Founding Director ·
# Augmenting Your Future Workforce
This is the ninth in a series exploring how organisations can build capability that lasts. In this installment: why vague goals breed false commitment, the difference between output goals and behavioral goals, and why the execution of any organizational outcome starts long before the first day of learning.
# First, know what you want
Knowing what you want is a key determinant of whether you achieve it, and it is one of the most powerful questions you can ask of yourself or of a client in a coaching relationship. Given its importance, you would expect most people to be good at it — to be clear and precise about the objectives they set themselves. In our experience, they are not.
Most of the advice available on goal setting is drawn from sport and lifestyle. Run a sub-three-hour marathon, complete your first five kilometres: ask a coach, search online, or put the question to an AI agent, and you will be handed a training plan with milestones, process goals and performance goals that direct and support your success. What is striking is how rarely that same discipline crosses over into working life. For some people there is no distinction — the rigour they bring to their personal pursuits is present in everything they do. But the majority of the people we work with do not carry it across. When they try, it tends to be short-lived, resting on a superficial grasp of the thinking behind a SMART objective, or whatever format they happen to be using.
# Vague goals and false commitment
The danger of a vague goal is not that it fails, but that it feels like progress while quietly failing. An ill-defined objective, one that is neither anchored in a clear picture of the future nor communicated to anyone, is forgotten within days. Work lapses back into the predictable rhythm of the working week, and the individual is left with a comfortable sense of having committed to something without ever having done so. This is false commitment, and it is expensive precisely because it is invisible. For a decision maker weighing the efficacy of any development programme, this is the failure point to interrogate first — not the quality of the content, but whether the goals underneath it were ever real.
We saw the opposite when we worked with twenty-four crews from the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race. As those crews came together, each person had to share their own reason for taking on the race, and those reasons varied enormously. Reconciling them was among the hardest challenges the professional skippers faced: how do you define a goal that everyone can genuinely buy into? The more successful crews reached a level of alignment where personal and crew objectives were satisfied together, so that individuals could pursue both at once. In the race itself, that alignment translated into action. If your crew goal was a podium position into Cape Town, and a sail change offered a single knot of extra boat speed, the goal made the decision for you — change the sail for the marginal gain, rather than hold the current plan and make hot chocolate for the overnight watch. Goals that are well formed and reviewed regularly can move even the most tired and distracted team.
# Output goals versus behavioural goals
Here is the distinction that most goal setting misses. An output goal names the result you want: the podium, the target, the number. A behavioural goal names what you will actually do, repeatedly, to get there. Output goals are necessary — they give direction and let you know whether you have arrived — but on their own they are inert. It is the behavioural goals that carry the load, because they are the things a person can control on any given day. Change the sail. Give the feedback. Hold the difficult conversation. When a programme sets only output goals, it is asking people to want a destination without deciding how they will travel. When it sets behavioural goals as well, it changes what people do on Tuesday afternoon — which is where behaviour change actually happens, or does not.
# Why execution starts here
At Mission Performance we insist that individual and team goals are well formed and agreed before any programme of learning begins. This applies to the individual, but equally to the organisational expectation and context in which those goals sit. If there is no expectation that people will set goals and tie them to an organisational outcome, learning and progress will be limited and random. Address it early in the design process, reinforce it throughout the programme and beyond, and you move the odds decisively in your favour of achieving a measurable shift in behaviour and performance.
I have seen where this discipline comes from. When Chris and I walked through the gates of the Commando Training Centre Royal Marines, we entered an environment where progress was tied to explicit weekly performance targets and feedback was constant. On the Commando Course, the goal was to live up to the standards embodied in the Green Beret and the Commando ethos that underpinned it. Behaviour and outcome were linked: how you led yourself, your peers and your Marines was consistent with your values and with a belief that you could achieve almost anything, provided the outcome was clear, well communicated, and pursued as a team. I suspect it was much the same for Matt Burgess as he entered the Guildhall School of Music and Drama — an elite institution built on excellence, feedback and hard work.
The execution of an organisational outcome begins with individuals setting more effective goals. That is where it starts, and a failure to do it well at the point a programme is designed will cap everything that follows. For any decision maker assessing whether an approach to behaviour change will hold, this is the question that matters most: were the goals real before the learning began?
