Goals: Difference between revisions

{{a|design|{{image|Knee-slide|jpg|Goal accomplished, yesterday.}}}}Why employee performance goals — sufficiently '''S'''pecific, '''M'''easurable, '''A'''ctionable, '''R'''ealistic and '''T'''ime-bound ones of course —aren’t such a good thing:

*'''HR likes them''': This ought to be enough of a reason. But in more detail:

*'''They are a [[proxy]]''': Goals tend to be a [[proxy]] or a [[second-order derivative]] of an idealised state: “getting down to 70kg” rather than “becoming healthy, funny and physically appealing” — which is most likely what you really want. And, as with all Greek tragedies one can attain the proxy without achieving the end state it is intended to achieve — you starve yourself, you may attain 70 kg but have bad breath, a waxen complexion and liver disease.  

*'''Goals are fixed but the world changes''': Who hasn’t had a goal that has been overtaken by events? Goals commit you to an outcome which makes sense now, but should circumstances change, might seem less sensible later. But the one thing we know with [[certainty]] is that ''the future is not certain''. Circumstances ''do'' unfold in unexpected ways. Pre-ordained goals are a feature of a [[complicated]] world, not a [[complex]] one. Who knew, when they set their goals for 2020, that the world would be gripped by a pandemic for ten months of the year? As we look out to 2021, how long will the pandemic last? Should I set my goal assuming it does, or does not?

*'''They are designed so The Man can read you''': Why should goals be “[[SMART]]”? It is not for your benefit, but so that the [[All watched over by machines of loving grace|Machines of Loving Grace that watch over us]] can understand. Your contribution to the betterment of the organisation is ineffable, indescribable and unpredictable. Now, readers: usually, I say things like this with an air of irony: not here. It is true your contribution may not amount to anything much — many of you (probably most) are more trouble than you are worth — but the things that you do which do make a difference are, in the abstract, ''profoundly hard to judge'', especially from the perspective of [[human resources]]. So [[SMART]] goals — especially the specific, measurable and actionable part — is not about making life easy for ''you'' but making evaluation easy for ''The Man''. Your performance must be, in {{author|James C. Scott}}’s clever phrase, “[[legible]]”. Literally, ''[[machine-readable]]''. What The Man cannot see yields you no credit: this is like a dark inversion of Terry’s maxim: [[what the eye don’t see the chef gets away with]].  All that ''ad hoc'' mentoring you did; that moment of insight, in the heat of the deal, that took ten percent out of the operating costs of the project; those times you patiently covered for an AWOL colleague to make sure the project happened; your immaculate drafting that rendered that complex issue plain for the business — none of that will bear on your appraisal, because ''no-one can see it''. But did you complete your opinion reviews on time and to budget? Why yes, counsellor, you ''did''! Why should your target be ''measurable'', other than because the institution bearing down on you needs some way of assessing it in a binary way?  But (again, following Scott’s reasoning) these SMART goals then create perverse incentives, for employees know they are measured and rated only what can be read, so deprioritise “illegible” good behaviour, in favour of measurable [[box-ticking]].