Is it possible that the goals you’re setting for your business are actually holding you back?
In this episode of The Business You Really Want, hosts Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo dive into the concept of good vs. bad goals. They challenge the notion of SMART goals and explain why what might be a good goal for one person could be a terrible goal for another. They also explore how to set goals that align with your values, vision, and motivation to drive real business success.
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Is There Such A Thing As A Bad Goal?
Defining Bad Goals
Tonya here with my favorite operations expert and Everyday Effectiveness CEO, Gwen Bortner. Today, we are talking about goals. More specifically, is there any such thing as a bad goal? What do you say, Gwen?
Issues With SMART Goals
What I always say, yes and no. There can be good goals, and there can be bad goals, but it’s not really about the goodness or the badness. It’s really about that not all goals are created equal. I think the problem is we’ve got too set on SMART goals.
Not all goals are created equal. Share on XTell me more.
The concept behind them is great. I’ll see how I do because we don’t even have notes on this. I’ll see how I do on doing the SMART acronym. Tonya, you can help me out. S stands for specific. M is measurable. A is, I think, attainable.
I’ve heard attainable and actionable.
I think I’ve heard both as well, which I know is why I always struggle with it. R is usually realistic or something in that area. T is time-bound. I think we’ve got so set on making sure that a goal fits the SMART framework that we often lose track of what is the goal itself. Is it actually leading us where we want to go, or are we picking a goal because we can easily fit it into the SMART framework?
What you’re saying is SMART goals could be dumb or at least dumb for us.
I have actually said those exact words before, but I think it was before you and I were working together. Once again, you and I are on the same wavelength. I think I put that one time in a speech that SMART goals sometimes are dumb.
Individualized Goal Setting
I love that. I was like, that could be fun. We should have you teach a talk on that at some point, but that’s beside the point. I was going to ask you if you could give some examples of what you would consider bad goals for business, but let’s go with these whole SMART goals-can-be-dumb. What are some dumb goals for a business owner?
I think they’re only dumb when they don’t actually drive you and the business where you want it to go. I think absolutely every goal could be a good goal given the right scenario of people, place, desire, all of those things. I think that exact same goal that’s an excellent goal for one person is a horrid goal for another person.
Give me an example.
I’m going to use the classic example. It’s one of our client examples. It’s the one that I use a lot that we love so much because it’s such a great example.
Are we talking about the attorney again?
No.
It’s a different one.
It’s a different one, but it’s another one you will be familiar with as soon as I start it. It is typical in business to set a financial goal. It makes sense because finances are part of how we keep the scorecard for business, and watching your finances, I’m the very first person to say, you need to be paying attention to your numbers. The numbers matter. All of that is true. All of that is absolutely 100% true, but if money isn’t really your driver, if it’s not a true motivator for you, having a financial goal as your primary business goal can be a really bad goal.
If money isn't your driver, having a financial goal as your primary business goal can be a bad goal. Share on XFor one of our clients, I know money always got her anxious, but she was also at a point in her life, between her age, her retirement, all of the things that were going on, it was like I wasn’t actually convinced that money was an issue for her. I asked the question, I said, so how much money do you actually need to make? If you took $0 out of the business, is there a point that you would be homeless, that you wouldn’t be able to feed yourself?
It’s a fair question.
Motivation And Alignment With Personal Drivers
Is that really a driver? She looked at me and smirked and said, “Everyone tells me that I could live to be a hundred, and I’m not going to run out of money.” It was like, so money is not a good driver for you, and just her personality, she’s not a consumer, money is not a driver anyway, but this added to it. It was like there’s no actual survival need here either. She’s old enough that she doesn’t need to be working. She would be what we would call typical retirement age, although that, of course, is really shifting a ton. I’m not really sure what that is anymore. I said, so why are you working? Because she works hard, and she does a lot. It’s like, so why continue to do this as opposed to reading lots of mystery novels, which I know she likes to do? She said, “Because I love the impact that I make with my clients, and it’s a real motivator for me.”
This also was zero surprise to me, knowing who she is and what her personality is and all of the things that go along with it. I said, so I want you to set a goal around impact. It is not easy to set a SMART goal around impact, not in the truest definition of the word, but I did say I do want it to be a goal, meaning that it needs to be measurable in some way that someone on the outside can help you evaluate whether or not you achieved it. I’m way less worried about her achieving it, but as a means of starting to measure this, I said, so work on that for a couple of weeks. Before we do planning, we’ll talk again, and so she did.
Impact-Driven Success
She came up with a way that made sense for her and what her business was. It would totally not work for anybody else. Impact may not be a driver for anybody else, but the financial goal was actually a bad goal for her because it had zero motivation. It had zero drive for her. The irony of the whole thing is when she switched her goal to impact, she made more money. No one was more shocked than her. I was only a little bit surprised, and it continued so that we did that fairly early in the year, it was probably quarter two. By the end of the year, that was like one of her best years ever that she had ever had financially when she stopped having a goal around money.
