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The Top Goal-Setting Strategies For Students From Management Experts
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- Management theorists have experimented with goal-setting strategies for decades that can empower students to take charge of their educational journeys
- Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Xerox, and DuPont have all attributed their success to the SMART goal system
- CEOs, neuroscience PhDs, an Olympic Medalist, and a Princess have all proposed a system to surpass SMART
One of my main criticisms of our education system is how little time is spent teaching kids how to manage independent planning, productivity, and self-reflection. All the enthusiasm and positive thinking in the world won’t matter if students don’t know how to set goals and plans for themselves.
As a tutor, I’ve met many students who struggled to articulate their goals, and their lack of motivation as a result made it difficult for them to engage with their educational journey. School is the ideal time to learn planning and goal-setting, as it gets much harder to learn and change once you’ve started your career and take on many important adult responsibilities.
So, I made this list of 10 goal-setting methods I’ve encountered to help students get started!
SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound
The SMART system is one heavily encouraged by the University of California system. When I first attended UC Irvine, I was introduced to this in one of my first classes.
It originates with Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives system, which was designed to align individual short-term goals with organizational long-term goals with a system of evaluation and rewards. Companies like Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Xerox, and DuPont credit the system with its success.
Later, George D. Toran created the SMART goal system, inspired by the principles of Drucker’s MBO. Although originally designed around a management context, the SMART goal system can also be applied to other areas of your life where you have significant responsibility. For students, this can involve classes, clubs, jobs, or home projects.
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-bound
However, as you read on and see other goal-setting strategies, you’ll notice that many started as criticisms of SMART goals and where they fell short. Some of these criticisms include a lack of long-term continuous growth perspective and emotional engagement with the goal as a source of motivation.
WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan
This system was designed by a princess and used by the US military.
Princess Gabriele of Oettingen-Oettingen and Oettingen-Spielberg (born Gabriele Elisabeth Aloisia Notgera Prinzessin zu Oettingen-Oettingen und Oettingen-Spielberg)
But professionally, she goes by just Gabriele Oettingen. She’s not only a princess, but also a professor of psychology at New York University. Her work has involved “mental contrasting” as part of fantasy realization theory.
In simple terms, mental contrasting means mentally focusing on the differences between a desirable goal state and an undesirable present state. By imagining the gap between desirable and undesirable states, people can make changes in their emotions, behaviors, and motivations. Oettingen promotes behavior change interventions, one of which is WOOP.
The goal of Oettingen’s work with WOOP is to help people take their positive intentions and create concrete, actionable procedures that turn those intentions into reality. With concrete plans, people can visualize themselves following through on their plans better with improved attention, memory, and motivation. Empirically, there is a lot of support indicating that mental contrasting interventions can be very successful.
You can read details about Oettingen and her theories here. As for WOOP:
Wish: State your goal
Outcome: Think about what would happen if you met your goal and how it would feel
Obstacle: Identify personal or mental barriers that could interfere with your goal
Plan: Find actions you can take to work through the obstacles you identified
CLEAR: Collaborative, Limited, Emotional, Appreciable, Refinable
Adam Kreek, an Olympic Gold Medalist and current executive business coach, introduced CLEAR goals as an alternative to SMART goals in order to emphasize adaptability and personal connection. Kreek argues that SMART goals aren’t well-suited for a “more-agile environment that most businesses find themselves in today.”
Collaborative: Goals should have a social framework to motivate you to keep momentum
Limited: Goals should have a clear end point, whether a deadline or a personal benchmark
Emotional: Goals should involve personal energy and passion through emotional connection
Appreciable: Goals should be broken down into small, obvious actions that can be easily tracked
Refinable: Goals should be modified and revised as new information or circumstances arise
HARD: Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult
Mark Murphy, an author with various works relating to management and business practices, is also a critic of SMART goals. His surveys of workers revealed that very few are optimistic about their goals aligning with their full potential and ability to achieve great things, and that SMART goals don’t correlate with achieving great things.
Murphy instead highlights HARD as a strategy for meaningful future goals based on his research:
Heartfelt: you should care about your goals personally as a source of motivation
Animated: you should visualize your goals so vividly that it feels a part of your life
Required: you should feel your goals are a necessity, not an option, to stave off procrastination and encourage urgency
Difficult: you should challenge yourself to use your whole potential and grow, but you don’t want to set yourself up for failure
Unlike SMART and like CLEAR, Murphy’s HARD emphasizes emotional attachment to your goals to maintain motivation and bring out potential. However, HARD is also less about plans and implementations than keeping yourself motivated on the right goals. This means there’s room to add both in your goal-setting approach.
PACT: Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a PhD researcher of the neuroscience of education at King’s College London, introduced PACT out of more criticism of SMART goals. She emphasizes that SMART goals aren’t designed to empower personal connections to the goal and are ill-suited for long-term goals involving continuous goals. For example, “I want to build a calculator app” might work in the SMART goal framework, but “I want to become a better coder” does not.
Purposeful: your goal should coincide with your life purpose as a source of motivation
Actionable: your goals should have concrete steps that are within your control in the present as they lead to outcomes in the future
Continuous: the actions needed to meet your goals should be easily repeatable and adjustable as part of your regular routine so that you’re not constantly confronted with new decisions to make, which can lead to procrastination, distraction, stress, and paralysis.
Trackable: Goodhart’s Law states that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” So instead of measuring progress with metrics, which can oversimplify and distort reality, track whether or not you’ve made progress. Instead of thinking in terms of lines of code, think in terms of whether or not you coded today, or whether or not you accomplished a feature. These are more concretely tied to reality than metrics, which have to be contextualized.
