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Realistic goals at work

Realistic goals at work

Why most teams get goal-setting wrong

There’s a scene that repeats itself every quarter in almost every company I know. The manager gathers the team, opens a slide that says “Q3 goals”, and everyone nods along. Three months later those goals have quietly vanished, or they’ve been hit only on paper, with the definition of success rewritten halfway through. Nobody brings it up again until the next quarter, when the same ritual starts over.

This rarely comes down to laziness or low motivation: the real limit sits in the method behind how goals get written in the first place. Research from Leadership IQ, based on more than 12,800 people, found that 90% of those who set ambitious goals never reach them. According to an analysis from Harvard Business Review, only 20% of companies manage to complete 80% of their strategic goals. On top of that, 80% of organizations don’t track their goals regularly once they’re set: they write them down and forget them in a shared document somewhere.

If you work on a team, you’ve probably felt this frustration from both sides: as the person handed numbers that seem pulled out of a raffle drum, and maybe as the manager who has to translate pressure from above into targets that actually make sense for the people doing the work. In this piece I want to untangle three levels that usually get treated separately but are, in practice, tightly linked: how to write goals that are realistic and measurable, how to keep your team’s goals from clashing with the ones next door, and how to negotiate with your own manager when a target simply doesn’t hold up.

Method beats motivation

Before getting to the STAR model, it’s worth looking at what the research actually says about goal-setting, because this isn’t a recent trend or a passing fad. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent decades studying the effect of goals on performance, and a review of 68 out of 70 studies conducted by Rodgers and Hunter confirmed that management-by-objectives programs genuinely boost output, when applied with judgment.

One figure I find particularly useful comes from Gail Matthews’ study at Dominican University: people who physically write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them than those who just keep them in their head. And those who share their goals with a colleague or a manager reach a 70% success rate, compared with 35% for people who keep them private. Writing things down and sharing them, in other words, aren’t bureaucratic formalities: they change the outcome for real.

The trouble is that plenty of companies took these principles and applied them to the wrong lesson, turning useful goals into abstract figures disconnected from the actual work.

When goals turn dangerous

A paper I bring up often when talking about goal-setting with clients is “Goals Gone Wild”, authored by Lisa Ordóñez, Maurice Schweitzer, Adam Galinsky and Max Bazerman. The authors argue that corporate goals are frequently over-prescribed, as if they were medicine that’s always good for you no matter the dose.

The cases they cite are hard to forget. At Ford, the deadline set by Lee Iacocca for the Pinto project pushed engineers to skip crucial safety checks, with tragic consequences. At Sears, a target of $147 in revenue per hour for mechanics led to unnecessary repairs and a wave of customer disputes: the company’s president publicly admitted that the system “created an environment where mistakes happened”. And at Enron, incentives tied purely to revenue volume, with no regard for the soundness of the deals themselves, helped fuel the company’s collapse.

I’m not comparing your quarterly target to a corporate disaster. But the principle still holds: a goal that’s too aggressive, too narrow, or disconnected from context nudges people toward shortcuts rather than better results. Before we even ask how to write a good goal, we should ask whether that goal, as it’s currently framed, risks producing behavior we don’t actually want.

The STAR model: goals that are specific, trackable and grounded in reality

This is where STAR comes in, a leaner evolution of SMART that’s been gaining ground over the past few years among people who manage teams and performance reviews. Unlike SMART, which most people recite from memory without giving it much thought anymore, STAR puts two often-neglected elements front and center: concrete measurability and a firm grip on present-day reality.

The four letters break down like this:

Specific: the goal has to describe a precise action, not a vague intention like “improve customer service”.

Trackable: it needs to be measured against a clear number or indicator, one you can update over time rather than just check at the end of the quarter.

Achievable: it has to account for the resources, time and people actually available, not some ideal scenario that only exists on the manager’s slide.

Realistic: it needs to line up with market conditions and the team’s historical results, not with what we’d like to be true.

The practical difference from SMART is subtle but meaningful: STAR doesn’t lock in a rigid deadline as a separate criterion, which makes it better suited to goals that evolve over time, like the ones tied to quality or customer satisfaction, where a fixed date risks forcing fake numbers just to hit it.

Here’s a concrete example. Instead of “grow social engagement”, a STAR goal becomes: “raise average engagement on product posts by 25% within six months, measured through total interactions per post, with a monthly trend review.” It reads less elegantly, sure, but it’s far harder to misinterpret or artificially inflate.

