Page 153 - Hard Goals

144 HARD Goals

goal of making this dumb report take 10 minutes to complete
instead of its current 20 minutes. It will test the very limits of
kindergarten math and data entry typing, but let’s go for it!”
Puh-lease. Note: Plenty of companies set lots of dumb goals, but
they typically don’t receive the level of scientifi c attention and
effort that we’re talking about in this book. Dumb goals are
usually of the thoughtless variety.
There was one other noteworthy fi nding from this study:

employees who had bosses that set more difficult goals were way
more likely to give high scores to the following questions:

I recommend this company to others as a great place
for people to work.
I recommend my boss to others as a great person to
work for.

This makes pretty good intuitive sense. If your boss really thinks
through what kinds of goals are going to elicit your best perfor-
mance, if he or she sits down with you to design optimally dif-
fi cult goals, it’s a clear indication that the boss must care about
you. And that level of caring can buy a lot of heartfelt employee
loyalty, not to mention a great deal of extra effort.
Think about the greatest teacher you ever had. It’s a safe
bet that this person cared about you and even pushed you to
be your very best. I know, we all enjoyed those days when we
walked into class and saw a substitute teacher and the movie
projector, but the do-nothing routine would’ve gotten old pretty
fast. And we would’ve been a lot worse off over the rest of our
lives without the learning and pushing we got from that caring
teacher.