Most goals look fine on paper. The strategy deck is clear, the pillars have names and the OKR template is filled in. And yet nobody quite knows what to do differently tomorrow. Florentine and Paul invited me onto the 7people Podcast to talk about why that happens and what actually helps. These are the moments from our conversation I'd go back to, with timestamps so you can jump straight in.
The 7people Podcast: Goal setting that works (for real), with Florentine, Paul and Koen Veltman (40 min). Tip: click any timestamp in this article to jump straight to that moment.
Prefer audio? Listen on Spotify →
1. "Goal" means five different things, so agree on the words first (3:21)
Within the first few minutes, Paul used the word goal three times, each time for something different. That happens in most organizations. When leadership talks about goals, they often mean the purpose or vision. When an employee asks about goals, they want to know what to work on today. A shared ladder of terms solves a lot of that confusion:
Purpose and vision: why you exist and where you're heading.
Ambition: what you want to have achieved in one to five years.
Themes: the big topics you commit to solving.
Goals: outcomes you can reach within three to six months.
Initiatives: projects that take a few weeks.
Tasks: what you can pick up in the next hour.
The exact labels matter less than everyone using the same ones.
2. Goals are about focus, not about all your work (8:19)
Some companies adopt OKRs and then try to capture everything in them. But the whole point of goal setting is to communicate what matters most, and once everything is in there, you've communicated nothing. It's perfectly fine if 70% of your week is business as usual. Keep that part under control with a handful of KPIs, and use the time that's left for the goals that really count.
3. One company, three systems, and it works (10:28)
One of my clients deliberately runs three ways of goal setting side by side. KPIs cover business as usual: as long as they're green, everyone's happy. OKRs are for change goals, the three to six months of focused effort that take up 30–50% of the work. And roughly 10% goes to moonshot projects: new territory without a baseline, where any metric would feel fake and demotivating. Those get an aspiration and are treated as an experiment. Three systems sounds like two too many, but it works because it's crystal clear which one applies when.
4. Goal setting is a communication tool (13:24)
Telling a team "your KPI is X%" is not communication. Good goal setting is a conversation about what you find important and how you'd know you're doing well. That rules out top-down ("here's the strategy, good luck"), but purely bottom-up doesn't work either. What works is a rhythm. Leadership sets the direction, teams bring in what they see, you make choices together, and then it goes back down into a tactical plan.
5. The goosebump test (17:52)
"Improve eNPS" isn't an objective; it's a measure. Ask why a few times and you get closer to something people actually care about. But be careful with the wording you land on. Corporate phrases like "best-in-class employer" don't make anyone walk through the door with more energy. I need goosebumps when I read an objective. If it doesn't give you that, nobody will care, and you won't get the energy needed to do something extraordinary.
6. Key results: from A to B, by doing X (21:25)
Four rules I keep coming back to:
Measure often. A measure you check once a year means praying you'll make it. For a quarterly key result, I want at least six data points along the way.
Write it from A to B. Don't write "+5%"; name the starting value and the target, so progress is visible.
Include the how. For example: "Increase psychological safety in team X from 90 to 95 by running better meetings and learning to give feedback." The how creates focus and makes the initiatives obvious. Without it, an OKR is just a fancy way of writing a KPI.
Have your dashboard ready by day three (38:03). If it's not there by then, you're not ready for OKRs yet. Get better at the basics first.
Want the full list of what tends to go wrong? We collected 13 pitfalls in goal setting.
7. OGSM, Rocks, and why language wins (24:42)
OGSM puts the whole package on a single page, which sounds great. In practice, everything fits into every bucket, so nobody has to make choices. Rocks (from Scaling Up) is simpler: this quarter, this is the big thing. Its real strength is language, because everyone knows exactly what "our rocks" means. My favorite method is whichever fits, as long as it's simple, well communicated and forces you to choose.
8. Step zero: a boring, solid foundation (33:00)
This one is especially for people teams. Before you write a goosebump objective, know how your foundation is performing. Take the five stages of your employee life cycle, give each stage five key metrics, and you have 25 indicators on one page. Color them green, orange or red, and discuss them every month. Some will be a judgment call, and that's fine (37:10). "We did five interviews and it's not good enough yet" is a perfectly valid orange. That baseline is what lets you tell a story the management team will listen to.
What is the employee life cycle? It's the journey every employee goes through in an organization, from the first time they hear about you until after they leave. The stages are usually described as attract → recruit → onboard → develop → retain → offboard. Each stage has its own "moments that matter", and each can be measured: candidate experience in recruitment, time-to-productivity in onboarding, internal promotions in development, and so on.
Where to start
If your strategy is set but your goals still feel mechanical, start small. Agree on the words, choose what really matters, and turn it into something people actually want to run for.
It was a genuine pleasure to dig into this with Florentine and Paul, two people who care as much about making organizations work as we do.
Read next: 13 Pitfalls in goal setting: the most common goal-setting mistakes and how to avoid them.
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Watch next: an oldie but goodie
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TEDxINSEAD: There has to be a better way to organize, Koen Veltman.