Many Employees Don't Want Goals

Point #1 - About 5% of people regularly make goals for themselves. About 10% of people think about making goals but generally don't. And, the other 85% just don't tend to make goals.

Point #2 - When people set goals for themselves, their motivation and their results increase. This is well-proven and well-supported both in the lab and in practical reality.

Point #3 - When goals are imposed on people, the effect on motivation and results is negligible. In fact, motivation often decreases, and the tendency to cheat and misreport results increases significantly.

Point #4 - When we do performance management at work, we generally insist that 100% of our employees make goals and strive to achieve them.

So, if only 5% to 15% of our employees like to set their own goals, yet we insist that all employees set goals, we are obviously imposing goals on the other 85%. Even if we wrap it up in nice encouraging words, we are still imposing goals on them, and this just doesn't drive performance.