Shortcuts: The Perils of Setting Goals

Whether it be swimming with dolphins (an oddly common choice), writing a book, trekking through Nepal or all three, it’s not that the ideas are inherently bad. Rather, it is already too easy to reduce lives to a series of goals that we aim for, reach and then move on.

But goals are good, right? Aren’t we always told they’re the best way to get to where we want to be?

It turns out that that’s not necessarily true, personally and professionally.

I’ll get back to the bucket lists in a bit. But first, let’s look at what some of the research tells us about goals.

“We know goal-setting is a very powerful motivating force,” said Maurice E. Schweitzer, a professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Whether it’s a runner who wants to set a certain time or a salesperson aiming for a number of sales, goals give us meaning, purpose and guidance.”

But, said Professor Schweitzer, who co-wrote a paper in 2009 “Goals Gone Wild,” which appeared in the journal Academy of Management Perspectives, things got a little out of hand.

“The proponents of goals focused on the benefits of the goals, not the harm, and too many businesses went too far, saying ‘Here’s what we want you to accomplish,’ and implicitly saying, ‘We don’t care how you got there.’ ”

And that, he said, can lead to, among other things, unethical behavior.

Lisa D. Ordóñez, a professor of management and organizations at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, described experiments that proved this point. In one, participants were asked to create as many words as possible using letters — sort of like the game Boggle. In one group, the participants were given a goal of nine words, and if met, they would receive some money. In a second group, they were given a goal but no financial incentive. And those in the third group were simply told to try their best.

The students who participated were given a chance to check their words in a dictionary to make sure they were true English words. They threw out the worksheets, and turned in the answer sheet that only stated how many words they had finished.

But the academic researchers running the experiment had a code to match the worksheets with the answer sheets and discovered that both groups that had been given a goal of creating a certain number of words — whether or not money was involved — cheated 8 to 13 percent of the time. Those in the third group rarely did.

“It’s not that goals are bad,” said Professor Ordóñez, who was also a co-author of the “Goals Gone Wild” article. “We’re just saying be careful.”

For example, a lot has been written about tying teachers’ merit pay or jobs to how well their students do on standardized tests. The goal is to find a way to evaluate teachers’ abilities. But this has led to a number of problems, including, in some cases, teachers cheating to raise students’ scores.

“Part of the larger problem is, How do we measure performance?” she said. “We want to put our money where we are better served — I get that. But what we end up measuring is not always the most important thing but the easiest to measure.”

Gary P. Latham, a professor of organizational effectiveness at the University of Toronto, has long studied the positive effects of goals. It’s not that goals are bad, he said, but that problems arise when the values that underlie them and the process to achieve them are skewed.

“If you’re going to be overly reductionist, then you’re behaving stupidly,” he said. “You can have multiple goals for complex behavior.”

Professor Schweitzer agreed that it’s a problem when goals become too narrowly focused.