13 Pitfalls in goal setting
Final Thoughts
Great goals don’t just describe ambition; they shape how people feel about their work. They’re signals of trust, clarity, and courage from leadership. The hardest part isn’t writing clever Goals; it’s building a culture where goals are living guides, not bureaucratic obligations. Avoid these traps, and you’ll have a simpler, sharper, and more human system that helps your teams thrive.
It’s Monday morning, and the leadership team is huddled around a screen for the quarterly OKR review. The slides are colorful, the language ambitious, “delight customers,” “scale innovation,” “be the market leader”, but halfway through, someone asks the dreaded question:
“So… did we actually hit any of these?”
Awkward silence. Charts appear, metrics are debated, and someone sheepishly admits they haven’t checked their goals in weeks. Heads nod in quiet agreement. By the end of the meeting, no one feels smarter, just tired.
Sound familiar? You’re not alone. Even experienced leaders with all the right intentions stumble when setting goals. It’s not a lack of ambition or smarts; it’s that goal setting is deceptively tricky. Good goals are clear, energizing, and focused. Bad ones? They quietly sap motivation and create busywork. Even seasoned leaders fall into familiar traps because they’re often trying to please everyone, hedge bets, or avoid tough calls. The result is a cycle of well-intentioned but uninspiring goals.
For something so core to how you work together and succeed as a company, it’s surprising how often we get it wrong. That’s why it helps to spot the traps before you fall into them.
If you’ve ever run a goal-setting cycle, you know it’s part art, part science, and part organizational therapy. Good goals align a company, sharpen focus, and create team momentum.
Here are 13 classic pitfalls and how to avoid them. Use to assess your goal setting practice. Or do a workshop with us to bring your goal practice really up to next level. Its not about which goal setting mechanism you use, whether you are a fan of OKRs, OGSM, Rocks, SMART goals, or whatever system is out there. Its all about how you make it work. Remember, goal setting is one of the core practice you want to be good at as an organization!
1. No choices
When you try to tackle everything, you end up tackling nothing well. A goal list that’s ten bullets long might feel comprehensive, but it usually signals leadership indecision and a lack of clarity about what truly matters. Teams forced to chase too many priorities end up delivering mediocrity across the board. Good goals are painful, because there is a lot clear that you won’t do.
How to avoid it: Force trade-offs. Limit goals to a few priorities that truly matter and empower teams to focus. Make an explicit list of what you won’t do or what teams can say no to
2. No finish line
A goal like “Improve customer experience” is a nice intention but utterly unhelpful: when do you know you’ve achieved it? Without clear definitions of “done,” teams drift, momentum fades, and celebrations never happen because nobody knows when they’ve succeeded. The lack of closure erodes morale over time. The date or milestone is not the finish line, it’s the result that’s being achieved.
How to avoid it: Define “done.” Use measurable criteria or concrete outcomes to mark success and celebrate. Do not have “topics” as goals, but real outcomes. And most importantly CELEBRATE your successes.
3. No Ambition or too much Tension
A good goal stretches your teams. Without tension, teams settle into “business as usual” and creativity stalls. Safe goals might feel good politically, but they rarely inspire high performers or drive growth. Overambitious goals also never deliver. Ambition should be a motivator, not a stick.
How to Avoid It: Set goals that feel slightly uncomfortable. Goals that are challenging, but still achievable. Talk through the ‘how to’, its not just about a clear outcome, but also together articulating how we will get there together.
4. No Follow-Through
Setting goals is exciting; sticking with them is the grind. Many teams draft beautiful goal slides, present them once, and never revisit them until end-of-quarter reviews. This turns Goals into a reporting exercise rather than a steering mechanism.
How to Avoid It: Make Goals part of weekly or biweekly check-ins so they guide real-time decisions. Put them front and center in your weekly team meeting. Every time ask for progress. Remove topics from your agenda if they are not linked to the goals.
5. In the Dark – Cannot Measure
What isn’t measured gets deprioritized. If a goal can’t be tracked, it becomes a vague aspiration that teams quietly ignore because they don’t know what success looks like. Even imperfect metrics are better than none, they create accountability and focus.
How to Avoid It: Use proxy metrics or leading indicators. Transparency drives trust and progress, show the metrics where you can. Invest heavily in good data, good data doesn’t come by itself, and you need to do this thinking and work before your goal execution starts.
