The Mintable
Every quarter, teams across every industry go through the same ritual. Goals come down, get documented somewhere, and then mostly get ignored until the end of the quarter when everyone scrambles to explain what happened to them. It's theater, and everyone knows it's theater, and nobody is sure how to make it stop.
The problem isn't goal-setting as a practice. The problem is who's doing the setting.
Why top-down goals don't land
When someone else sets your goals and hands them to you, two things happen. First, you don't feel ownership over them — they're targets you're expected to hit, not things you've committed to. Second, and more importantly, you haven't thought through the mechanics of how you'd actually achieve them. When reality diverges from the plan (it always does), you have no framework for adjusting.
Managers who set goals for their teams without involving them also tend to set the wrong goals. They set goals based on what they can see, which is usually outputs and deliverables. The team can see the inputs — what's actually making things move or not move. Without that perspective, the goal often lands in the wrong place.
What genuine involvement looks like
Involving your team in goal-setting doesn't mean everyone gets to pick their own targets. There are organizational objectives that need to flow down, and it's your job to connect the team's work to those. But there's a difference between "here are the constraints, help me figure out what we commit to within them" and "here are your targets, sign off on them."
Start by sharing the context. What does the organization need from this team this quarter? What's at stake? Why does it matter? People engage differently when they understand the stakes. They're not just pushing toward a number — they're contributing to something that has a reason behind it.
Then ask the team what they think is achievable. Not what they want it to be — what they actually think can happen given everything they know about the current situation. Listen carefully to what they say, because they usually know things about the work that you don't.
The specificity problem
Vague goals are comfort goals. "Improve customer satisfaction" is not a goal. It doesn't tell anyone what to actually do, and it can't be evaluated at the end of the period because there's no agreed-upon definition of success.
Useful goals have a number and a date. Not because metrics are everything, but because measurability forces clarity. When you try to make a goal measurable and you can't, it usually means you haven't decided what success actually looks like yet. That conversation — about what done means — is worth having before you commit to doing it.
Stretch without breaking
There's a version of ambitious goal-setting that's actually destructive. When goals are set so high that people can see from day one they won't hit them, the goals stop functioning as goals. People stop believing the goal matters, start optimizing for a story about why they missed it, and the whole system loses credibility.
A goal should feel like a stretch — something that requires the team to work smart and stay focused. It shouldn't feel like a punishment. The difference matters more than most people acknowledge, and teams can tell which kind they're dealing with almost immediately.
What to do when the quarter starts to go sideways
Goals set in January can't predict what February will bring. When priorities shift or assumptions turn out to be wrong, the team needs to know it's acceptable to surface that early and renegotiate, rather than quietly running toward a target they know isn't relevant anymore.
Build a mid-cycle check-in into your process. Not a blame session — a genuine reassessment. What's changed? Does the goal still make sense? Does it need to be adjusted? A goal that gets updated for good reasons is not a failure. A goal that gets silently abandoned is.
The closing condition
At the end of every goal-setting conversation, make sure everyone in the room can say — in their own words — what they're committing to and why it matters. If the answers are vague or hesitant, the goal hasn't landed yet. Keep going until it has. That last five minutes is often the most important part of the meeting.