New Year's Resolutions: Put Your Imperfections Behind You!

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Fresh starts are real!  This week we will hear a lot of advice about setting the appropriate New Year's resolutions. We'll also hear about how hard it is to actually adhere to our resolutions.   So many of us establish diet or exercise goals this time of year, but by the spring, we find ourselves struggling to stick with our original plans.  Having said that, recent research does suggest that New Year's Day might be a more effective day for setting a bold goal than a "typical" day during the year.   

Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman,  and Jason Riis published a paper three years ago titled, "Put Your Imperfections behind You:Temporal Landmarks Spur Goal Initiation When They Signal New Beginnings."  They studied "temporal landmarks" - i.e. days that “stand in marked contrast to the seemingly unending stream of trivial and ordinary occurrences” in our lives. These landmarks include birthdays, holidays, new beginnings (of a year or semester), and major life events such as a wedding.  These scholars examined whether an event that marked a "new beginning" could be motivating for people to pursue a particular goal.   Dai, Milkman, and Riis found that landmarks that represent new beginnings are useful to us because they enable us to "leave our old selves behind" and to embrace a better version of ourselves.  We can "disassociate" ourselves from our past imperfect selves, in a sense, at these landmark moments.  That motivates us to pursue a new goal, perhaps to eradicate a bad habit.  

In sum, New Year's Day might just be the right time to attempt to pursue a bold new goal regarding your career, personal well-being, or other aspect of your life.  Of course, much work will remain with regard to adhering to that goal.  However, the holiday will certainly be advantageous when it comes to initiating the pursuit of this new goal, much more effective than January 3rd or 4th might be... unless that happens to be your birthday or some other key moment in your life.  

How To Think About Goals Over Time

Researchers have conducted some interesting new work on goal-setting and achievement.   Insights by Stanford Business summarizes the findings of research conducted by Szu-chi Huang, Liyin Jin,, and Ying Zhang:

New research by Szu-chi Huang, assistant professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, finds that while people benefit from concentrating on small “sub-goals” in the early stages of a pursuit, they should focus instead on the larger objective in the late stages. That notion could be important to any business that entices consumers and employees to set goals, whether as part of an incentive program or service offered.

“When you are just starting a pursuit, feeling reassured that it’s actually doable is important, and achieving a sub-goal increases that sense of attainability,” Huang says. But later, people are no longer concerned about attainment and need to feel that their actions continue to be worthwhile in order to maintain motivation.  “At that point, to avoid coasting and becoming distracted, they need to focus on that final goal to see value in their actions,” Huang says. 

The research appears very consistent with the work on small wins.  You need to have those sub-goals, because small wins are important during any transformation process or challenging task.  However, you need to have the broader vision as well.   This work adds nicely to our understanding of how small wins work by describing the important shift that has to happen over time from small sub-goals to broader objective.

Unreasonable Goals, Unethical Behavior

In a recent Harvard Business Review post, Liane Davey explores the connection between unreasonable objectives and unethical behavior.  Sometimes, you face a difficult situation as a team leader.  You have been given an unreasonable goal to achieve.   Davey examines how team leaders can prevent their employees from engaging in inappropriate conduct as a means to achieving highly aggressive goals.  

First, Davey argues that you need to "define the off-limits options" when discussing how to achieve your objectives.  Davey recommends asking, "What would we not be willing to do to hit our target?”  Second, Davey argues that you need to probe carefully to understand how people are trying to achieve their targets.  Don't just focus on results.  Focus on the behaviors and the processes that are being employed to try to achieve those results.  Third, don't single out publicly those people who are struggling to achieve highly aggressive goals.   Such shaming may cause them to resort to unethical methods to achieve better results.  Finally, keep your eye out for outliers... people doing extraordinarily well in the face of aggressive targets.  If one person or unit is exceeding all others by 30%, you might want to ask, "How could they be doing so much better than all the others?"  Don't accuse them of inappropriate behavior without any evidence, of course.  Probe to understand what their best practices might be, for purposes of sharing those with other team members.  However, be on the lookout for any evidence that they may be crossing the line in pursuit of top notch results.  

In sum, these types of vigilant behaviors will help avoid some very unpleasant surprises.   Don't just complain about unreasonable objectives, or demand that your team go above and beyond to achieve those results. Keep a close eye on how people go about their work so as to avoid putting you and your organization at great risk.   

