The Essentials of Stretch Goals

In Beyond Performance Management, Jeremy Hope and Steve Player recommend key practices to achieve superior performance.

For example, how to use stretch goals that are “invariably based on negotiating short-term fixed targets and have recently become more pervasive in both the private and public sectors as senior executives look to make managers more accountable for delivering improved results.” They can help to accelerate individual growth.

In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras have much of value to say about what they characterize as “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” or BHAGs. These tend to be organizational goals.

Actions to Take

o Frame group success in terms of peer-to-peer comparisons (“be the best”).
o Ensure that the executive team sets aspirational, medium-term goals and directions.
o Support continuous, relative improvement (:be the best”) as the primary definition of success at every level.
o Ensure that the executive team supports, but doesn’t control the goal-setting process.
o Enable teams at every level to set their own goals.
o Use benchmarking to encourage teams to raise their game.
o Use ranges rather than single point goals.
o Enable teams to reset goals as required.
o Focus performance reviews on trajectories and gaps.
o Use league tables with care.
o Balance internal competition and cooperation.

Hope and Player explain all this in Chapter 3.

* * *

The late Jeremy Hope was a much-loved and highly-admired thought leader. To learn more about him and his work, please click here.

Steve Player founded The Player Group to help clients improve cost and productivity management. Additionally, The Player Group manages leading edge best practices research in to advanced ABM implementations and beyond budgeting applications. Steve is based in Dallas. To To learn more about him and his work, please click here.

Beyond Performance Management was published by Harvard Business Review Press.

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