S1E8 – Setting Challenging Goals

Show Notes

Goals. We all have them, but should we? Mon-Chaio and Andy examine the literature on goal setting and discuss how to set good, challenging goals.

Opening quote from “Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey”.

References:

• Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey: ⁠https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705⁠
• The High Performance Cycle: Standing the Test of Time: ⁠http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/0470013419.ch10⁠
• Participative Goal Setting in Self-Directed Global Virtual Teams: The Role of Virtual Team Efficacy in Goal Setting Effectiveness and Performance: ⁠https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2013.442

Transcript

Microphone-1: In short, when people are asked to do their best, they do not do so. This is because do your best goals have no external referent and thus are defined idiosyncratically. This allows for a wide range of acceptable performance levels. Which is not the case when a goal level is specified.

Mon-Chaio: hey everyone, thanks for joining us again today. We thought we would talk a little bit about goal setting and in the vein of goal setting. I think we should make it our goal, Andy, to keep this podcast, let’s say under 45 minutes.

Andy: Oh, that’s a challenging one. I don’t know, . Can you convince me of this, that we can do this in some way?

Mon-Chaio: I can’t. Let me start here and say, Post edit. Our episodes have been mostly under 45 minutes,

Andy: You’re right. We do have a lot of leeway in edit okay. Yeah, let’s do it. We’re gonna try to keep this one under 45 minutes. .

Mon-Chaio: So this may or may not be a challenging goal, but we’ve certainly given each other self-efficacy to believe that we can do this. Why did we decide to talk about goal setting? I think this actually came about because I was reading a relatively decent article which was an excerpt from a book or a summary of somebody’s book, and a piece caught my eye, which said, As a leader, it is important to challenge your people by setting challenging goals for them, and that is a way to get your peak performance. Another way to put it is if you don’t set challenging goals for your folks, you won’t get peak performance. So I thought that might be an interesting thing to explore both. A, do we believe that’s true? And B, if it is true, how do we go about doing that as leaders?

Andy: I think that is an interesting one. It’s something That I have to admit, I don’t have pat answers to. It is a challenging goal to talk about this subject, but , I’ve also done some research. We’ve passed around some papers and I think it’s given me a much better.

Model for thinking about this.

Mon-Chaio: a lot. Of people out there who say, look, you have to stretch your team. You have to set stretch goals for them. You have to challenge them as a leader and as a manager. Do we believe that? Do we believe that’s necessary for your team to achieve whatever optimal performance we could say, or whatever we can say is quote unquote optimal performance.

Andy: Oh, let me pull that apart a little bit. So I struggle with that idea of optimal performance and it has this very externalized, mechanistic view of a manager who’s like poking around in the guts of a machine. So it troubles me. However, I also know that me personally, if I don’t set goals, I don’t do quite as much.

I do believe that having goals does cause me to do more than I would’ve done otherwise. And part of it I would say is because it gives me direction, it gives me a challenge that I might enjoy. So yes, I can believe that teams and individuals will do better with goals. But Oh, that framing, that the standard literature gives of a, as you said it of the kind of like the manager has to set this goal because the machine won’t work optimally without it.

But what Is your reaction to it as well? Mon-Chaio.

Mon-Chaio: I do also have that visceral reaction if. Y’all who have listened to our podcast for a bit, you might be able to get a sense of the style of leadership that Andy and I prefer. It tends to be very participatory. It tends to be very bottoms up driven. It tends to be very empowering of the folks closest to the information on the ground, so

Andy: And viewing them not as parts, but as intelligent actors within a large, complex society and system.

Mon-Chaio: Absolutely. And insofar as we believe that, I think we also believe the fact that you can’t compose a hole from the parts and that there’s these systemic effects, right? And so you have to treat the whole as a whole in many cases, if that makes any sense. It is disconcerting for me to think about a leadership style where you say, oh, you all have decided on a goal. Now it is my job to come in and poke you and say no. what if we did this? Or what if we did that? That may not be the only way to do it, and we may figure out other ways to do it as we explore it, but that is certainly the way that I’ve seen my leadership do it. And honestly, I’ve done that in the past as well.

Hey, you Said you wanted to sign up 10 customers next month. What if we made that 15?

Andy: And that is actually a technique that I’ve heard sometimes, which can be useful as a thought exercise, I would say. Have you ever heard of this one, which is the break your mold of thinking with customers? We are, we have 10. What would it take for us to have a thousand. If you do a hundred times the number you currently have, because your current approaches won’t work.

