Goal Setting

I've known for some time that goals are good. We've long been told that setting a goal at the beginning of a coaching session is important, and that if we can encourage our clients to identify specific and measurable goals for themselves at the end of a session then they are more likely to put their plans into action. But it was good to read Locke and Latham's paper  (2002) which summarises the research on goal setting and explains why it works.

First, it's encouraging to note that there is good and solid and widespread evidence that it does work. Goals are linked with people putting in more effort and achieving more. And a specific goal results in more effort and better performance than simply encouraging someone to 'do their best'.

But there's more.

I had thought that it was crucial to set appropriate, ie moderate goals. Apparently not always. In general, the harder the goal, the more effort people put in and the more the attain. There is an issue about what this might do to people's confidence (of which more later), but broadly speaking, the harder the goal the better.

Locke and Latham explain how goals work:
1) they direct attention and effort towards the goal and away from other things - both cognitively and behaviourally ie, you think more about making sure that your efforts are linked to achieving the goal
2) they energize. And linked with the comment above, high goals lead to greater effort than lower goals
3) they affect persistence and in particular people carry on working for longer when the goals are hard
4) goals lead to better strategies. People either use strategies they already have, transfer strategies over or learn new strategies when they have a specific goal in mind.

Other important factors are:
Goal commitment
goal commitment strengthens the link between goals and performance. Goal commitment is enhanced when the outcome of the goal is important to the individual, and when the individual has high self-efficacy ie believes that they have the ability to achieve it.
Self-efficacy seems to come up all over the place, but helpfully the authors of this paper give some empirically tested methods for enhancing self efficacy. They suggest that the individuals need to be adequately trained (so that they do actually have the ability to achieve the goal), they need to see role models that they can relate to who have previously achieved the goal, and they need to be helped to develop specific strategies.
Feedback is important so that the individual can see how well they are doing and knows how much harder they need to try.
Task complexity has am impact. Goal setting works better for simple tasks. With complex tasks it seems to be more effective to set a range of small interim goals (ie one for each simple task involved).
Satisfaction: a goal seems to act as a sort of yardstick for satisfaction. Achieving or exceeding a goal leads to satisfaction and failing to meet a goal leads to dissatisfaction. This then presents us with a bit of a dilemma - there seems to be a choice that needs to be made between setting a challenging goal which is likely to lead to a higher performance or to set a lower goal which is likely to lead to higher satisfaction.

There has clearly been a huge amount of research conducted on goal setting, but I am pleased now to have a slightly clearer understanding of what it all means and how and why it works.

Locke, E.A. and Latham, G.P. (2002) Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35 year Odyssey American Psychologist 57 (9) 705 - 717

Goal Setting - how important is it?

I had the great pleasure of seeing , Tony Grant give a lecture today. He was a very engaging, very accomplished lecturer. He knows his psychology backwards and did a very good job of bringing in evidence from all sorts of psychological disciplines into coaching.

The main thrust if his session was about goals, and made me question the importance of goal setting in career guidance and coaching. Goal setting is one of the things that careers advisers often imagine is a key difference between the two career disciplines.

I recently published an article in Constructing the Future which outlines the evidence of the difference between career guidance and career coaching, and previous research suggests that although goal setting is often perceived to be a key difference (with goal setting being a more significant part of coaching than guidance), in reality, coaches and advisers would use goal setting in the same way: setting goals with clients who would benefit from goal setting, and not with those who wouldn't.

This was an explanation that  I was quite happy with, but listening to Tony Grant has made me wonder.

Grant was suggesting that it's just not possible not to have no goals. Goals don't need to be big or long term, but they do underpin everything. Without goals, we wouldn't be able to get out of bed, or make it to the office, and those of us who claim not to have goals, are either not really understanding what goals are, or are being disingenuous.

And, having thought about it, I quite agree. So where does that leave our career interventions? Should we be conducting coaching or guidance sessions that don't start with goals? I begin to think not. And whether we are using the GROW model as a framework for a coaching session, or the Ali-Graham careers interview model, we aren't going to get our clients very far if we don't set goals both for what we're planning to achieve during our time together, and if we don't identify an end point to their current career thinking.

I like the idea that in the collaboration between coach and client, the client is responsible for the topic, and the coach is responsible for the process. I think I've concluded that the place we all need to start in every interaction is with the identification of these two levels of goals. And I think that without a goal for the session, the conversation is just a chat, and without a goal for the client's current career exploration, we are failing to take adequate responsibility for the process, and letting our clients down.

So what do you think? Is it possible to have a productive coaching or guidance conversation without goals? What would you do as a practitioner if your client was reluctant to set a goal during your session?