The Better Way to Set Business Goals

We’ve all been taught to set business goals the same way. Pick a big, ambitious number, attach a date to it, and call it a strategy.

Grow sales by 20 percent this year. Hit two million in revenue by Q3. Land 50 new customers. It’s the standard playbook for most companies.

But what if this approach, despite its good intentions, is actually demotivating your team and keeping you, the owner, trapped in a cycle of firefighting?

The cycle is familiar. A big kickoff meeting announces the new targets. Teams hold strategy sessions. Everyone scrambles to hit the numbers. Then, something outside of anyone’s control happens. The market shifts, a key client leaves, the economy takes a dip.

Suddenly, the goals are out of reach. The quarter ends with a somber meeting about missing the targets, and the whole process starts over. It’s an exhausting cycle that can unintentionally breed cynicism. Your team might smile and nod, but they know a hard truth. They don’t actually control the outcome.

The flaw in traditional goal setting is its focus on outcomes we can’t directly control.

You can’t force a customer to buy. You can do things that encourage them to buy, but you can’t control their final decision. This brings up a critical question for any leader:

If your team did everything within its control to win, but the desired outcome didn’t happen, was it a success or a failure?

The traditional model would call it a failure. But that feels like it misses the point, doesn’t it? As Captain Picard once said, it’s possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That isn’t a weakness. That’s life.

Think about a personal goal, like losing 20 pounds. You can’t directly control what the scale says. But you can control your actions. You can stop drinking soda. You can go to the gym three times a week. Those are the real goals, the ones you have complete control over.

If you stick to those new habits but only lose a few pounds, what’s the takeaway? One path leads to defeat. You feel like your efforts don’t matter, so you give up. The other path sees the success. You stuck to your commitments, and now you can use what you’ve learned to adjust your approach.

Sports psychology has embraced this idea for years. Athletes perform better and experience less anxiety when they focus on their performance, like perfecting their technique, rather than on the final score. They focus on what they can control.

Our businesses can do the same. This shift is how you move from constantly managing the daily chaos to truly leading.

Instead of chasing unpredictable outcomes, let’s focus our goals on the strategic actions we can control.

Instead of, “Grow sales by 20 percent,” a better goal is, “Define our defensible niche and re-align our service offerings by the end of the quarter.”

Instead of, “Gain 50 new customers,” try, “Build and launch a thought leadership platform to become the most trusted voice in our market.”

When you frame the strategic actions as the goals, you free your team to focus on doing excellent work. They can celebrate real wins and feel a sense of accomplishment, regardless of what the economy throws at them. They’ll perform better because they aren’t living with the constant anxiety that their best effort won’t be good enough.

This isn’t just a better way to work. It’s a more resilient and human way to lead. It’s how you build a business that gives you freedom, not just a more stressful job.

Making this shift from outcome-based thinking isn’t always easy, but it’s the first step to taking back control. If you’re ready to build a more focused and resilient company, we should talk.