And so it’s a useful way to think, but in terms of a goal I don’t think that’s necessarily the best way of choosing what your actual goal will be. ,

Mon-Chaio: And I think it’s challenging too. And when you’re doing a brainstorming exercise, I think that’s a relatively great idea. Can you bring that same mindset into goal setting where you’re saying, Hey, we’re setting goals for the next quarter but let’s switch off that goal setting part and go into the brainstorming mode to see, what different things we might be able to do to set a more challenging goal.

So I’m not sure may, maybe that works, maybe it doesn’t. We could talk a bit more about it. But I do think it is a different sort of mindset.

Andy: So when setting goals, I think many people probably will have heard of this inverted u curve that we hear about the kind of difficulty of the goal and the performance you get out of the system. That if you set the difficulty too low, your performance is low.

If you set the difficulty too high, your performance is low, and somewhere in between your performance is high. I think this is called the Ys Dodson Law. I don’t know how to pronounce that first name. Is it Ys?

Mon-Chaio: I believe it is. I’ve only read it and I’ve never heard it pronounced

Andy: All right. Let’s say that it’s Yurts the

Yurts

Mon-Chaio: if we’ve butchered your name,

urs,

Andy: we’re really sorry. It’s been around for a long time. It’s apparently a kind of like fundamental idea, but is it something we believe that we should go off of? And does it give it, does it really give us much guidance to work with?

Mon-Chaio: I think it gives us some, when you were talking about your personal experience, I experienced that too, right? I think if a goal is too easy, sometimes you set it aside or you don’t focus on it, you’re saying, oh, that’s easily achievable. I can do that at any time. Why worry about it?

And obviously we know if a goal is too difficult Such that it’s unattainable, the stress that you get from trying to meet, especially an externally set unattainable goal. I think everyone can agree that doesn’t help performance. Maybe not everyone can agree to that. I’ve certainly had bosses in the past, maybe you and I even shared a boss who tended to believe that if you set unachievable difficult goals and that motivates people, I don’t know, but I tend not to believe that.

Andy: But it is a common belief that we should talk about a little bit because I think many people will encounter it, which is the idea that if. If some is good, if some stretch is good, why isn’t more stretch better?

And I think we’ll get into it a little bit when we get into the research. But there’s this idea of self-efficacy,

Which says if you believe that you can do it, if you can understand yourself as being able to do it, then it’s okay.

But as we all know, there’s a point at which you just think this is a farce and you just tune out. So a goal set too hard doesn’t really help anyone achieve it.

Mon-Chaio: And so I do believe that there is something to this inverted you Yorks Dobson law type of thing, where a bit of stress in the system does, I think help for performance. And I actually, I’ve been reading this book called Leaders Eat Last which I don’t know if you’ve read. There are parts of it which are I think fantastic.

And I think there are parts of it that are,

eh, maybe I’ll skip it. But it talks a lot about how human chemicals come into play and how our evolution has structured us to behave with certain chemicals. And I do think that Having a little bit of stress inter introduces a little bit of cortisol into your system, right?

Which is not great in sustained or great amounts, but cortisol is a performance drug in some ways. So I think all of that combined together, personal anecdotes from you and me experiences as well as tying it back to some biology, it does get me to believe that introducing some stress into the system is necessary for us to whatever that optimal performance is for us to perform better, let’s

Andy: And you can understand that also just from the idea of how do we learn to be better on, on something is we push ourself to try to do something that we haven’t done before. And that is a stressful activity. And if we weren’t pushing ourself into that thing of not having, that we haven’t done before, we wouldn’t know some of those limits of what we can or can’t do.

Mon-Chaio: It sounds like we both are arriving on a consensus that we do believe a little bit of stress introduced into the system is a good thing.

Andy: Yep.

Mon-Chaio: Too much is a bad thing.

too little is a bad

thing, and we haven’t really talked about how to introduce stress into the system. I, is that the next thing we should discuss?

Andy: I think maybe how to introduce stress, and I think that will then lead on to. Where is that middle point that is useful?

Do I just walk in one day and with a baseball bat and say, perform better? Everyone hit your sales target with a baseball bat slam on a desk.

Is that the kind of stress we’re talking about?

Mon-Chaio: It could be. The funny thing is as we were sending articles around and thinking about this topic and I agree with Andy, I also did not have preconceived notions necessarily about this topic or Pat answers ready to give. And so I feel like this was one in which I had to do a little bit more reading and challenge my own thinking. There does not seem to be a lot written about how to introduce stress into the system. Not a ton at all. I think, and maybe this is too easy an answer. I think what I got out of the research is that people and teams will naturally introduce stress into the system and set difficult goals for themselves when a, they have a strong identity.

Slash trust with the team that they’re a part of, and B, when they and their team have high self-efficacy or high team efficacy.

