Goal Setting: Focus On The Process, Not The Outcome

Leaders in the business world tend to have outcome-based goals as their primary motivation. Outcome-based goals might include a pay raise, a promotion, or even having the most sales revenue amongst their staff. This is perfectly understandable, as it is in our nature as human beings to seek rewards for our efforts.

However, those goals may do more harm than good. Someone's self-worth is prone to be tied up with the goal, which causes them to judge the outcome as either good or bad. This approach causes added stress, which is known to decrease the ability of one to perform at their absolute best. When someone is unable to perform at their best, they decrease their chances for success in their outcome-based goals. They may also judge themselves in comparison to others, which adds additional stress. The more stress you have, the less likely you are to perform optimally.

An alternative for leaders would be goals that are internally focused, and seek mastery of processes over outcomes. These internal goals (also known as mastery goals) focus not on the outcome of any specific task, but rather on the process it takes to get to that task. These mastery goals are how the best leaders achieve sustained success rather than inconsistent success. The reason for this is simple; they focused on creating a replicable process to achieve success again and again.

In order to achieve sustained success, a leader must let go of the urge to focus on outcome-based goals. This is difficult for many leaders to do, as they have been trained to always focus on the outcome for setting goals. However, it is possible to achieve the desired outcomes without the excess attachment to them. Those leaders are not judging their outcomes as good or bad; rather they are using outcomes as feedback for improvement opportunities. Remember, judgment leads to stress, which decreases your ability to perform at your very best. With less stress, a leader has a greater chance of performing at their very best and thus has a better chance of achieving their desired outcomes.

This new frame of reference may take time to get used to, and may even require a leap of faith. But if a leader is looking for optimal performance on a consistent basis, then it might be time to consider focusing less on the outcome, and more on the processes in order to achieve those outcomes.