Once upon a time, there was a business world that was tangible with both hands. Things had length, height, width, and weight and were more or less beautiful. Everything could be expressed in figures. What was needed for the production of an item? How long did it take to produce or transport it? How many people were needed? What were the costs of the material? In this palpable time, goals could be specified precisely. Then it was an advantage to put the goals somewhat higher, in order to increase the performance of the employees. That was the golden time Stretch Goals.
The meaning of ‚Stretch Goals’ is ‘extended, exaggerated goals’. It describes targets that are set beyond the normal level. This can be on the one hand objectives that exceed the own expectations. On the other hand, it can be requirements that exceed the capabilities of an employee. The idea is to simply raising the bar higher than anticipated. Thus, the employee makes an extra effort. As a result, he gets over a greater height, as if the bar would be put on a realistic height. Nowadays difficulty is the fact that the height of the bar is more and more difficult to assign. How long does it take to write a simple invitation email? How do we measure the quality of the text? How the success of the meeting does go into the evaluation?
If we spend a moment, we find the following reasons that speak against stretching goals.
- The tasks become more often small projects, because they are unique and often unpredictable specialties emerge during the processing.
- Due to the lack of a reliable estimation, the goals are constantly reduced to keeping the deadline and the budget.
- The performance compressions that enterprises carried out for the reduction of expenses in the last years already overstrain the employees in normal operations. They run then out of the potential of additional contributions.
- The superiors and employees are unable to come to a reasonable agreement. This leads to frustration on both sides.
Bottom line: Stretch Goals do not yield results in the current situation. The fuzzy tasks are already challenging enough. Avoid the demotivation that comes from this approach and take your time to agree upon reasonable goals.