It took me a minute to recognize who we were talking about, but I do think it’s important. I appreciate how you said how she measured her impact wouldn’t work for everybody because I feel like you are always really fair about one size does not fit all. I think, in this case, I just have a feeling that people listening have been told that you can’t measure impact goals. That’s why they’re shoved into the SMART goal framework.
I happen to know in this particular case what she came down to is that she could track the number of calls she made, the number of people she spoke to every day that would make an impact in some way, whether it was a connection call, whether it was a sales call, it didn’t matter. But if she was talking to a certain number of people per day, she was likely to have the impact she wanted by the end of the year.
She set it into something very proactive. She had full control over it. “How many people am I going to approach today?” That led her probably, I think you would know this, to actually talking to more people than ever because it was about building a relationship instead of being about getting a sale, which she wasn’t so much excited about. Is that fair?
Yeah, I think that that’s fair. She tracked different types of impact. There were ones that she would call long-term impact, which are her regular clients, where she’s doing coaching or masterminding or whatever with, and they’re spending time with her. She had a goal around that of, “I want to be touching a certain number of people in that way,” which is a different kind of impact than what you just described, but also still valid. It wasn’t just a one-size-fits-all answer to it. There were multiple elements to what that meant. She does public speaking as well, and she knows that’s yet a different level.
There’s the real close, intimate impact, long-term connection. There’s the “you’ve seen me on stage, and I’ve said something that probably made your mind go,” and then there’s just that connection level. She actually set goals at all three, knowing that they have different levels of impact. Some of them she doesn’t have as much control over. Like you said, how many people she actually reaches out to, she has complete control over. How many people she has long-term relationships with, because they’re buying her service, she has less control over.
Well-Intentioned Goals
As I keep thinking about SMART goals being dumb, and I cannot believe as long as we’ve known each other we’ve never had this conversation, but we haven’t. You’re talking about how SMART goals can really hold people back. I was thinking initially just about well-intentioned goals. I think going back to this example of somebody setting revenue goals because that’s what they’re told business owners are supposed to do.
Successful business owners make a certain amount of money, and in order to make that amount of money, they’ve got to set goals around the amount of money that they make. In this specific example, that was holding her business back because that just wasn’t that exciting since there wasn’t a true need associated with that goal.
There was no motivation around that. None.
Are there other ways that having well-intentioned goals can hold back your business growth?
I really do think it gets back to motivation. We talked about this earlier in the series, about motivation really is a key element for a goal being useful as a goal. As a driver, it needs to be motivating. Money is a really easy thing to measure, which is where I get worried about SMART goals, because we pick SMART goals for things that are easy to measure. Do they need to be measurable? Yes, they do in some fashion. But most of us, if we get a little creative, can measure most things that we actually care about. It may take a little creativity, but we can. Instead, we go for an easy measurement instead of a useful or impactful measurement.
I think sometimes, especially if we’re in group settings, if everybody else is coming up with their goals really fast, we feel like we need to come up with them as fast. What I am taking away from this conversation is that easier things, you can think of them faster. These deeper goals that are truly motivating may take some time to figure out what’s the right measurable activity.
One of the things I think it’s important to say is it doesn’t mean that financial goals are also bad, because for some people, that really is a motivation, and there’s no judgment on them for that being a motivation. There are all sorts of reasons that that number, whatever that financial goal is, could be a really significant motivator. It could be because it’s making sure that you’re getting your house payment, your groceries paid, your children clothed, all of the things. That can be a huge motivator.
The motivation is all of those other things, but without that number, it’s not happening. It’s not like one’s good and one’s bad. It just depends. This is the whole context matters. We should, at some point, do a follow-up, like after we’ve done a hundred episodes, to see how many times we said context matters.
Run all the transcripts through AI.
The Evolving Nature Of Goals
Exactly. How many times did context matters come up? Because it does. Context does matter. The goal that’s really important today may not be the goal that’s important tomorrow because your context has changed.
The goal that's important today may not be the goal that's important tomorrow. Share on XStop there, because you just gave me two, what I think are, important questions. The first thing is when you say context matters, I think in this specific case, what you’re really talking about is that each entrepreneur is going to have their own values that they bring to the table, and those values color everything they do. They also have their own vision for their business. This is the kind of business I want to achieve. Some people truly have a vision for a six-figure business. Other people have a vision for an eight-figure business. There are some people who, quite honestly, just want to pay for daycare. I know those people, and that’s totally fine as well.
All of those are right answers.
Aligning Goals With Values And Vision
Depending on where you live, that might require a six-figure business, to be fair. What would you say is the process that a business owner can go through to align their goals with their values and the vision that they have for the business that they want to run?
This is going to sound easy, and it is so freaking hard. That is to get really clear on what success actually means to you. We talk about it all the time in our quarterly session. What does success really mean to you? Not what society has told you success is. Not necessarily what your family of origin says success is. Not your culture. There are all sorts of things that will condition us so far in our head that we don’t even realize it’s not our definition of success. The first piece is to get really clear on what is your unique definition of success. Like I said, that sounds easy enough. When I say the words, that is so hard. The great example I use is the attorney example, and I’m just going to reiterate it really fast, which was, in their mind, a successful attorney is a top-notch litigator, but that didn’t align at all with who they were, their values, all the things that were going on in their life, etc.