Andy: And we should probably say a bit of what self-efficacy is or the corollary of team efficacy

Mon-Chaio: And I think you mentioned that a little bit, but just to, in case somebody, in case folks missed it,

self or team

Andy: it out.

Mon-Chaio: right? The concept of efficacy is your own belief or your team’s belief that something is possible to achieve to put another way that you and your team have the skills and ability to achieve something. Is that a good summary?

Andy: Yep, yep. The thing I have here highlighted in front of me is one’s perception of one’s ability to accomplish a specific task has been labeled by Bandura as self-efficacy. Bandura being first a researcher’s name.

Mon-Chaio: So getting back into it, now that we have a good definition of it, I would say, again, to summarize, having strong trust and identity with your team and then having strong self and team efficacy will naturally lead that group of individuals to set challenging goals, thereby self introducing stress into the system. That is, I think, my take from the research. What about you, Andy?

Andy: I think I agree with all of that. I got that. I would also, I would add a few other things that you want that self-efficacy, you also want specificity in the goal.

You want to avoid the situation where everyone has maybe a different interpretation or that it’s just vague. The thing in the research we found again and again was the do your best challenge.

Wasn’t very good. It wasn’t specific. It didn’t help people. And the other one was commitment. So someone may believe, or a team may believe that they can do it, but they may not have committed to it. And so that’s the other thing you need for that goal to actually be useful for creating that stress, creating that that reaching, which is they need to commit to it.

Mon-Chaio: And isn’t it interesting that these concepts of specificity and commitment, this might be our third time talking through a different topic where those come up, right? I certainly remember, for example, the BART model

Andy: Yep.

Mon-Chaio: of analyzing a team situation where you want to be specific about your roles and boundaries and you want commitment around your responsibilities.

So I think If you take nothing else away, there are these running themes through leadership that come up again and again in various different topics.

Andy: And now I feel like I’m gonna be a late night advertisement on television. And I’m gonna say, but wait, there’s more.

Mon-Chaio: Are you’re, I could see you though, you’re not wearing this Steve Jobs like black shirt and a black background.

Andy: No. I’ve got my standard plaid on. But wait, there’s more mcha because you also want to formulate your challenges, formulate your goals with a learning orientation.

We’ve heard about this before as the organizing for learning. You want to frame the goal. As they’re learning to do something better,

You can do what’s called performance orientation, which is things like set your sales to X or you’re gonna get 4 million in sales this quarter.

That would be a performance orientation. A learning orientation is going to be you’ll successfully take a customer through the spin model for selling a few times or like six times or something, because the idea is you’re having to learn a whole new technique. Now, both of those are valid ways of setting up a goal, but what the research found was that the learning orientation is more robust.

It more often than not, leads to higher performance.

Whereas the performance orientation, it can. But there’s many more variables that knock it down and cause it to not perform well.

Mon-Chaio: I think you stated that, but I want to. Pound on that. It’s not that you cannot set performance goals. You can and you should. They just have a higher chance of not leading to the performance that you hoped for. Whereas setting learning goals has a better chance, so they need to work in concert.

I also want to say that learning goals, and I had to look this up for myself because I didn’t really understand what learning goals were. I was like, does that just mean that you’re gonna go out and you’re gonna learn about something like, oh instead of saying, I’m gonna sign up 10 customers, I’m gonna learn about the wants and needs of some customers.

Andy: I’ve seen teams actually formulate their goals that way.

and It feels safe. It feels like a way of setting that we’re learning. And I’ve watched it also turn out to be like, pretty meh. It doesn’t feel like you’ve achieved anything at the end. So what did you find is a better way of formulating it?

Mon-Chaio: I think that your learning goals should also, should be proxy goals to your performance goals. And so they should have steps and they should connect to some sort of outcome. Be specific, right? In terms of specificity instead of being vague and saying, Hey, we’re just gonna learn because we’re learning.

Andy: right.

Mon-Chaio: And I think if you do that, then sometimes you’re learning goals while phrased differently. End up sounding a lot like, or laddering up or mirroring what you would set as performance goals pretty well.

Andy: I agree. And I think I have a quote from one of the papers that underlines what you’re talking about. So it says, A learning goal orientation seems to refer to the desire to undertake challenging tasks and acquire new knowledge and skills, whereas a performance goal orientation refers to a desire to ensure success by choosing tasks or goals that one can easily master and hence get praise from others for success.

Mon-Chaio: Ah, and so already we can see why learning goals are better, because if a performance goal is about choosing easy tasks, and we know that easy tasks don’t lead to performance because there’s not enough stress introduced into the system, then

there we are.

Andy: So your idea of laddering these things, which we’ll also get to on proximal and distal pretty soon. Your idea of laddering these things, I think is completely right. It’s about laddering up a set of skills that bring you to that final goal and get that performance that you’re looking for.

