It’s Time to Do Away with SMART Goals

First, “the boss knows best” paternalism no longer works. Many global companies are transforming into businesses free from top-down structures. Respect for expertise, not centralized authority, results in open-source communities that create great technologies. Furthermore, innovative companies give employees off-the-clock time and free resources, and benefit from their efforts. These environments thrive due to decentralized action, and SMART goals cannot add tov and inevitably subtract from—these types of structures.

Second, companies no longer compete individually, but as members of networks: Apple, for example, couldn’t create the iPhone, or Airbus the A350 aircraft, without collaborating with outsiders. Complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity are unavoidably present in these situations, since network members are geographically dispersed, and have varying strategies, processes and cultures. These enable problems and opportunities to regularly propagate with blinding speed. By implicitly assuming a staid environment in which immutable goals are appropriate, every constituent element of SMART hinders appropriate action.

Let’s break down and discuss each section of the acronym individually.

Specific. Experiments show that in turbulent environments, people assigned specific goals actually tend to miss key events that occur simultaneously. So, consider two otherwise identical companies that evaluate their managers very differently. One company gives each manager five specific quarterly goals and authorizes them to decline any unrelated work. The other authorizes its managers to improvise to respond to changing business conditions. Given today’s dynamic business environment, which of these two company’s shares would you buy?

Measurable. Senior executives asked to identify a single factor whose absence would destroy most modern businesses tend to pick—relatively quickly—an immeasurable value: trust. They’re right, since people wouldn’t get much done if they had to personally check every input they got. This suggests that the blind faith in Kelvin should at least be tempered by the idea attributed (perhaps aphoristically) to Einstein: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”

Achievable. Something that is achievable can still produce inadequate outcomes. As Volkswagen’s current scandal illustrates, such goals can engender ethical lapses, especially if they are specific and time-bound. Even if ethics aren’t at issue, they can limit, not enhance, organizational performance. That’s because externally imposed, ambitious but achievable goals inevitably embody carrot-and-stick properties. These—as Daniel Pink has brilliantly communicated in a YouTube video—don’t engender better intellectual work, which benefits instead from people developing mastery in a field and acting autonomously therein. Not surprisingly, managers, engineers and scientists who set their own (ambitious) goals have produced many of the world’s great innovations.

Relevant. Goals are supposed to be ‘Relevant’ to the specific individuals for whom they are set. This criterion seems reasonable: why set a goal that isn’t deliverable by the person being evaluated? Ironically, relevance engenders a widespread problem: silos that hinder collaboration. For example, sales functions accountable for customer satisfaction often clash with supply network functions accountable for inventory. Each has goals relevant to its tasks. Suppose we added an inventory level goal for sales managers and a customer demand fulfilment goal for supply network managers. These would be irrelevant to each silo’s “real” work, but would force them to collaborate to produce better organizational outcomes.

Timely. How could ‘timely’ not be legitimate? Very simply because it has become code for “as soon as possible.” Speed has become a virtue that trumps every other meaningful organizational goal. Textbooks teach the blind pursuit of “first-mover advantage” despite irrefutable examples of its limits. When did Apple last launch a truly first-in-the-world product? Didn’t Yahoo! enter the search business before Google? Didn’t MySpace and Friendster launch before Facebook? How are Chinese and Indian multinationals, Johnny-come-latelies to world markets, giving established Western firms a run for their money? Equating ‘Timely’ to speed irreparably harms creativity, effectiveness and even efficiency.

So what’s the solution?
First, ask yourself whether your business faces dynamic or staid conditions. If the former, consider, at the least, becoming less SMART. Second, assess which jobs truly warrant the limiting of discretion and which would benefit from flexibility, collective judgment, risk-taking and experimentation.

Retain SMART goals for the former. For all others, truly involve the affected people in setting non-specific, qualitative goals that can inspire them to achieve “can’t be done” challenges. Ensure that time is only one of several criterions at stake. Add only truly unavoidable SMART goals, making sure they aren’t overly constraining.

Stated simplistically, managers ensure people get their work done, while leaders inspire people to enthusiastically contribute discretionary effort to their work. Being SMART might make you a good manager. But it won’t make you a leader.