The research is conclusive, stretching does not improve athletic performance. If your 4th grade P.E. teacher is stuck in your head and compels you to stretch, knock yourself out, but it is more likely to hurt your performance than help. The research is also starting to bear out what my experience coaching more than 100 entrepreneurial leadership teams has taught me: stretch goals for your employees don’t work either. I’ll spare you a total-nerd out on the subject and give you three quick points to support my hypothesis.
The pressure of a stretch goal causes people to neglect disciplines. Let’s say seven new deals is a reasonable target for your sales rep Jojo, but you give him a goal of nine to “get the most out of him.” Jojo will go right to the bottom of his sales funnel, doing everything he can to push late-stage deals across the line. What he won’t do is spend time building relationships and adding prospects to the top of his funnel, because they won’t pay off soon enough to help him. He might get lucky and hit the goal once, but he’ll suffer months and months of poor performance as he rebuilds his funnel. His performance will see-saw until one of you gets frustrated enough to end the relationship.
One of the strongest motivators of human behavior is consistency. When someone agrees to a 15-minute phone call to give their views on a political candidate, they’re much more likely to attend a political rally. When someone attends a rally, they’re much more likely to contribute to a campaign. Whether we realize it or not, we place a high value on behavioral consistency. If you give Jojo a reasonable goal and he hits it, he will see himself as someone that sets and achieves goals and will work hard to stay consistent with that self-image. As he gets better and your business gets better, you can work together to raise his goal to his optimal performance. On the other hand, if you “break” him with stretch goals, he’ll identify as someone that doesn’t hit goals and will start avoiding accountability. Then you’ll have to choose between tolerating poor performance or terminating someone you set up to fail.
Bad thinking. Think about your thinking: when you set a goal of nine deals for Jojo, what you are really saying is that if you were to set a goal of seven and he hit it, he would stop trying. If that’s what you believe, you’re trying to solve a people problem with a measurement, which is lazy and won’t work. Manage your people. When you have the right people, the excitement they get as they approach a goal will cause them to build steam and blow right past it.