And so the thing is that it’s not necessarily gonna be hugely different in the actual goal that’s set, but it’s in the framing of how you’re approaching this goal.

Mon-Chaio: I think we have a good framework, right? Trust and identity. Strong trust and identity to the team. . Strong self and team efficacy, right? Spec, specificity in your goal

Commitment to your goals. And the last one would be, what did we just talk about? That is slipping my mind now,

Andy: Learning.

Mon-Chaio: right? And having, focusing on learning goals not to the exclusion of performance goals, but not forgetting about learning goals.

.

So as a framework, I think that’s interesting. And as a leader you can say, I’m gonna set up my organization or my team to be able to do all of these things. But I still don’t think that we’ve answered the question of, so your team does all of these things and comes out with a goal. Now what do you do? Poke them. No, that’s not it. That’s not it. Can you do better? Can you do better? We haven’t really touched on that

Andy: How do you actually select the goal? ’cause that’s really part of the goal selection process that you’re asking about is they come up and they say, all right, this,

And you say, I don’t like that.

So one of the things that came up multiple times that they researched quite a bit was the question of, are assigned goals better than participant part, oh, I’m gonna mess up this word all the time.

Ly assigned goals

Or.

Mon-Chaio: set

Andy: Set goals,

are assigned goals better than participatively set goals or are self set goals better? And that was a big, kind of murky area.

And basically the research appeared to be, it actually doesn’t matter. They all had in the end the same amount of kind of like randomness or variance in whether or not people reached the end or not hit the performance that they were looking for.

But I think there was a bit of like self set goals were often seen as set lower than assigned goals.

So I would say that for my style that particip set goals, you’re gonna get the best outcomes, as a real world thing, because so often we just don’t know what’s actually possible. And a purely assigned goal, it’s missing out on a lot of information.

So I think that having a conversation with the individual or the team possibly anchoring on some initial assigned goal proposal and then working through it, because what that also allows you to do is to have that conversation to frame it. For that learning orientation to make sure it is specific, it’s clear what’s really being asked.

And to work out that narrative for self-efficacy. If whether or not the team or the individuals believe that they can do this. And that self-efficacy to me gives you the point at which you might be able to push a little bit or pull back. If you’re hearing people saying, oh yeah, that would be easy.

You might say what would be a little harder? Then? Is there a point where it becomes difficult? Or if they’re saying, if they’re doing the standard I know I can’t say no so I’m not going to really engage and I’m just gonna say yes kind of conversation. You need to listen for that and say, alright, I’m not hearing a strong commitment.

’cause that’s what we want. Commitment. How do we pull this back so that it’s something that you really believe we can do?

Mon-Chaio: I like that level of thinking. When I think about this concept of self set assigned or participatively set goals, I do come back to the research a little bit because to your point, each of those has its own set of values. It’s not one is necessarily better than the other. There was a piece of research that showed that it depended based on what they call locus of control. Why don’t we start with what is locus of control? In psychology, locus of control is what you believe controls what affects the events in your life. And so there are two locusts of controls. An external locus of control means that you as a person generally believe that outside factors are affecting what is happening to you. It could be as vague as fate perhaps, or it could be as specific as I didn’t get that promotion because that person didn’t like me. Or That the the strategy wasn’t well set by leadership, and so this project was doomed to fail. Something like that would be a external locus of control, an internal locus of control, you might imagine would be the exact opposite of that, which is a person who mostly believes that incidents in their life are controlled by themselves.

Oh, I didn’t get that promotion because I didn’t build strong enough relationships with leadership, things like that. And obviously people are not, you’re not one or the other binary as these things always work. But you can categorize yourself mostly into one bucket or another. And what they found was that for folks who were primarily external locus of control, again, that’s, they believe outside factors primarily influenced the events in their life. Assigned goals worked really well for them and self set goals did not. In fact, self set goals worked worse than control. And the opposite was true for people that had internal locus of control. So for people that believed that they were primarily responsible for the incidents that happened in their life, self set goals were great for them. In fact, they were able to set challenging goals for themselves, whereas assigned goals, they did much more poorly on even relative to control. So I think there is a, there is something to take away here about when you can use assigned versus self set goals.

Andy: Okay do you have some ideas about how I would know which one to use with a group?

Mon-Chaio: I think that although the research doesn’t say that, I think you could probably assess the locus of control for a group as well. I. My sense is that if you know your team to be fairly self-sufficient you’ve seen them take responsibility for their actions. Now this isn’t to say all of the stuff around self-efficacy and whatnot, which we will touch on again because it’s so important is unimportant.

