Dave Kashen discusses when to adjust team goals, explaining that goals drive motivation and creativity more than outcomes. He covers OKRs, the difference between 95% consistency targets and 50% moonshot goals, and why teams need to align on how hard a goal should be.
When should I adjust my team's goals if they're falling behind? Falling behind.
Yeah. One thing I said to a client once is like, most people think of the goals as the ends unto themselves, but it's useful to think of goals as a means, the ends of which are enjoying the pursuit, creativity, motivation, inspiration. And so then the question becomes, what goals best serve us? You know, and the other thing is, it's really useful to get clear of like how you're relating to the goals. 'Cause like Google, when they said OKRs, at least historically, they said, you know, two-thirds, if we hit two-thirds of our goals, that's a win. So they purposely set like stretch goals knowing that they likely wouldn't hit them all, and that served them. Other teams like to set like, basically it's like, what probability are you playing with, right? So Google was like, two-thirds probability we hit this, and if we hit two-thirds, great. You know, other teams will set like 95% probability goals because they just, they want more, uh, consistency of like achieving their goals and the feeling of that. Like we, you know, we did what we said we would do. Other teams might be more like Moonshot and they set 50% goals. So the other thing that really matters is being clear with the team what, you know, how do we say it, like what risk level are we taking, right? And how, like, to what degree do we want to set stretch versus kind of realistic goals? I think there's not a right answer, but if you If one person on the team thinks it's like a, you know, 95% probability goal and another one thinks it's a 65%, you know, they're going to have issues in how they respond to whether or not they achieve the goals.
