying to learn?
Performance goals are about executing well. Learning goals are about getting better at something you don’t know how to do yet.
This is the distinction that finally dawned on me some decades after my junior project manager years. “Get better at managing projects through periods of uncertainty” was always a learning goal, not a performance goal. When the real goal is learning, demanding SMART-like performance measures won’t make it a better goal. Instead, elaborate the goal in terms of the learning activities that will need to happen.
Learning goals also tend to hold up better when the task is genuinely hard, because a difficult thing will pique your interest when you’re trying to learn it, whereas trying to perform something that you simply don’t know how to do feels like you’ve failed before you’ve even started.
Ask yourself a simple question: am I trying to get good at this, or just show that I’ve accomplished it? If it’s the first, it’s learning. If it’s the second, it’s performance. Both are legit, they’re just not the same goal. That means you have to treat them differently.
4. Can I actually influence this?
Some goals depend on other people’s behaviour or actions. Get my manager to trust me with more scope is only partly your goal for this reason. Whether your manager decides to increase their trust in you is entirely up to them.
Don’t abandon goals that are partly outside your control. Instead, hunt down the parts that are inside your control: how you respond, what you can show, what questions you ask, what support you request, and build the goal around those. But be aware, a goal whose achievement is substantively decided by someone else will feel like failure even when you’ve kept your end of the bargain.
5. Does the small thing serve the big thing?
Goals stack. There’s usually an ambition or an abstract goal somewhere at the top, which is the big hand-wavy reason that it matters to you, and then a pyramid of smaller ones below that are supposed to help you get there.
Two things go wrong. Sometimes the concrete goals don’t stack nicely: you’re busily getting small goals ticked off, but they don’t add up to the big thing you really care about. And sometimes the small concrete goals get so absorbing that the big ambition vanishes in the clouds and you kind of forget about it.
The check: ask yourself what this goal is in service of, and would achieving it actually deliver that?
What to do with the answers
Note what these five have in common: not one of them asks you to scalpel-sharpen your goal in the way SMART does.
They ask whether it’s yours, which direction it points, what kind of goal it is, whether it’s within your sphere of influence, and what it adds up to. If a goal isn’t coalescing, the answer will more often be in one of those than in the absence of a SMART metric.
And when SMART is the right tool, because the goal genuinely is yours, pointed the right way, the right type, in your control, serving something real, then by all means make it specific and measurable and everything. That’s what SMART is for.
This piece draws on Ruth E. Price’s chapter on goal-setting in The Coaches’ Handbook (ed. Jonathan Passmore). The five questions are my own selection and framing; her taxonomy is considerably richer, and if you work with clients on goals, it’s worth reading in full.