But irrespective of that, if you’ve seen that they are generally internal locus of control for your entire team, I would say you could do a lot less pushing for those folks if they have a self set goal. Many times you could probably take it as, yeah, this is challenging, and they are pushing themselves and they’re introducing stress into their system. Whereas if you have a group which is more, oh, I don’t know why we failed here. This external team didn’t deliver this a p i, there was no way we could have achieved that. And that’s their primary locus of control. Then I think it’s imperative for the manager or the leader to recognize that and perhaps use assigned goals for those folks, even more so than the participatory set goals. Say, Hey, look, these are the set of goals that, I’ve decided on. And not that you don’t get feedback, but that we’re primarily gonna execute against these.

Andy: Yeah, I think that sounds like a really reasonable way of thinking through it is it’s paying attention to the needs of the team is, I think a way of thinking about it is what are, what do they need to succeed?

Mon-Chaio: We should also mention that groups aren’t static. And this is again, another topic which we’ll hear again and again through all of these podcasts. And so just because you allowed your group to self set goals last quarter because you thought they had internal locus of control, doesn’t mean that because of the context of next quarter assigned goals aren’t the right way to go because they may change, right?

Based on the context.

Andy: Because one of those things, getting back to the self-efficacy is about their history. The story they tell themselves about how good they are at performance, how much they can learn, how far they can stretch themselves. And if that team had a. Quarter where nothing seemed to work right, everything went wrong.

They may have lost some of that self-efficacy and they might have shifted their locus of control to saying look, we’re now a victim of the external world. Nothing we did seem to matter.

You might need to bring them along support them a little. And it might be partly doing an assigned goal.

Mon-Chaio: And for those folks like me who don’t really like black and white answers, because we don’t think the world is black and white, and who may fall back to saying y X or Y if I just do participatory set goals and just always do that will that will solve all my problems. I think there are challenges in a leader coming in and participatory setting goals as well.

Two that I would watch out for one is that identity piece. Remember, it’s important for those folks to have built strong trust, bond and identity. And so if you’re a leader who’s on the ground and who they can identify with, then I think that being a partner in that goal setting really helps or can help. But if you are, again, in the boundary thing outside of AAA boundary, right? Especially as your orgs get larger and larger, and you don’t have that identity built with your team because maybe you run seven teams, right? And so team two is like, he doesn’t really belong to team two. He’s just like overall manager of seven teams, right?

Then it’s probably. More detrimental to come in because you haven’t established that identity. They don’t identify with you. You don’t really identify with them. And so coming in and really trying to participate to leave you set goals with those folks probably is not a great idea.

Andy: Yeah you’re gonna trigger all sorts of social dynamics that will probably work against you.

Mon-Chaio: And then the last one that I will touch on and we will touch on, not just this part of it, but more because it’s so important, is that team efficacy or self-efficacy thing. Because if you come in and by your actions, whether intentional or not, you are reducing their efficacy, you are gonna have a very difficult time getting a successful goal, successful challenging goal out of that team. And I say, Despite your actions, because a lot of times leaders come in wanting to increase people’s efficacy, but doing it in a terrible way, right? Somebody coming and be like, oh look Joe over there was able to get that done in six weeks. You are better than Joe. You should be able to get that done. Or saying patently false things or things that people can’t believe, things like there is no way you all could absolutely fail. You got this. You guys are the best. You folks are, the top engineering team in the company. Efficacy has to be team and self-believed right to

that Of commitment.

And to your definition of efficacy that you read earlier. And if your team can’t believe it and if you can’t transmit something in a way that they can believe you’re actually doing harm when you come in and try to. Encourage the team that they can meet a goal. So I think those are the two pitfalls that I would see in particip set goals.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah. If there’s not the belief that the person helping to set the goal should be there and also that they are part of that goal in some way, is that it? Because I’m trying to figure this out.

The person who’s coming in from on high isn’t part of the narrative that the group has about their ability to do these things. And so it’s highly likely that the stories that they tell or the things that they try to pull out to, to participate in setting that goal won’t be believed and might be actively distrusted

Or when they should have pushed back the psychological safety, something that we still actually need to talk about more in depth. The psychological safety might not be there to challenge and dispute. And so there, there’s a social dynamics, as I said before, there’s a social dynamics problem that starts to show up.

In whether or not those open and honest conversations are actually going to happen.

Mon-Chaio: Yes,

Andy: If you have somehow amazingly created a company in which the culture is that, that c e O can come down over multiple layers of management hierarchy and talk to an individual team and collaboratively set a goal, I want to hear from you.