6. Too Tasky
A key result like “Launch Q4 marketing campaign” is a task, not a result. When teams confuse action items with outcomes, they risk completing a checklist without achieving meaningful impact. And it opens the door for micromanagement. It feels good to tick boxes, but it doesn’t move the needle.
How to Avoid It: Phrase results as measurable outcomes, not steps. Let teams choose their own tasks.
7. From the Ivory Tower
Goals crafted in executive isolation often miss ground truths. Leaders sometimes write generic, buzzword-laden Goals that sound good but fail to resonate. Teams see through this instantly, which undermines trust and engagement. Top-down mandates without clear responsibility lead to confusion and finger-pointing. Goals are also not supposed to be defined bottom-up. Good goals ARE COMMUNICATION. It’s a two-way exchange by your team with you do it for on what is important to achieve. If you see or hear little communication then you are not doing goal setting.
How to Avoid It: Co-create goals. Iterate goals, ask for feedback and input. It’s a 2-way open dialogue. Involve people closest to the work to ground leadership’s vision in reality.
8. No Ownership
When everyone owns a goal, nobody owns it. Goals need champions who are accountable for driving progress, not committees. Your org chart is there for your goals. The biggest reason to have an org chart is that you can execute on your goals (your strategy). If you can’t explain how each goal is owned by a single team, then you have the wrong teams. You are just creating bureaucracy.
How to Avoid It: Assign explicit owners for each goal and make them visible in your team structure. Don’t bring teams to a goal, bring one goal to one team. If needed, you create a (temporary) team to own a goal.
9. Forgetting the Learning Loop
Many organizations never pause to reflect on what worked and what didn’t. We get it, works busy, and there’s always a next fire to fight. Without retrospectives, you repeat mistakes, treat goals as one-off exercises, and miss valuable learning opportunities. This limits your team’s ability to improve future cycles.
How to Avoid It: Run reviews after every cycle. Document lessons and evolve your goal-setting process. Good goal setting is a very important learning journey.
10. No Alignment
When teams are rowing in different directions, even great execution feels chaotic. Misaligned Goals create friction, duplication, and frustration, often leaving teams wondering why their hard work doesn’t ladder up to broader success. When teams write Goals in isolation, you get silos. It’s not that people don’t want to collaborate it’s that they’re rarely invited to. Disconnected goals waste opportunities for synergy, especially in cross-functional environments.
How to Avoid It: Share Goals widely. Connect team goals to company objectives and clarify interdependencies between teams. Encourage teams to review each other’s goals and align work early. Build rituals for cross-team input.
11. Using Goals for Everything
Not everything needs to be formalized in a goal setting framework. Overloading the system with small tasks makes Goals feel heavy and bureaucratic, leading to disengagement. The tool should amplify focus, not become an administrative burden. The goal of goals is to communicate focus, not to communicate everything.
How to Avoid It: Reserve Goals for game-changing priorities. Manage smaller work through simpler tools.
12. No goosebumps
Are we human or are we dancing? A famous quote by Coldplay. We are not machines that execute on goals. A key driver of us humans is to be meaningful. So let’s make our goals meaningful. Who do we help, and why do we care? “15% more sales” can be interesting for management, but for the sales agent feels like extra workload. Even “implement the new accounting software” has meaning, make it stand-out that you get goosebumps
How to Avoid It: Tell goals like stories. Make them personal, exciting and purposeful. Repeat, repeat, repeat why it is valuable to for example your customer or the health of the company (and watch the interview Koen did with 7people on this topic below).
13. Treating Goals as Performance Reviews
When bonuses and promotions hinge directly on Goals, teams will “play it safe.” Instead of setting ambitious goals, they’ll sandbag to protect their ratings. This kills innovation and erodes trust in the system, and drives individual interests.
How to Avoid It: Separate performance conversations from goal-setting. Goals should inspire learning, not fear.
Great goals don’t just describe ambition; they shape how people feel about their work. They’re signals of trust, clarity, and courage from leadership. The hardest part isn’t writing clever Goals; it’s building a culture where goals are living guides, not bureaucratic obligations. Avoid these traps, and you’ll have a simpler, sharper, and more human system that helps your teams thrive.