Plenty of Room at the Top
Ready to stretch?
It's amazing the comments that stick in our minds and influence us long after they were made. I remember being told at choir rehearsal before our Year 10 graduation to step away from the microphone as my out of tune singing was drowning out the better in tune voices. Truth hurts. I had dutifully sung with passion and gusto but clearly without skill.
It was the same teacher who signed my graduation booklet with the words "Aim for the top Steve, there will always be plenty of room there". Clearly, she wasn't referring to my music career.
Those two comments have shaped my life ever since. I have always been drawn towards doing what others say is impossible, and I've carried the belief that if I aim high, I'm more likely to hit high… maybe not get to the summit but get higher than even I thought possible. Bit of a mouthful, but it turns out my teacher was onto something when it came to aiming for the top.
What the research says about aiming big
Sim Sitkin and his colleagues have spent years studying stretch goals and how likely we are to hit them, personally and organisationally. A stretch goal is one with extreme difficulty and extreme novelty attached, so it goes well past trying to do a little bit better and into something we don't yet know how to do (Sitkin et al., 2011). Charles Handy would call it getting onto the next Sigmoid Curve (yep, that's a real thing). His argument was that everything we build starts slowly, grows and eventually declines, and that the time to start the second curve is while the first one is still climbing (Handy, 1994). Stretch is a deliberate choice to take on something new, bigger, better, different.
The uncomfortable bit is that just thinking big and setting big audacious goals fails more often than it succeeds. When Gary and colleagues (2017) gave people either moderate or stretch goals in a business simulation, the stretch goals lifted a few of them and many of the others abandoned the goal for an easier one, took bigger risks and on average did no better than the people with moderate goals. Sitkin's conclusion is that stretch works when there is a track record of recent success and there is slack in the system, and that without those two things a missed stretch goal tends to kill motivation and damage performance.
Yahoo is the example he uses. When Marissa Mayer took over in 2012 revenue had dropped from $7.2 billion to $4.9 billion in four years and people were demoralised. She set the goal of double-digit annual growth along with eight other very ambitious targets, and by 2016 she had fallen well short on the growth goal and on six of the eight, with Verizon agreeing to take over the company (Sitkin, Miller & See, 2017). Compare that with DaVita, the kidney dialysis company, who in 2011 set up a new team and asked it to find $60 to $80 million in savings within four years while improving patient outcomes and staff satisfaction at the same time. By 2015 they had reached $60 million, and both of the other measures had improved. They had recent wins behind them, the resources to fund it and clinics with enough capacity to absorb the experiments that didn't work.
From my own work I would add a third condition to Sitkin's two, so for me the conditions for stretch are Purpose, Track Record and Space.
Purpose
Is the difficult goal something that matters? Does it resonate, does it inspire and motivate, and is it a bit scary? (If you already know how you are going to get there then it's not a stretch.) The stretch might be in the challenge, the time or the complexity. Purpose isn't one of Sitkin's conditions, and I include it because of what Andrew Carton (2018) found when he studied NASA in the 1960s. Leaders there connected the biggest goal the organisation had, a man on the moon by the end of the decade, to the daily work people were doing at every level, and people came to describe quite ordinary jobs as part of getting there. Purpose is the reason to stretch when nothing is forcing you to.
Track Record
Track record matters if it is the right type of track record. A proven track record often stops people going after stretch goals because they become comfortable with what they have done. Audia, Locke and Smith (2000) studied airlines and trucking companies over ten years and found that the more successful a company had been, the more it stuck with the same strategy after the industry changed around it, and performance fell as a result. Muscle memory matters, but my view is that muscle memory of learning, experimenting, pushing through adversity and delivering in difficult conditions counts for much more than muscle memory of getting the job done. That is the type that carries forward into something new.
Space
This is the reason stretch goals often fail, and it's the concept most people struggle with. Sitkin rates slack as the more critical of his two conditions, and he talks about it mostly in terms of resources. I think it is wider than that. If there isn't space to experiment, reflect, learn and review then the stretch goal has no space to breathe. Di Stefano and colleagues (2016) found that call centre trainees who spent the last fifteen minutes of their day reflecting on what they had learned performed better than trainees who spent that time doing more work.
Most high performers and senior leaders are frustrated about their lack of progress but are trying to stretch without the very condition that matters. That's a bit like jumping off the roof and hoping that gravity won't kick in this time. Ludicrous maybe, but that's exactly what stretch is like without space.
Room at the top
As my Year 10 teacher encouraged me, there is room at the top. I think stretch goals matter and I get excited when I see one in action. My encouragement is go for it. Stretch. Aim big. But be methodical in your own unreasonableness. Be clear on purpose, build on the track record that matters and be disciplined in creating space.
If you have a stretch goal on the go at the moment, which of the three is it short on?
Want to check your own stretch goal, give the 'Stretch Goal Audit' below a go.
References
Audia, P.G., Locke, E.A., & Smith, K.G. (2000). The paradox of success: An archival and a laboratory study of strategic persistence following radical environmental change. Academy of Management Journal, 43(5), 837-853.
Carton, A.M. (2018). "I'm not mopping the floors, I'm putting a man on the moon": How NASA leaders enhanced the meaningfulness of work by changing the meaning of work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 63(2), 323-369.
Di Stefano, G., Gino, F., Pisano, G.P., & Staats, B.R. (2016). Making experience count: The role of reflection in individual learning. Harvard Business School Working Paper 14-093.
Gary, M.S., Yang, M.M., Yetton, P.W., & Sterman, J.D. (2017). Stretch goals and the distribution of organizational performance. Organization Science, 28(3), 395-410.
Handy, C. (1994). The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future. Hutchinson.
Sitkin, S.B., Miller, C.C., & See, K.E. (2017). The stretch goal paradox. Harvard Business Review, 95(1), 92-99.
Sitkin, S.B., See, K.E., Miller, C.C., Lawless, M.W., & Carton, A.M. (2011). The paradox of stretch goals: Organizations in pursuit of the seemingly impossible. Academy of Management Review, 36(3), 544-566.
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