I want to hear what you did because that sounds very interesting and also very hard to make. And I’d be interested to know how you did it. Probably very context dependent and something that almost no one else could replicate, but it would still be interesting to hear about.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah talk to us. We will invite you on our show and we’ll do our first. We don’t generally like to do interviews partly because of the reason we sat in our last episode where, there are so few experts I think in the world and often interviews make people come across as experts. Like my way is the right way and that’s why I’m being interviewed.

Which I don’t generally believe, but folks with interesting stories, anecdotes, that want to explore them. And that would be a very interesting story. I’d love to know the context of your company. The space, how many people you have, the type of hiring culture you put together. That would just be fascinating for me.

Andy: Yeah. And the reason I said that kind of like most people wouldn’t be able to replicate it is because this is actually one of the biggest problems in management, I would say, is this idea of what worked somewhere else will work here.

It’s almost completely untrue because so often what worked there was a product of the culture of the long path of culture that organization has taken that allowed them to do something in particular.

And since no other group has taken the same path, it’s very unlikely that what they’re able to do now is something that you can just pick up and do in your own organization and get the same results.

Mon-Chaio: I will just mention that that is the first strong leadership lesson I learned just a couple years into leadership that we cannot replicate what worked elsewhere.

Andy: yep I’ve learned that as well and it still makes me sad.

Mon-Chaio: It really does. It really does. Yeah but I learned it so strongly that, it was 15, 20 years ago now that I learned this, and I still use it as an example. I still think about it a lot. Yeah, it was very strong learning experience for

Andy: Yeah. So that said, let’s talk about research and what research can teach us about what we can do in our organizations.

Mon-Chaio: Sounds great. And maybe the way we end this is by focusing on self and team efficacy.

I think at the end of the day, what research tells us is that efficacy plays such a big, and I would argue you may disagree with me, Andy, an outsized role in goal setting, and if you only did one thing to make sure that your team and organization set challenging goals, it is to increase their efficacy.

Would you agree with that or would you disagree?

Andy: I think I’d agree with that. Pay very close attention to the efficacy because it’s gonna control so much about what you do.

Mon-Chaio: So then let’s talk through that. As a leader, how do you increase efficacy?

Andy: I think one is you cultivate the story that they tell themselves. This is like on the feedback type thing. You give them feedback. Oh, that is another important thing about goals. For goals to work well, they need feedback on where they are so they can course correct.

Andy: One important part of that is ’cause I knew I needed to get back to this at some point, the distal and the proximate goals.

So a distal goal is the distant goal. It’s like the final goal. That might be a real challenge. And there, if you just look at that self-efficacy may stumble. People may look at that and say, I have no idea you. So what you do is you help to break it down into what’s called proximate goals. So milestones along the way or things to try to tackle to get there.

And then they build a sense of efficacy through hitting those proximate goals. That’s one other way of building self-efficacy.

Mon-Chaio: So there are other ways, obviously to build efficacy. I think you mentioned one Andy probably in private conversation or whatever, which is training. Right? And I think that’s a clear way to build up the skills of your team, right? They have higher efficacy when they feel like they’ve been trained up to the task. So I think that’s a way to build efficacy. Another one that I found really interesting. Was what they call vicarious experiences. And one of the research papers suggested that what you can do is record teams, other teams, or this particular team in doing task related activities, and then editing this video to only show the positive parts of that and emphasizing what they did.

This gets back into the feedback mechanism as well, where this paper says, look, what you should do is give feedback that rewards the behaviors that are doing well, and that builds efficacy.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: so I think interestingly, those the video thing I had never actually thought about. So

Andy: Yeah, I heard that. I heard that and I thought it was a little strange, but it’s worth a try.

Yeah. Why not?

Mon-Chaio: And the last thing would be really to your point that you talk about a lot, paying attention to the team. There are a lot of states, effective states which can make them less effective and decrease their efficacy. Things like anxiety and whatnot. And so really paying attention, especially during the goal setting part, whether those are creeping back in and trying to eliminate those outside of the team, I think is really important.

Andy: One other one came to mind. I. This one very specific tactic for a very specific type of work. If we’re talking about software teams, and if we’re talking about teams of engineers or infrastructure engineers who run operating software, so production systems one part of efficacy can be their belief in whether or not they can actually affect the system when it has problems. And so doing like a failure Fridays or chaos monkey type activities where the team actually causes problems and in that through a practice run, learns how to bring it back up. It’s it’s like the distal and proximate stuff. Again, the distal goal is the, when the site goes down, we can bring it back up.

The proximate goal is we’re gonna cause a portion of the site to go down so that we can bring it back up. And hopefully do this in a safer environment so that some of that pressure is gone. But that kind of like practice of the activity can be very useful in building that self-efficacy. Seeing that they can perform this activity, they can do this thing.

