Goal-Setting and Psychological Safety
Why you can't have both.
There are two words you should not select as a code-name for your next project. They are Apollo and Genesis.
Apollo was the name of the manned spaceflight program during the space race, and the subject of Kennedy’s inspiring speech. Three people died in an accident during the Apollo 1 program. You are not John Kennedy, and you’re not going to the moon.
Genesis would be an acceptable name if you intended to evoke the legendary English rocker Phil Collins and his legendary and long-touring band, but you don’t.
Ambitious code-names and inspiring speeches are two ways that leaders look to galvanize teams around big ideas. Another is by setting goals and deciding how to measure success. The argument about how to define and measure success is sometimes more difficult than the argument about what should be done to achieve it.
One common method of addressing this is an annual goal-setting process. One approach is “OKRs” (Objectives and Key Results) which is a modern, proven framework for scaring everybody half to death.
OKRs, so-called SMART goals, and related planning tools are instruments used by those who are “managing by the numbers.” They’re related to leadership principles captured by a delightful aphorism attributed to Peter Drucker. It’s a favorite in the management consulting world, and it goes like this:
“What gets measured gets managed.”
It’s short and snappy, isn’t it? There are a million pages on the internet saying that it’s brilliant, and just as many saying that it’s wrong. It is surely, in fact, both. The simple idea inside is that it’s easier to lead people to success when it’s defined by a measurable, not an arbitrary, outcome.
But when you start measuring outcomes of people and their work, things get complicated. There are nuances, ramifications, and unintended consequences. If you measure “new customers” but not “profitability”, you can end up very busy and very broke. Anybody who sets out to work on metrics should do some reading on Goodhart’s Law and Campbell’s Law. Of course there’s a related quip attributed to Steve Jobs:
“Incentive structures work. So you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do, because various incentive structures create all sorts of consequences that you can’t anticipate.”
Millions of posts have been written about incentives and metrics, how people sandbag their bosses, and how bosses alienate their teams with moon-shots. Today, I want to focus on something a little different — the emotional aspects of the goal-setting process.
Managing By the Numbers
Long before Amy Edmondson became famous for her excellent ideas about psychological safety among workplace collaborators, there lived a man called Carl Rogers. Born in 1902 in Oak Park, Illinois (also my hometown), Rogers was the godfather of modern psychology, responsible for many long-lived ideas including his “theory of self.”
Rogers described psychological safety as an essential precursor for creativity. He described three aspects of our experience that determine whether we feel psychologically safe:
The assurance that our value is unconditional, not contingent
The absence of external evaluation, meaning that the appraisal of our worth is primarily self-assessed
Empathy ensures an effort is made to understand us, and no fear or recrimination is demonstrated in reaction to what we express
That’s a lot to unpack, but it sounds like a pretty good deal, doesn’t it?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could arrange it so that high-performing people could be held to high standards while preserving these preconditions for a safe and sane workplace?
The Mismeasurement of a Man
Many jobs ago, on the way home from a team offsite, I got a surprising email that sent me and my team into an emotional tailspin.
We learned that management was changing our “North Star” metric. For years we’d been been optimising for monthly active use (MAU), which looked at how often customers engaged with our product. Our MAU measurement included users who had our code running on their website and actively being seen by their site visitors.
Suddenly, due to a change in corporate strategy, the goal posts were shifting. Our new North Star metric was the number of unique users who logged in each month. But the vast majority of our users almost never logged in! We’d deliberately designed the product for the convenience of our users, who wanted to “set it and forget it.” Half of our users would disappear overnight.
The frustration nearly brought me to tears. My psychological safety crumbled like a stale muffin. It felt like our intentions and hard work had suddenly evaporated, and that we were being evaluated in a silly way that lacked the context that defined our value.
It didn’t help that the rationale for the decision was totally opaque, and delivered to us in a way devoid of empathy for our experience.
Psychological Safety
Many people misunderstand psychological safety to mean “freedom from doing anything hard.” It’s fashionable to say that there’s a generation of workers who can’t do difficult things, or really anything, without first having a big meeting to talk about feelings.
Both are wrong.
In fact, almost everybody wants to work under a thoughtful and fair goals regime. Most people want to be challenged with high expectations, asked to do difficult things, and measured against an ambitious vision for what they can achieve. Nobody wants a workplace where it’s unclear what’s expected of them. Given the option, people will select difficult goals rather than none at all.
In fact, Rogerian psychological safety is supported by goals that are thoughtfully set via an intentional process, when:
People feel valued and integral to goal-setting deliberations, and not merely the object of it. This is accomplished by ensuring the entire team is involved in a comprehensive way throughout the process of setting goals, measuring progress, and determining attainment.
Measurement occurs within the community of collaborators, not by people outside of it. The team should have the opportunity to supply context that accompanies reports of progress.
Attainment is determined fairly, demonstrating empathy for the efforts of the team, and recognizing the totality of their accomplishments.
Big meetings to talk about feelings, by the way, are a sign that management has already failed at providing psychological safety. It’s a sign that people don’t feel safe speaking up anywhere else.
Psychological Safety
The idea that leaders must be “tough” in order to do difficult things is out there, and it is bullshit. I’ve been investigating that for years, and I cannot find anything inside the idea that isn’t a recycled patriarchal stereotype, built in a post-war factory during an era of Cold War command-and-control. That stuff is obsolete, bankrupt, and alienating to the people I want to work with today.
There is no science that shows it’s productive to stubbornly stick with goals or metrics even as you learn things that undermine their relevance. Nobody has shown conclusively that leaders should “sign off” on goals that they weren’t involved in setting. No journal has published a paper showing that being flexible and intelligent about how you determine goal attainment will harm shareholders value.
In fact, the science seems to agree that optimizing for psychological safety — valuing people, involving them in their own measurement, and being thoughtful about attainment — benefits the well-being of individual team members and the interests of the companies and their investors.
Of course, not everybody will agree with that, and that’s ok. Each of us are entitled to their own opinion. The great thing about the science is that it’s true whether you agree with it or not.
It’s that same science, not our opinions, that got us to the moon.