Supporting Others (or not!) As We Strive to Achieve Our Goals

Stanford Professor Szu-chi Huang has co-authored an interesting new paper about goal achievement along with Susan M. Broniarczyk of the University of Texas at Austin, Ying Zhang of Peking University, and Mariam Beruchashvili of California State University at Northridge.  Their paper is titled, "From Close to Distant: The Dynamics of Interpersonal Relationships in Shared Goal Pursuit.” 

What did these scholars discover about people's behavior with peers as they pursue common goals?   In the initial stages of goal pursuit, people tend to be supportive of one another.  They advise and encourage one another.   They reach out and try to help their peers.   However, as people get close to achieving their goals, they become more distant from their peers.   They are less likely to offer tips to others, or to share important and perhaps helpful information.   According to this article from the Standford Graduate School of Business, "Almost 79% of those in the advanced stage expressed feelings of distance and reluctance to share information with other members, compared with 44.4% in the early stage." 

Huang studied this phenomenon from the perspective of engaging customers in programs such as Weight Watchers.  The findings may have far-reaching implications though.  We know from a variety of studies that sharing information within groups can be a challenge.  Sometimes, we hear that people horde data because, "Information is power."  However, we know that power is not the only reason people fail to disclose information to their peers.  Sometimes, people work in different silos, and for that reason, barriers to free information flow exist.  In other cases, people do not feel safe speaking up and sharing their perspective.  This study suggests that sharing of information may be more prevalent when we begin to pursue a particular objective, but it may diminish as we approach our goals.   Teams leaders, therefore, need to be particularly mindful of facilitating information sharing and knowledge transfer as projects mature. 

The Impact of Conflicting Goals

With the new year upon us, many people will be setting goals for themselves and their organizations.  Of course, we would hope that these goals would be aligned, i.e. that they would reinforce and complement one another.  Sometimes, however, we find ourselves trying to juggle conflicting goals.  Stanford's Jennifer Aaker has conducted research, along with Duke's Jordan Etkin and Rotterdam's Ioannis Evangelidis, on the impact of competing objectives.   What did they find?

1. Not surprisingly, people tend to experience more stress when they have competing goals that they are trying to juggle. 
2. People tend to feel more pressed for time when they experience conflicting goals, even when the goals do not compete for their time. 
3. When people have conflicting goals, they tend to become much less patient.  In other words, they are less willing to wait in line, or on the phone.  They are also less willing to wait for a package to be delivered.  
4. Because they have less patience, people are willing to pay more to save time.  The researchers found that, "Goal-conflicted subjects who felt short on time were willing to pay 30 percent more for expedited shipping of a DVD from Amazon. Such results confirm the hypothesis that feeling pressed for time shortens patience and increases willingness to pay."  

 What's the lesson for all of us as we set goals for 2015?   First, if we are leading an organization, we should be mindful of the pressures we create for others if we establish too many goals that are competing with one another.  We can never align objectives completely, but we can try to minimize conflicts.  Second, we can become more aware of how competing objectives may distort our behavior.  Before we expend resources, we might think about how stress and anxiety may be causing us to spend a bit less responsibly.    Finally, we might think about streamlining our list of goals and objectives for 2015.  If we set too many goals, we may not accomplish anything.  We have to be able to set priorities.  In so doing, we will also reduce the likelihood of stress from competing objectives. 

How to Encourage Persistence

Wharton Professor Rom Y. Schrift and Georgia State Professor Jeffrey R. Parker have written a new paper titled, "Staying the Course: The Option of Doing Nothing and Its Impact on on Postchoice Persistence."   They discovered that people are more likely to persist in pursuit of their objectives if they originally had an option of doing nothing.  In other words, imagine that someone had the option of choosing a membership at Gym A or Gym B.   Now imagine that they were explicitly presented the option of not joining any gym at all.   In the case where this third option of doing nothing is explicitly presented to them, people are more likely to stick to their original goals.  Parker explains, "The intuition is we don’t want to give them the option.  ‘Not doing whatever’ may sound like giving up. But what people decide for themselves is, ‘I didn’t have to do it and I decided to do it, so I’ll stick with it for a longer period of time.'"  The authors explain their conclusions in the paper:

“Sticking to a diet, completing drug regimens, regularly visiting the gym and working through personal or professional challenges are all instances in which persisting is beneficial and important,” the authors write. “Using the right incentive structures, one can drastically reduce or eliminate the tendency of opting out, while maintaining the positive impact that affording no-choice options has on persistence.”