Mon-Chaio: And I think it’s important to note here that efficacy is both a long-term and a short-term thing. I think for leaders, there are a lot of things that you need to do continuously, like the Chaos Monkey situation like the training situation that you can’t do at a point in time to increase efficacy right then and now.

Andy: What we’re in an outage situation. I need to increase efficacy. Right now, people need to believe that they can fix this, but it’s too late. If they don’t believe that they can. At that point you’re gonna struggle.

Mon-Chaio: I think interesting to me and counter to generally the way that I do things, I do think that I’ve realized that there’s short term ways to raise efficacy that are really valid during the goal setting periods. And I’ll use an example that’s not in goal setting. So a lot of large companies have these things called company. Like a company m p s or this concept of how is the company doing? How is my manager doing? Am I happy with the situation? That sort of review process, culture

Andy: Oh, those kind of employee surveys,

Mon-Chaio: Exactly. And many actually pretty good leaders I have found will tactically remind their teams of the negatives they said last time and all of the stuff the leader has done for them in the three months or six months leading up to the survey that have actually improved those negatives such that they don’t forget, Hey, I was listening to you and things have gotten better.

And we’ll do these meetings two weeks before the next survey or one week before the next survey or whatever. And it Gets results, right? People don’t forget that things have happened and they’re generally happier and whatnot. And while I dislike those sorts of actions in general I don’t do them enough because of that, I think they’re valuable.

I don’t do them enough because I dislike them, but I should do them more. I think this is a case where as you’re doing goal setting and as you get into setting goals, especially if you want your team to set challenging goals, you should do more of these short-term efficacy things to raise their efficacy, reduce stress, plan your team activity around that time, perhaps raise the amount of positive feedback you’re giving your team around their capabilities, right?

You don’t want to pander them, but when you see, especially stuff that they do well based on their capabilities, remind them of that, Hey, I noticed that your debugging skill was so great that you were able to catch this thing in two minutes or whatever. I think it’s a great opportunity to do that.

Andy: Providing feedback on a regular basis timely and geared towards something that they’ve done well that you’d like to see more of and will make them feel good that they actually can do the job that they’re being asked to do.

Mon-Chaio: I would just say that we want to be a little bit more targeted than that. We both believe in leaning into strengths. We both believe in structuring growth based more on positive feedback perhaps than negative feedback.

I would simply say we want to be more intentional in the goal setting times to give feedback, especially that will increase efficacy to the particular goals that you want them to set. So there are a lot of feedback around things like collaboration or, you’re a really good strategic thinker or whatever, but if your goal is specifically around, Hey, I need to, I know that we need to create this challenging technical system that requires a lot of expertise around cloud infrastructure and scale. My, and maybe you disagree with me. My learning here is that I want to, during the portions leading up to that goal setting activity, really enforce that the team is really good at scale.

Really good at cloud systems,

Andy: Assuming that they

are,

Mon-Chaio: of course, assuming that they are, you don’t want to be untrue even if they’re not though, you want them to have efficacy.

So you want to say the true things

Andy: The, yeah you want to find the positive, true things that you know that they’re able to do that’s related to this goal

Mon-Chaio: Exactly. Exactly.

Andy: so that they have a clear picture of their own ability to do things. And I think that’s important because there is a bias that most of us have to downplay our abilities and think my abilities don’t matter in this case, and so this will help them see No, actually the abilities you have, they matter in this case.

So let’s keep that in mind.

One last thing before we go Mancha, is I wanna talk about commitment,

and specifically a quote that I have from one of these papers, which is when commitment is lacking, goals have little or no effect on behavior. Commitment is often easy to obtain in both laboratory and field settings because the goal is perceived as legitimate by the participants.

And I think there’s a very important thing in there. We were just talking about self-efficacy and how important self efficacy is towards setting challenging goals.

What we didn’t get was that if you wanna set any goal that actually modifies people’s behavior, they have to commit. Because if they don’t commit, you’re not gonna change any behavior.

So let’s talk a little bit, and I don’t think it’ll take very long, about how do you get commitment? How do you get that commitment to a goal?

Mon-Chaio: Interesting. I like that you brought this up. We talked about commitment very briefly when we talked about specificity and commitment, but you didn’t bring up that quote then, and I think that quote is so important. I. So how do we get commitment? I think in participatory set goals, you sort of are halfway there.

Would you say that?

Andy: I would say so. Yeah. Because by definition what you come out of that with, there is at least some level of commitment to

Mon-Chaio: And in self set goals, then you get a higher level of that. They set the goals for themselves, so as long as they didn’t feel undue pressure or whatnot, you would say that they’re committed.

