Saturday, February 19, 2011

How Setting Career Goals Can Backfire

According to Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist who teaches courses in ethics and decision-making at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, a slew of studies have shown that people perform best when they set tough and precise goals for themselves--what he calls "specific stretch goals." They do much better than people with "non-stretch," or easy-to-achieve goals, or vague aims like "do your best." Strive for concrete, ambitious ends and you'll exhibit greater motivation, higher performance and more creativity, he says. But you can also get in real trouble that way, he adds.

Specific stretch goals can be big or small, intellectual or physical. Tell yourself you'll do 20 push-ups in the next five minutes (a specific stretch goal) vs. five push-ups (non-stretch) or the vague idea that you'll do as many as you can. You may not make it to 20, but you'll do a lot more if you challenge yourself with a set number, Galinsky says. Likewise, if you strive to complete a number of math problems in a designated amount of time, you'll do a better job than if you try for a lower number or you just tell yourself to work hard.

Many of us know this intuitively, which is why we often set exact and difficult career goals. A lawyer or banker might decide she's going to bring in a certain number of new clients in the space of two years, or get promoted to senior associate or vice president. An advertising account executive might aim to win a national award and move to a more prestigious agency by three years from this June. Setting such targets can bolster your career. But they have their dark side as well, Galinsky says, two in particular: They can encourage both excessive risk-taking and unethical behavior.

Such goal-setting contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, he says. Too many investors and bankers took too much risk in the pursuit of lofty rewards and engaged in unscrupulous behavior along the way. Think of Jérôme Kerviel, the so-called rogue trader at France's Société Générale, who lost some $7 billion in 2008 when he tried to cover up his trading mistakes with risky bets. Or Enron, where company executives were given specific, ambitious revenue goals--and engaged in fraud to meet them.

Galinsky has also examined goal-setting and achievement in the context of competition. People perform better when they are up against a strong challenger. But such rivalry has a downside too, he says. Like individuals who set specific stretch goals, rivals tend to take excessive risks and often attempt to cheat.

How does Galinsky suggest we prevent ourselves from falling into the dual traps of unethical behavior and excessive risk-taking? A few ideas: Create what he calls "locks" for ethical behavior. For instance, employees could sign an honor code of conduct. Another idea: Bosses should define and demonstrate ethical behavior and the boundaries of risk-taking.

Mary Walshok, a dean at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Closing America's Job Gap, points out one more danger in specific career goal-setting. It can block you from making fruitful lateral moves. Example: A business school graduate starts her career at a bank, then goes to work for a museum and winds up teaching nonprofit finance courses at a business school. Says Walshok, "That person has made three lateral moves based on experience and lived an interesting life." It wouldn't have happened had she been constricted by goals.

Thanks to Susan Adams / Forbes

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