How to Set and Achieve Big Goals

BY SARAH LYNCH

When Caroline Adams Miller learned about the science of goal setting, her professional and personal life changed forever.  

It was 2005, and Adams Miller was a student at the University of Pennsylvania studying for a master’s degree in positive psychology when she received an assignment about a goal-setting theory formalized by psychologists Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham in 1990, which posited the relationship between goal setting and task performance. “It was literally like the burning bush in front of me,” she says.  

Adams Miller had already been working as an executive coach for seven years, but this theory revolutionized the way she thought about goals: “All I ever heard [about] were SMART goals, law of attraction… I realized I’d been sold a bill of goods and that there was a science that no one was talking about and that nobody knew.”  

As she continued coaching—working with executives from companies like Citibank, Lazard, McDonald’s, and more—she saw again and again that these leaders just didn’t understand how to set goals, and were underachieving as a result. 

Now, in her latest book, Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life, Adams Miller is sharing what she’s spent the past 20 years developing: BRIDGE, a methodology for how anyone—and business leaders, in particular—can set objectives backed by goal-setting theory, and accomplish them through brainstorming, relationships, investments, decisions, grit, and excellence.  

Using BRIDGE, she argues, companies can eschew a “zombie goal setting” approach and get the results they need to pursue their company’s purpose.  

Start with the right questions  

When brainstorming, executives first need to determine whether the goal they’re considering is a learning or performance goal.

This was a key distinction made in Locke and Latham’s work, Adams Miller says: Learning goals give teams “a grace period to be curious, engaged in the process of learning,” and to learn how to do something new or better, she says. This can then turn into a performance goal, measured by a particular score or outcome, but confusing the two can be deleterious for companies and their innovation.  

Then, you need to use smart prompts to brainstorm further. “It’s like AI: you’ve got to have high-quality prompts to get high-quality answers,” Adams Miller says. That includes questions like, “What’s new?” in technology or in a competitor’s offerings, for instance. But that could also include more imaginative prompts like, “If there was a way to do this using Star Trek-kind of materials, how could we do it differently?”  

Get the right people involved—and cut out the rest  

Relationships are a crucial part of goal setting, Adams Miller argues, as you need the right people at your side to support your goal. So, ask: “Which relationships do I need do I need to cultivate?” she says. And just as importantly, “which ones do I need to keep out of my life?” 

Answering these questions can help companies overcome the common “silo problem,” Adams Miller says, and incorporates some much-needed accountability.  

“In these all-hands meetings…or these Monday morning huddles if people haven’t achieved what they said a week before, it slides,” she says. “I hear this all the time… The relationships that you have need to involve accountability.”  

Ensure you’re making the necessary investments  

Often, when companies set goals, they underestimate the “time, money, energy” it will take to make meaningful progress, Adams Miller says.

Thus, leaders must be clear on what is required and drill down on the specifics.  

“Have we brought in the right speakers? Do we have the knowledge?… Have we given people the time to actually come up with new ways to attack these learning goals?” she says. “Have we set aside a budget to give people the ability to go back to school…and become more up to date on this fast-changing technological world?””  

Cut out thenoise  

A very under-addressed topic in goal setting is the “decision-making matrix,” Adams Miller says—how you make the decisions that you do about “hiring or firing or work feedback” and more. And to make good decisions, leaders need to cut out bias and noise, Adams Miller says.

Biases could include “confirmation bias—you only do things that agree with what you already thought,” she says, or “anchoring bias, which is when you believe the first piece of information you hear.”

Noise, meanwhile, pertains to the variability in judgements, she says, pointing to the work of psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the subject. An example might be if an HR manager makes one kind of decision about a candidate on a Monday and another on a Wednesday, based on a change in their mood, she says. “Noise costs so much because the answers are just not consistent,” she adds.  

Instead, company leaders must closely evaluate the decisions they make and how they are making them to avoid bad decision-making.

Leverage the right kind of grit  

You need grit to accomplish goals, but only the good kind, Adams Miller says. According to her, there are plenty of bad types of grit: “stupid grit,” like an arrogant CEO not taking feedback from their board; “selfie grit,” such as when a “disruptive star” is accomplishing impressive things but at the expense of others; and “faux grit,” or faking the strenuousness of the task.  

Good grit, meanwhile, is “contagious, and it creates an awe-inspiring phenomenon in the organization,” Adams Miller says. Individuals with good grit have humility, patience, passion, the ability to self-regulate, and also the “ability to change the channel” and “persist in spite of disappointment,” she says.  

So when setting goals with your team, consider: “How long is this going to take you? Do you have the humility, do you have the patience, do you have the passion for this goal? Do you have the ability to hang in there when it’s tough?”  

Settle for nothing short of excellence  

Lastly, make sure that you are “setting the standard that you’re shooting for from the outset.” And that standard should be both high and clear.  

In Locke and Latham’s work, they found that “specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than urging people to do their best,” whether learning or performance, per a 2002 summary from the researchers.  

This might be a “wake-up call” for many employees who haven’t had this level of excellence demanded from them before, Adams Miller says. But it needs to be clearly communicated: “What’s the record board that we’re shooting for in this goal?”  

Photo: Getty Images.