Are there tactics that you can use to increase the level of commitment in participatory set goals?

Andy: I would say it comes down to the second sentence of the quote that I read. I. Which is that the goal is perceived as legitimate by their participants. It’s about that legitimate, that people believe that this goal in some way matters to something that they care about. And so it’s a goal that they themselves have said, yes, this really matters.

We want to do this. Or it’s a goal that they can easily understand the story to which it gets to, like what’s the company objective at the moment. It’s that they’re not being taken down a, on a wild goose chase somewhere, that when they finish it, there’s some praise at the end, or there’s a monetary bonus or there’s something, there’s some reason for them to believe that what they’re doing, others care about.

I think is one aspect of it that, that gets the, that kind of like external part the more internal commitment I think. I think that is then providing the story for why this goal matters and help and probably even better, including them in the creation.

You wanna do almost a co-creation of the story of this narrative. Why does this goal matter? Why is it legitimate?

Mon-Chaio: I like all of those. I think the co-creation of the story is so important when we talk about O K R setting, K P I setting, you always want to do it collaboratively. I want to add one other thing. There was this researcher named Wilson. Wilson is his last name,

Andy: Is he a volleyball?

Mon-Chaio: and he was not stranded on a desert island for four years. He coined these five core values when goal setting that he said would increase the likelihood of achieving success. I like that, but I also think it increases commitment. And let me run this by you and see what you think. So his five values were integrity, responsibility, fairness, hope, and achievement. And I think if you’re setting goals that play into those values and people believe in those values, we talked about the achievement part of it, right?

A valuable. What is it in a valuable end state or that they’re gonna be rewarded. But I think the other stuff matters too. Do they have a responsibility for this particular goal?

Do they feel responsibility towards this goal? Do they feel like it is fair?

And then of course there’s hope and integrity as well. I hadn’t thought about that before. And so when I read it, I thought, these are really interesting. And I have definitely been in places where goals would not be considered as having integrity

Not considered as fair, right? Like, why am I doing this goal that team biffed this X, Y, and Z and now I’m responsible for their thing, or whatever the case may be. And I think all of that reduces commitment as well.

Andy: Yes. That’s that reminds me of a quote that I sent you and I commented on. The goal performance relationship is influenced by external rewards only when people believe that the rewards are attainable. High dissatisfaction occurs when rewards are perceived to be or perceived as unfair as too impersonal, or as punishment as can be the case when high performers are consistently assigned more work than low performers.

So yes if people’s goals are seen as a punishment because they’re too good,

It won’t be seen as legitimate and they won’t commit to it.

Mon-Chaio: Absolutely.

Andy: All right, so let’s aim for a wrap up here, Mon-Chaio. Now let’s assume we’ve got this listener. It’s a big assumption that we’ve got a listener and and they’ve just jumped to minute, let’s say 45, that we’ve edited this down to 45 minutes, and that’s where we are right now. What do you think that they should hear having skipped everything else? What do you think they should hear as tactics that they can take away and used with their team to help them set challenging goals?

Mon-Chaio: I think what I would want them to take away is that while there is value in a manager coming down, or a leader coming down and giving a goal to people, In certain contexts, and while there is value in the team setting their own goals independently in certain contexts, most of the time you probably want to do this jointly. And joint setting of goals, what we call participatory set goals only work when the team identifies strongly with each other and they feel like they have high team efficacy. So a leader’s job then in making sure that their team sets challenging goals, that a improve performance is one, to make sure that the boundary of that team is something that has high identity and trust. Two, improving efficacy. And three, making sure that the goals have strong commitment through what we talked about with values or fairness and that sort of stuff. And when improving efficacy, there are both short-term and long-term things that you should do to improve efficacy. The long-term things such as training, proximate goals, that sort of thing I would say are long term and the short term things around making sure the team feels confident about their abilities during the goal setting period.

By giving them positive feedback around the skills that they need to accomplish the next set of goals, as well as reducing their anxiety by giving them time off or team events and that sort of thing to put them in a positive mindset. As they go into goal setting, that was a little bit of a long summary, but I think touches most of the points.

Did I miss anything?

Andy: I was going through it in my mind as you went, and I can’t think of anything you’ve missed. I think that covered it pretty well.

I hope that our conversation was illuminating for anyone who was listening. I found it really interesting going through this. It gave me a new perspective that I hadn’t had on goals before. We’ll put a lot of links, I think more than normal in the show notes so that people can follow up on some of these research papers.

I found them all pretty easy reading. They were not dense scientific papers. So I hope you all can go and take a gander at them and see what you can get out of them. So thank you, cia. It’s been a joy.

Until next time.

Mon-Chaio: Until next time.