Forget your goals, build a system instead

It’s mid-January, just enough time for the good intentions of early January to meet with the harsh reality of late January. In early January, we set goals, make resolutions, and look starry-eyed at the year ahead. By late January, we just want to keep up with work and stay five extra minutes in our warm bed.

I love setting goals, but goals are dumb. Don’t get me wrong, they are important; they are just a bad thing to measure. Goals are a lagging indicator, which is an indicator of success that lags behind the actions it takes to get there.

Let’s take a company’s goal for profit as an example. Company profit gets calculated at the end of the year after every action is complete. Once profit is calculated, it can’t be changed-the metric lags behind all of the actions that affect it.

Lead metrics are more important.

A lead metric is something you can measure now that you know will impact your goal for the future. For example, a lead measure may be a salesperson’s number of sales calls. If we know that 5% of sales calls result in business, and we know the average size of that business, we can figure out how many sales calls we need to make to hit the revenue number we want to hit to make the profit number we want to make.