Friday Notes, April 16, 2021
Dear Friends –
One of the puzzles I’ve encountered over the past year, as I’ve been learning how to lead an organization, is what level of ambition to articulate. How realistic or extravagant should our goals be? Should they be tethered to our current strengths – the same, but more and better – or fundamentally new territory that has the potential to be, yes, disruptive and transformational?
This is not a puzzle I’ve chosen but one that’s emerged as several people I respect, who have important roles in the organization, have asked “What is your vision? What are your big goals?” These are not unfamiliar topics, but in an organization that sits within a community of “social entrepreneurs,” they have a special salience.
Early on, I answered, “My vision is that the organization will survive COVID.” Then, as things stabilized, my answers all fell into the “more and better” domain, with a touch of experimentation around some new ideas and a lot of learning from experience to improve. But the questions have kept coming, even more insistently, along with encouragement to be far bolder. The commitment to massively ambitious goals, I’ve been advised, is essential both to achieve “outsized impact” and to motivate the best employees.
I am trying hard to be the best leader I can be, so I’ve listened hard to this advice and tried on different versions of goal-setting. Each and every time, the more pleasing the draft goals have been to those who are asking for a grand vision, the less comfortable and authentic they have felt to me. So far, this is the aspect of leadership in which my instincts have been most misaligned with the signals I’m getting from some of those around me. And it’s not pleasant.
Thus, I’ve done what I always do when faced with puzzling situations: I’ve looked for writings that can help inform and clarify. Surely if every single business or non-profit leader hopes for success and to have motivated team members, then there must be a full body of research on how to set goals and what results from different approaches, right?
Well, as those of you familiar with the business literature know, a search on a topic like this turns up a bunch of assertions, often backed up by personal anecdotes from allegedly successful leaders, and not a ton of substance. Along with this, there are many guides, checklists, and tools to help you set goals that are BHAGs, or SMART, or OKRs. None of this solved the puzzle: is it better to set grand goals or incremental ones?
And then I found the Harvard Business Review article “The Stretch Goal Paradox” and the research paper on which it’s based. (There’s even a video version!)
Here’s the gist: “Stretch goals” are ones that are extremely difficult and/or require you to do something you have never done before. They are goals for which you cannot develop a full strategy because you don’t know how to go about achieving them. The moonshot, the killer app, the 100x return on investment.
The researchers claim that there is one situation in which stretch goals make sense: If you have been successful in your current business, you have surplus resources, and your team is complacent. When (and only when) those three conditions are met, go for crazy. In all other situations, stay with incremental, small-win, small experiment approach.
This makes sense to me. It’s not about how one type of goal-setting is always good and others always bad. It’s about using stretch goals to overcome complacency when failure isn’t an existential threat. That, my friend, is an uncommon situation and definitely not one that my organization is in at the moment. We have a good track record, but no one is self-satisfied, and we have very little spare change lying round. Not time for a super-stretch.
The framework is a gift. Not only does it help me feel saner about reluctance to over-promise; it also tells me when it might be a good idea to go big.
Now, time to share this with a few other people I know.
As my Instagram feed fills with gentle nudges to buy sack-like dresses and oversized Ts, apparently other places in the world have not devolved into the current American only-if-it’s-baggy-or-stretches pandemic “fashion.” The New York Times puts many of us to shame by highlighting how people in many other countries have managed to continue to look presentable during the past 12 months. My favorite passage:
Not even a pandemic has diminished Dakar’s claim to being the flyest city on the planet.
In the Senegalese capital, at Africa’s westernmost tip, men in pointy yellow slippers and crisp white boubous — loosefitting long tunics — still glide down streets dredged with Saharan dust. Young women still sit in cafes sipping baobab juice in patterned leggings and jeweled hijabs. Everyone from consultants to greengrocers still wears gorgeous prints from head to toe.
Occasionally they now wear a matching mask.
So very Senegal.
We have reached the part of late-stage pandemic when it seems like a good idea to install a badminton net in the backyard. Now, when our gaps in Zoom meetings coincide, we can occasionally be found out in the sunshine and fresh spring air, whacking the birdies around. I think we’ve invented recess.
Have a good weekend,
-Ruth