SMART Goals: 5 Shocking Reasons Why They Might Be Dumb

If you're going to set SMART Goals, you deserve to know the truth about their limitations. Every company in existence has set its share of SMART goals (the SMART acronym most commonly defined as Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound).

Now, some of those criteria (like Specific and Measurable) are perfectly fine; of course, you should set a specific goal and a measurable goal. But other parts (like making sure you have an achievable goal and a realistic goal) make SMART goals pretty dumb. Why? Because too often, they act as impediments to bold action and actually encourage mediocre and poor performance.

In the study, Are SMART Goals Dumb?, only 15% of employees strongly agree that their goals will help them achieve great things. And only 13% of employees strongly agree that their goals this year will help them maximize their full potential.

Since most of those respondents worked for companies using the SMART goals framework, it's safe to assume that the SMART criteria are not fostering great performance.

What follows are five shocking reasons why SMART Goals might be dumb (or at least deliver subpar performance).

#1: CEOs Do Not Set SMART Goals

SMART goals have been a fixture in corporate life for decades, but you'll rarely see successful CEOs set a SMART goal. Chief executives typically eschew an achievable goal or realistic goal in favor of BHAGs (big, hairy, audacious goals) or HARD goals (heartfelt, required, animated, and difficult).

One factor that separates the people who become top executives from everyone else is the extent to which someone sets really difficult goals vs. a more achievable goal (e.g., SMART Goals).

The Leadership IQ study, Are SMART Goals Dumb?, analyzed goal setting behaviors by a person's level in the organization. The study revealed that 54% of top executives set difficult or audacious goals, while that was true for only 33% of frontline employees. In other words, top executives are about 64% more likely to set difficult or audacious goals.

Notwithstanding the ubiquity of specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-limited goals, SMART criteria have inspired far more mediocrity than prosperity. There's little or no fulfillment, excitement, challenge, or growth in reaching a realistic goal (or a goal that's achievable and generally undemanding).

Think about a business goal from legendary CEOs. In 1985, Steve Jobs said this about Apple: "We attract a different type of person: a person who doesn't want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe."

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said this about Amazon's goals: "We are going to be bold with our experiments and some of them aren't going to work. And if you decide that you are only going to do things that you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table."

Did either Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos set an attainable goal? Of course not; there were no smaller goals for them, and they pursued a difficult and audacious long term goal.

Across the tens of thousands who've taken the test, Do You Set HARD Goals or SMART Goals?, we learned that top executives are far more likely to enjoy learning new skills and leaving their comfort zone. On one question, respondents were asked to choose between the statements, "I don't like to leave my comfort zone," or, "I will leave my comfort zone on occasion," or, "I like to leave my comfort zone." And the data revealed that top executives are 91% more likely to enjoy leaving their comfort zone in pursuit of their goals.

When you think about the goals you give to your employees, ask yourself, "Are these goals in sync with what our CEO would be doing?" Because if the CEO isn't setting an attainable goal SMART goal, if they're trying "to make a dent in the universe," how good are employees going to feel about their own SMART goals? If the CEO says, "I would never set a SMART goal, I'm going to go make a dent in the universe like the late Steve Jobs did," how good is the employee going to feel about having a realistic goal using the SMART framework?

#2: SMART Goals Were Created For A Radically Different Era

SMART goals were created in the late 1950s for a mindset that says "Don't step out of line." General Eisenhower was president. It was the era of the man in the gray flannel suit. Corporations wanted employees to follow a regimented action plan and follow the rules. Command and control leadership and transactional leadership were the norms. And employees remained with employers for decades, if not their entire career.

Compare that with today's environment, where employee burnout and turnover are rampant, companies compete on innovation, there's a war for top employee talent, and transformational leadership is the norm.

SMART goals certainly had their time, but they are missing critical pieces to be a successful goal setting process in the current environment.

#3: SMART Goals Aren't Difficult Enough

Think about your life's greatest achievements, the accomplishments that months or years later still fill you with pride. Maybe you got a big promotion, earned a tough certification, put your kids through college, or ran a marathon.

