Goal Setting Shouldn't be a Show

"Scott, my goal document was nine pages, and my Manager told me it still needed to be enhanced."

This is exactly what I was told on a call yesterday regarding an issue this individual was having with their leader.

When I hear this kind of stuff, I want to scream. It says to me that someone is working for a junior-level leader, and the organization has lost its mind on the original purpose and planning around creating individual goals for people. No goal planning document should be nine pages. Maybe it can be two pages, but with nine pages, you might as well create a business plan and then launch a Kickstarter and be done.

After 2010, OKRs became a thing, and they shouldn't have. OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results. They were adopted by Google, and since nobody has any original ideas, they took off like wildfire across many organizations. Objectives and key results are nice when used appropriately, but I once worked for an organization that took them to the millionth degree. We would have pre-meetings before the meeting about our OKRs for the quarter, and then we would spend hours each month dissecting them repeatedly. I counted one quarter, and I spent almost thirty hours working on OKR-related documents and meetings.

These bad moments inside organizations are typically the result of a group of people who all sort of go along with bad ideas. Remember when you were in middle school, and someone said it would be a good idea to egg your math teacher's house? It sounded like a great idea, but nobody stepped up and ultimately stopped it. Next thing you know, you're standing on the curb holding a dozen eggs, throwing them like Tom Brady at the front pane window.

When nobody stands up and says we shouldn't do this, you end up spending hours and hours on wasteful, meaningless shit that doesn't actually move the needle in an organization. The older I get, the less I want to spend dealing with this stuff, and the more time I want to spend on actually making positive traction on things that matter.

So what do you actually do when you find yourself sitting there staring at page eight of a goal document that nobody is ever going to read again after it's submitted, knowing full well this has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with someone trying to look like they're adding value? You stop playing along blindly. You don't go rogue and light it on fire, but you start asking better questions. "What are the top two or three things that actually matter here?" "How will this be measured?" "What decisions will this document influence?" Watch how quickly things get uncomfortable when you start pulling it back to reality, because most of the time, there isn't a clean answer.

You also have to protect your time like it actually matters, because it does. If you're spending hours writing and rewriting fluff, that's time you're not spending getting better at your craft, building relationships, or doing the kind of work that actually moves your career forward. There's a difference between doing your job and getting buried in performative work that exists just to check a box. Learn to simplify. Summarize. Push for clarity. Nine pages can become two real quick when you strip out the nonsense and focus on what actually drives results.

And at some point, if it keeps happening, you have to decide if you're going to keep tolerating it or if you're going to advocate for yourself. Speak up respectfully, but directly. Offer a better way. If it lands, great, you just elevated the conversation. If it doesn't, now you have real information about the environment you're in. Not every place is going to value efficiency, clarity, or common sense, and that's fine, but you don't have to sit there quietly drowning in it.

The goal isn't to win the argument; it's to protect your energy and make sure your effort is going toward something that actually matters.