It’s been so ingrained between society and TV, you can’t watch any of the courtroom dramas without knowing that the successful litigator is the awesome attorney. We don’t realize that we’ve created this definition of success that isn’t necessarily ours. That is, first and foremost, the thing that you’ve got to be really clear on is what does success actually mean to you at this point in time? That’s where the context matters comes in. What was successful for you before you had children may not be what success is after you have children, which may not be what success is after the children leave the nest. Those can all be very different definitions of success.
Goal Reassessment
I like that. It matches my own lived experience. What was really important to me when I was 28 is not important to me now at 47. Just not. I don’t have any shame or regret over what was important to me at 28 either. I’ll be clear. It’s not like I thought I used to be shallow. How often should we reassess our goals and adjust them if needed? Just your recent examples had to do a lot with certain stages of life. Do we just tie them to stages of life, or are there other points in time where it makes sense to reassess the goals and adjust as necessary?
The Changing Definition Of Success
I think anytime that there is some significant shift in your world, it can be all sorts of things. It can be a close loved one gets sick in a serious way. That could be an elderly parent, but it could be a spouse, it could be a best friend, where all of a sudden that’s going to change what success is looking like right here and right now. It can be all sorts of unexpected things. My husband got a job, my husband lost a job, my best friend is wanting me to move with them to this new space. I can’t even begin to think of the number. It’s anytime something significant really has changed.
Our own process is we look at it every 90 days because sometimes there are shifts that we don’t realize are shifts that are happening. I really always pay attention if you see something big has happened because your definition probably has changed. There are often lots of little shifts happening along the way.
I think what you’re really saying is there is what success looks like. The definition of that for you as an individual can, and often does, change during major shifts in life. You get a job, lose a job, move to a location, move back to a location, family gets bigger, family gets smaller, all of that stuff. Those are major shifts that can change your definition of success. The second piece, which I think is really what goals are, is what is our path? What are we going to do to achieve that definition of success? That is really where you’re looking every 90 days or so. Is this still the right path to achieve that definition of success this year, these five years? Is that on track?
Focusing On The Journey
Absolutely. Totally on track because one of the things that we talk about when we talk about goals is it’s not about achieving the goal. It’s about the journey on the goal. If you are miserable up to the point of achieving the goal, it wasn’t a good goal because the journey is the bulk of the time. The achieving the goal is just a moment in time. As soon as it’s happened, it has passed.
The process is we’ll set this goal, and we start down the path, and it’s like, this path is making me miserable, then let’s change the goal. There’s often a lot of different paths to achieving success. This was just one of the paths. This particular goal was one of the paths. Let’s sometimes back up and try a different direction. Sometimes we can just make a hard turn and go make a different choice. But often, we don’t know that it’s miserable until we start down it.
Which is why it is important. It reminds me of, I think I was 30, where I was just looking and going, I can tell you exactly how I got to right where I’m at. Because there was this part where I was like, I don’t know how I got here. How is this the life I’m living? It’s like, I know exactly how I got here. I don’t want to stay here. That’s the pivot. That’s the hard turn left or the hard turn right, depending on which direction you prefer to go. We’ve actually covered a lot of ground and not a whole lot of time. Let me recap us very quickly. I think the really important point you made is that not all goals are created equal. It’s not so much whether there’s a good goal or a bad goal. Is this a good goal for you?
Not all goals are created equal, and in order to set the right goals for yourself, goals that are truly good for you, don’t try to shove them into the SMART framework. If that works for you, awesome, but it doesn’t work for a lot of people. Like Gwen said, SMART goals are dumb. Sometimes, not always. What you want to do is learn how to set objectives or goals as targets that really serve your business and align with the values that you have. Gwen, do you want to add anything to that?
I really do think understanding that defining your definition of success is hard work is super important. It takes a lot of time, and there will probably be lots of fits and starts. That you’ll start down a path, and it’s like, nope, that wasn’t quite it.
It takes a lot of time and work to truly define your version of success. Share on XI love that because it’s like, in an all-start, your next step is just to find what success looks like for you. Define your definition of winning, but like you said, that alone can be a really big job and a really big task. With that, what I want to say is if you’re listening and you have a definition of success that you would like to share, email it to me. We’re here to start conversations.
The best way to start a conversation is for us to put this information out there for you to think about and for you to respond to it. You can email me at Tonya@everydayeffectiveness.com. We would love to know how you’re defining success. I would just love to know the composite of all of our listeners. Gwen, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for helping us to recognize that SMART goals can be dumb and to figure out a better way.
Mentioned in this Episode
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Also, be sure to check out Episode 12, where we explore how to balance growth and sustainability in your business without burning out.
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
