If Everyone Is Playing Defense with their Goals, Nobody Is Trying to Win

A client was setting goals for the second half of the year. Their forecast said 9.8 million. They long had a goal to cross 10 million for years.

I asked if they were comfortable to stretch for the last 200,000.

They pointed at the math. The math said 9.8.

I pointed at the calendar. They were ahead of schedule. Both quarters this year so far they’d beaten plan. Nothing in front of them suggested the back half would fall apart.

"Why can't you presume the good results keep happening?"

They took a pause. I’d asked enough that they talked themselves into it.

The 200,000 was not the interesting part. The interesting part was how fast a room of capable people reached for the number they could almost guarantee. They felt safe at 9.8. 10 made them uncomfortable.

That discomfort is worth following. It usually tells you something about how the organization thinks about goals in the first place.

Goals Were Never an Accountability Tool

Ask a room of leaders why they set goals and most will say accountability.

That answer creates the problem.

Goals exist for alignment. The company needs to reach a number, so this group does this, that group does that, and together the math works. Everyone is pointed in the same direction.

Focus comes second. A good goal tells you what to say no to.

Accountability has a better home. It belongs on the scorecard or dashboard. If you need a two percent conversion rate and you are running 1.9, the scorecard tells you there is work to do. Measurable. Unemotional. Reviewed regularly.

Lead with accountability when you set goals and people start hearing something else.

Blame.

People who expect blame write very different goals than people who expect alignment.

Clear ownership still matters. A goal with nobody accountable for moving it is not much of a goal either. The problem starts when ownership gets defined so narrowly that success no longer requires anyone else.

Defense Cannot Put Points on the Board

There is a version of this I think about in sports. People say defense wins games. Sure. Defense undeniably matters.

The best defense in the world can keep the other team from scoring. It still cannot put points on the board for you. 

I see teams write goals the same way. Protect my number. Protect my team. Make sure I cannot be blamed for somebody else missing.

At some point, nobody is playing offense anymore. 

Brené Brown talks about playing to win instead of playing not to lose. I like that distinction. Some goals are designed to move the company somewhere. Others are designed to make sure the person who wrote them cannot be blamed if it does not get there.

That is where psychological safety comes into this. If people believe missing a stretch goal will be used against them, they’re going to stop stretching. 

No one is swinging for the fences if every strike gets punished. You need some tolerance for the strikes if you want the home runs.

What People Write When They Expect to Be Punished

When someone is setting goals from a place of defense, every variable belonging to someone else gets negotiated out. The scope narrows until the only remaining input is their own effort. Set a number people know they can hit and they will work exactly hard enough to hit it. The goal stops being a target and becomes a ceiling.

They call it focus. They call it clean ownership. They call it controlling our own fate.

Read those goals closely and you find something else.

A team writing goals it can hit without anyone's help has decided in advance that help is not coming.

It’s a contingency plan for other people's failure, written down and approved by leadership.

If You Won't Depend on Anyone, You Don't Trust Anyone

The fastest way to build a team is to make people need each other. Overlap the goals. Give two groups a shared number. Build the dependency into the goal and alignment, collaboration, and communication stop being optional.

That is team building.

When a group resists overlapping goals, I hear something specific.

They do not trust the people they would have to depend on.

Worth naming out loud, because the resistance never arrives in that language. It arrives as accountability. As clean ownership. As not wanting to be graded on someone else's work.

Sales and marketing is the version everyone recognizes. Marketing hits its lead number. Sales misses and says the leads were bad. Marketing says they delivered exactly what was asked for. Both teams point at their own goal and one claims success while the company misses.

Let that go long enough and the behavior spreads. Morale drops. Teams stop helping each other and start protecting themselves. Everyone can defend their own number while the business misses. 

Name the Dependencies Before You Agree to the Goal

Every goal I help build has a field for dependencies.

Who do you need? What do you need from them? By when?

Filling in that column changes the process. Goal setting becomes iterative on purpose, because the person you are depending on gets to say, "I cannot do that for you," while there is still time to do something about it. Better to hear that in week one than week ten.

Most of what teams fight about in November was decided by silence in January.

When I ran technology organizations, every department needed something from my team. So I made a habit of helping my peers edit their goals before they finished them. Partly I wanted to see what was coming.

Mostly I wanted them to win.

We were a product company. Marketing generated the revenue. When marketing missed, my budget got cut. Their success was not a nice thing for me to support. It was the mechanism that kept my team funded. That is a much more durable reason to care about another department's goals than anything you will hear at an offsite.

Manufacturing depends on supply chain. Supply chain depends on vendors who likely depend on someone else. Customer service needs the marketing calendar and the release schedule to plan its own training. Every process map in every company is a chain of people waiting on each other.

There is no version of an organization without dependencies.

There is only the version where you named them and the version where you pretended.

What I Do When a Team Won't Budge

I add more dependencies.

When a group is protecting itself from the rest of the organization, the answer is not to grant the isolation they are asking for. Build their goals so they cannot succeed alone. The trust develops, or the real problem finally surfaces.

If they keep fighting it, I change the leadership.

That sounds harsh. Consider what the alternative preserves. A leader who will not let their team depend on anyone is teaching an entire department that the rest of the company is a liability. That lesson outlives the quarter. It spreads.

As the Boss sings, “Nobody wins until everybody wins.”

For Thirteen Weeks, Nobody Asked Whose Job It Was

Pre-internet. I ran technology for a company building services for the dial-up online providers. Closed systems. Proprietary protocols.

We were weeks away from going public.
Then the internet became a thing.

The board told us to be on the web before the IPO.
Thirteen weeks.

Building for the open web was a completely different architecture from the one we had spent our first few perfecting.
We made it to the web in time. A full quarter of hustle, straight through the holidays.

For those thirteen weeks nobody cared which department a problem belonged to. There was one goal and so much to do. Every person's work depended on someone else's.

Every silo that had looked permanent turned out to have been optional.

You should not need an IPO deadline to find that out.

Where the Trust Ran Out

Look at your goals for next quarter. Find the ones your team can hit without anyone's help. Then look at the ones that depend on somebody else.

Which ones make people nervous?

Which ones start a debate about ownership?

Which ones get negotiated down until one person can control the whole thing?

The safest-looking goals are often the ones telling you where the trust ran out.

And if everyone is writing goals from a place of defense, the company may be very well protected.

It still has to score.