Now ask yourself: Were your great objectives easy or hard? Did you know everything when you started, or did you have to learn a lot? Were your achievements inside or outside your comfort zone? Were your goals comfortably achievable and realistic, or were they courageous and difficult?

If you're like the tens of thousands of leaders to whom I've posed this question, your great achievements were not the result of an easily-attainable SMART objective; your action plan for your great achievements were hard, required lots of learning, resided firmly outside your comfort zone, and were courageous and difficult.

In the Are SMART Goals Dumb? study, team members were asked to choose between the statements, "I set goals that are achievable and realistic," OR, "I pursue goals that others describe as difficult or audacious." As can be seen in the chart below, only 43% indicated that they set difficult or audacious goals.

When we analyzed the previous finding according to how people felt about their jobs, we discovered that only 32% of people who pursue an attainable goal love their job. But a far greater 43% of difficult and audacious goal setters love their job. In other words, people who set difficult goals are 34% more likely to love their jobs than people who follow SMART goal setting.

#4: Smart Goals Don't Require Enough Learning

Given the intense pace of change today, the people who stay on the cutting edge and constantly expand their minds are going to enjoy the greatest career progress; they'll set career goals that generate the coolest assignments, higher-visibility projects, and more.

Leadership IQ's study, called If Employees Aren't Learning, You're Not Leading, discovered that only 35% of employees say that they're Always learning something new at work. Meanwhile, 52% of employees are Never, Occasionally or Rarely learning new things.

And here's the kicker: Employees who are always learning new things are ten times more likely to be inspired than those who are not.

The key with your career goal setting is to ask yourself, "What new skills am I going to have to learn in order to achieve my career goals?"

If you can't identify any new skills that you'll need to learn, then you've just discovered that your objectives need to be more difficult.

Not only does learning new skills keep our careers progressing, it also significantly increases our fulfillment and inspiration on the job.

Setting a stretch goal doesn't mean that you have to log more hours of work, nor does it mean setting an impossible goal. But it does mean that your objectives must contain learning new skills or ideas.

#5: SMART Goals Aren't Visual Enough

We humans are visual creatures, and we respond to imagery. The technical term is "pictorial superiority effect." It expresses the idea that concepts are much more likely to be remembered if presented as pictures rather than as words. To what extent do we remember more? Well, when we hear only information, our total recall is about 10% when tested 72 hours later. But add a picture, and that number shoots up to 65%. It's a pretty substantial difference.

And this applies to effective goals. For example, people who answered Strongly Agree to the question "I can vividly picture how great it will feel when I achieve my goals" had 49% higher employee engagement than people who answered Strongly Disagree.

You've probably heard that people who can visualize their goals are more likely to achieve them. And one of the most shocking findings from the study Are SMART Goals Dumb? is that people who use visuals to describe their goals are 52% more likely to love their jobs.

Humans are visual creatures, and, as we know from the pictorial superiority effect, concepts are much more likely to be remembered if presented as pictures rather than as words.

In another part of the Are SMART Goals Dumb? study, participants were asked to rate the question, "My goal is so vividly described in written form (including pictures, photos, drawings, etc.) that I could literally show it to other people and they would know exactly what I'm trying to achieve."

Fewer than 20% of people said that their goals were 'Always' written down this vividly. And people who very vividly describe or picture their goals are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to successfully accomplish their goals than people who don't.

One of the biggest impediments to any business goal (or personal goal) is the lack of visual stimulation. The typical SMART goal template asks for a few key phrases, words and numbers, but does not ask people to describe their goal with visuals. We're human, and we're visual, and our brains remember pictures better than they do words. So why do we think that a clear goal can only be described in numbers or a few phrases? Even CEOs will create vision boards or white boards or other media that portray their end goal with visuals.

It's not necessarily terrible if your SMART goal framework requires distilling your goal into a worksheet. But it is a problem if, in the process of creating a clear goal, people aren't encouraged (or allowed) to engage in visualization to ideate their goal.