The real issue: goals that collide across departments

This is the point that, in my view, gets overlooked more than any other: a goal can be written flawlessly according to STAR and still cause damage, if it ignores what neighboring teams are doing.

It happens more often than you’d think. The product team aims to “redesign the homepage by end of quarter” while the engineering team has frozen all changes for a security audit. Marketing promises an aggressive push into a new customer segment right as support is already understaffed handling a system migration. Each goal, taken on its own, sounds reasonable. Put together, they undercut each other.

Deloitte estimates that organizations lose up to 20-30% of revenue every year to inefficiencies tied to poor cross-team alignment. On the flip side, McKinsey research shows that companies with strong cross-functional collaboration are 1.5 times more likely to report above-average growth, while a study cited by Harvard Business Review puts the odds of being a high performer at five times higher for organizations that work this way compared with those stuck in silos. Deloitte also notes that solid collaboration across functions raises the odds of beating industry-average profitability by 21%, while Gartner calculates a reduction in project cycle times of up to 30%.

A case worth mentioning is TRG, a consulting firm that worked to eliminate silos between its departments by reallocating resources in real time instead of waiting for monthly reports. The result was a 76% jump in productivity, simply because teams could catch priority conflicts in time to fix them.

How to orchestrate goals without clashing with neighboring teams

The practical question, then, isn’t just “how do I write a good goal” but “how do I make sure my goal doesn’t make someone else’s impossible”. A few habits that work well in practice:

Before finalizing your quarterly goals, run them past the leads of the teams you work with most, even just through a message or a fifteen-minute call. You don’t need a massive formal process: just ask “does this clash with anything you’re already working on?”

Make every department’s goals visible in one shared place, even a simple table works. Most conflicts arise not because people disagree, but because nobody knew what the team next door was planning.

Lean toward alignment rather than a rigid cascade. Cascading, meaning pushing goals down from the top step by step, creates long waits for each layer of approval: some industry analyses point to execution time dropping from six weeks to just five days when teams work in parallel on aligned goals instead of in sequence on inherited ones.

If you deal with internal relationships or need to convince another department to rethink its priorities, it’s worth revisiting The subtle art of influencing: most tension between teams gets resolved through listening and trust-building far more than through a formal request email.

Negotiating with your manager: refusal as prioritization, not as a wall

There’s a moment, in nearly every career, when a manager hands you a goal you already know is out of reach. The instinctive reaction is to accept it anyway, so as not to look uncooperative or unambitious. But agreeing to a target that doesn’t hold up shows no real loyalty to the company: it just postpones a failure by a few months.

Harvard Business Review devoted several pieces to this topic throughout 2025, introducing the concept of “strategic refusal”. The core idea is that many managers say yes to unreasonable requests because saying no feels risky for their own credibility, but that pattern breeds burnout across teams, weak execution and a broad erosion of trust. The key, according to the authors, isn’t to refuse outright but to reframe the refusal as a prioritization choice: not “I won’t do this”, but “to get this done we’d need to push back something else, which one would you rather delay?”

That reframing changes the entire conversation. You’re not telling your manager the goal is wrong, you’re showing them the real cost of that goal in time and resources, leaving the final call to them with all the information laid out on the table.

Pushing back on metrics without looking like you don’t want to work

A different case is when the issue isn’t the workload but the metric itself: an indicator that doesn’t actually reflect the value being produced, or one that pushes people toward the wrong behaviors, just like in the Ford and Sears examples above.

In these situations, the question to ask isn’t “is this goal too high” but “does this metric actually measure what we want to achieve”. Always bring a concrete alternative: if you’re asked to be measured on the number of tickets closed, but you know that pushes people to close tickets fast rather than well, propose pairing it with a quality indicator, like the reopen rate or post-resolution customer satisfaction.

Always bring data, not gut feelings. If you have historical performance on hand, show it. Managers respond far better to a chart with three quarters of trend lines than to an “it feels like too much.” And remember that negotiating a metric doesn’t mean negotiating down your effort: it means making sure that effort gets measured the right way.

A small exercise for next week

If there’s one thing to take from this piece, it’s this: before writing your next goal, for yourself or for your team, ask three questions in order. Is it specific, trackable, achievable and realistic according to STAR? Does it clash with anything neighboring teams are already doing? And if I had to negotiate it with my manager today, which priority would I need to ask to push back in order to actually hit it?

Three questions, not some enormous corporate process. But they change, quite radically, how goals get experienced: from quarterly ritual to a tool that actually works.

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Chiara Bonifazi