Fire and Forget Goal Setting

In this episode of The Leaders Kitbag, I unpack a common leadership pitfall I call ”fire and forget goal setting” – when we set big, ambitious goals for our team, then disappear, hoping for the best.

Setting the target isn’t enough. Support, guidance, and course correction are essential to turn bold goals into real achievements.

You’ll learn:

• Why goals that feel manageable to you may feel overwhelming to your team
• The psychological effect of stretch without support
• How to break big goals down to keep motivation high
• The importance of milestones, check-ins and the opportunity to reset
• A lesson from my own early career that highlights what not to do

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If you’d like support with leadership training, coaching or conference speaking, do drop me a line via chat@ben-morton.com, I’d love to help.

Podcast Transcript: Fire and Forget Goal Setting 

In today’s episode of The Leaders Kitbag, I want to discuss what I call ‘fire and forget’ goal setting and help you understand if you might occasionally be guilty of this approach yourself. 

Now, we might have set people in our team a big hairy audacious goal – or BHAGs, as they sometimes get called – but is that alone enough to guarantee success and ensure that the people in our team will actually deliver on that goal? 

The answer, most of the time, is of course, no. 

But the thing is, we do it. We fall into the trap of setting goals and then forgetting all about providing support. 

And when we do that, it’s a little bit like sending a group of 14-year-olds off on a two-day expedition in the wilderness, expecting them to arrive somewhere 40 miles away in two days’ time without having any checkpoints along the way. 

If we don’t have those checkpoints or milestones, whether we’re on an expedition or working towards big goals at work, we can easily lose our motivation and drift off course. 

The very first thing I want you to log into your head is this: what might seem like quite an achievable goal for you could be massively overwhelming for people in your team. 

As leaders and managers, we have the benefit of hindsight and experience. Many of the things we’re asking people in our team to do, we’ve done before, or at least have some familiarity with. 

So, a goal for us that seems like a stretch but is achievable could actually feel hugely intimidating, anxiety-inducing, or just too big and confusing for those in our team. 

And that means it’s our job as leaders to help the people we lead and manage to bridge that gap. 

We can accomplish this in several ways. 

The first and most obvious way is to help them break that goal down. Again, it’s often easy and obvious for us because of our experience, but those in our team haven’t got quite as much. So that task alone could be a lot harder for them. 

And of course, if they’re feeling overwhelmed or anxious by the scale of the goal, it’s going to be even harder for them to think logically and rationally and break it down themselves. 

As leaders, we can help by giving them some direction around the very first step, by creating a picture of the journey ahead and helping them understand what success looks like in a week, in four weeks, in two months, in a year. 

When we do that, it slowly starts to feel more realistic and more achievable for them, even if it is still stretching. 

The second thing we must do when setting these big, stretching goals is not to fire and forget. 

We need to make sure we are working with our people to review the goals, give them that shot of motivation in the arm, and help them reset or course correct. 

In my first job after leaving the military, I was given a set of incredibly stretching, ambitious weekly recruitment targets for a nine-month period. 

Six months in, it was plainly obvious that I had zero chance of hitting those weekly goals, and I was given absolutely no opportunity to reset them. 

The impact? 

It was massively, massively demotivating. More so because I had a big chunk of performance-related pay based on those weekly targets. 

So, you see, it’s critical for us to be there for the team – to support them, help them set up those regular milestones and check-ins, and understand that the situation and context changes. 

We might need to adjust the plan or shift some of the sub-targets or milestones along the way. 

And when we do that, we can help our team to achieve some of these big hairy audacious goals that we might be setting. 

That’s it for this episode of The Leader’s Kitbag. 

If you’ve got any specific questions or topics you’d like me to cover in future episodes, send them to me via email at chat@ben-morton.com, or drop them in the comments wherever you’re watching or listening.