Le Cunff is open about how PACT won’t help short-term goals, because it’s intended to help nurture long-term ambition. Like I mentioned before, you can definitely mix and match these systems depending on the type of goal you have.
OKR: Objectives and Key Results
OKRs are commonly used in a lot of businesses as part of their management practices. Andrew Grove, an engineer and later CEO of Intel during its period of massive growth, popularized OKRs within the company. Grove actually based OKRs on the work of Peter Drucker, mentioned above for his influence on SMART goals as a result of his MBO strategy. In fact, OKRs were initially called Intel Management by Objectives, or iMBOs.
The goal of OKRs was to value workers by their results instead of their background, meaning that execution leading to good outcomes was more valuable than contributing ideas. Workers could set their own goals to drive this.
John Doerr, a salesperson at Intel when he learned about OKRs, eventually introduced them to Google. They became a central part of Google’s management culture.
“The key result has to be measurable. But at the end you can look, and without any arguments: Did I do that or did I not do it? Yes? No? Simple. No judgments in it.” - Doerr
“OKRs have helped lead us to 10× growth, many times over. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of 'organizing the world’s information' perhaps even achievable. They've kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most.” - Larry Page
Since then, Linkedin, Twitter, Uber, and Microsoft have all adopted OKRs in their management practices. Students can adapt them too.
Objective: what is the goal you want to achieve? It should be aspirational and align well with your long-term ambitions.
Key Results: what are the specific, measurable outcomes that indicate progress? There should be 3-5 of these associated with your objective so that you can have a more holistic perspective.
GROW
The origins of this model are a little messy, but it involved collaboration work between business coaches John Whitmore, Graham Alexander, and Alan Fine through the 90s.
The GROW principle was influenced by Timothy Gallwey, a tennis coach. His Inner Game method to help his players relied on the idea that the biggest performance challenges are internal, like having doubts, distractions, or mental barriers.
The “Inner Game” here refers to our internal thought process and dialogues, which can either help or hurt our performance depending on the nature of the thoughts. After his players completed an exercise, Gallwey would ask them questions about their performance to raise self-awareness. The players would critically examine their own behaviors and thought processes to identify a solution.
Goal: Define your goal so that it is very clear when you have achieved it
Reality: How far are you from achieving your goal right now? Define any issues you’re having that relate to the goals
Obstacles and Options:
Obstacles: What are the obstacles in the way of achieving the goal?
Options: What options do you have to deal with the obstacles?
Way Forward: Translate your options into an actionable set of steps you can take to get to the goal. Sometimes this includes When/Who/Willpower
PEST: Political, Economic, Social, Technological
At first, this one might seem like an unusual inclusion. However, as a tutor, I’ve had many students ask me questions about their goals within the PEST umbrella, especially because of the rise of Artificial Intelligence and my specialization within it.
Society changes incredibly fast now that technology innovates so quickly and brings too many products to market to keep track of. Some students are also concerned about political and social changes happening in their communities. It’s common for adults to think younger students aren’t thinking about the world in political terms, but thanks to social media, they’re constantly experiencing political messaging online and getting stressed about the state of the world.
While PEST was originally proposed by Francis Aguilar in the context of a strategy to assess a business environment, it can be a useful mental model while considering which goals are meaningful to you and how your goals might be impacted by a changing environment.
Political: Look at government policy, interest groups, and broad political trends that might concern your industry or area of expertise
Economic: Look at how your industry, ability to afford educational opportunities, and long-term career goals might be impacted by economic trends
Social: Look at broad cultural and social trends, including social values and demographics
Technological: Look at how innovations in technology might impact your goals, whether it’s empowerment or making your role redundant
FAST: Frequent, Ambitious, Specific, Transparent
Donald and Charles Sull, much like the others mentioned before, saw many limitations in the implementation of SMART goals in businesses they studied. They believed that targets in the goals would be manipulated to be easy to achieve and would fall out of alignment with the organization’s broader strategy.
Instead, they came up with FAST based on their review of business data and academic literature.
Frequent discussions
Ambitious scope
Specific metrics and milestones
Transparent for everyone to see
FAST emphasizes collaboration and accountability with others more than many other methods discussed so far, which emphasize personal connections with the goal.
Backward Goal Setting
This method doesn’t have a specific creator or process, but it’s based in cognitive psychology and reverse engineering. It’s very compatible with brainstorming with other goal-setting methods.
It’s also pretty straightforward: start by visualizing the end result of your goal in a detailed way, then work your way backward through the steps you need to take until you arrive at where you are now.
This is most useful for complex projects with overlapping or interweaving requirements, but it can make a big difference in your approach by making sure your plan is rooted in reaching the goal. It can be really easy to assume that you’re making progress because you’re doing something that looks productive, and it can be too late when you realize you didn’t think through the later steps of your plan enough.
BHAG: Big Hairy Audacious Goal (pronounced bee-hag)
In their book Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras introduce BHAGs. Instead of actions and results that accompany short-term thinking, BHAGs are meant to energize people into committing to a broad mission. Some types of BHAGs include:
Aspiring to be as good as a role model
Beating the competition
Achieving something great
Cultivating internal growth
Some of these goals can be very long-term, spanning years or decades. The research identified by Collins and Porras indicate that BHAGs are associated with a lot of ambitious, innovative companies that became dominant players in their industries. Of course, they were driven by ambitious, innovative visionaries at the top as well.
