Five Reasons Your Team Can't Set SMART Goals (And None of Them Are About the Acronym)

It's been 45 years since George T. Doran gave us the SMART framework. So why are we still struggling with the basics?

Last month, a practice leader – someone responsible for a team of fifty – reached out to me with a familiar request. "We need an L&D intervention on SMART goals," she said. "I've sent multiple reminders. I've flagged that the goals people are submitting aren't SMART. They're still not getting it."

We had already run a session on setting SMART goals earlier in the year. The team had attended. They could probably recite the acronym in their sleep – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. They knew the theory. And yet, months later, the goal sheets coming back were still filled with vague, recycled job descriptions dressed up as objectives.

This scenario plays out in organisations every single year, across industries and levels. And every single year, the instinctive HR response is the same: run another training. Explain the acronym again. Share better examples. Surely, this time, it'll click.

It won't. Because the problem was never the acronym.

When Doran wrote his 1981 paper in Management Review, he was offering managers a simple checklist to write better planning objectives. A handy tool. Somewhere over the next forty-five years, we took that handy tool and made it carry the weight of the entire performance management system. We built the house on a screwdriver – and now we're surprised the house won't stand. The real barriers to good goal-setting have nothing to do with the acronym. They're structural, systemic, and sitting far upstream of any template.

Here are five of them.

1. People are submitting their job descriptions, not their goals

Open any goal sheet at random, and odds are you'll find entries that read like a role profile: "Manage client relationships." "Ensure timely project delivery." "Support team development."

These aren't goals. They're KRAs – Key Result Areas – the broad domains of accountability that define what someone's role covers. A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is different again – it's the metric you'd use to track how that area is performing. And a goal is different from both. It's the specific change you're committing to, measured by a KPI, within a KRA, in a defined timeframe.

Let's make this concrete through an example. Say you're a client engagement manager:

Your KRA is: Client Relationship Management. That's the territory – the part of the job you own.

Your KPI is: Net Promoter Score (NPS). That's how you'd know if things are going well or poorly in that territory.

Your goal is: Improve NPS from 42 to 55 by Q3 by introducing a structured post-engagement feedback loop with the top 10 accounts. That's what you're actually going to do differently this year, how you'll measure it, and by when.

Most goal sheets are filled with KRAs pretending to be goals. "Manage client relationships" is not a goal – it's a line from a job description. The employee isn't wrong for writing it. Nobody ever showed them the difference. And most goal-setting templates don't enforce it. People open the form, mentally replay what they do all day, and type that in.

The fix isn't another SMART workshop. It's teaching the layering. Before anyone writes a goal, they should answer three sequential questions: What is the domain I'm accountable for? How would progress in this domain be measured? And what specifically am I trying to change or achieve within that domain this year?

2. Business-as-usual is filling the goal sheet

A large proportion of what shows up in goal sheets isn't aspirational. It's operational. "Process invoices within SLA." "Conduct monthly team meetings." "Submit reports on time."

If achieving the goal doesn't change anything – if it simply describes the baseline expectation of doing your job competently – it's not a goal. It's a performance standard. Ask: What's different if you achieve this? If the answer is "nothing, this is just what I'm supposed to do anyway," it doesn't belong in a goal sheet. It belongs in a role charter or a standard operating procedure.

And yet, the system often incentivises exactly this. In many organisations, the performance management framework penalises missed targets far more harshly than it rewards ambition. Set a stretch goal and fall short? Lower rating. Set a BAU goal and meet it? "Fully effective." People aren't stupid. They've learned how the game works, and they play it accordingly – keeping goals safe, achievable, and indistinguishable from daily work.

The reframe: Start goal-setting conversations not with "What do you do?" but with "What's different about this year? What will you build, improve, or change that didn't exist before – or wasn't good enough before?" This single question shifts the frame from maintenance to movement.

3. Goals are disconnected from strategy because the strategy was never cascaded

This one points the finger not at employees but at leadership.

In theory, individual goals should be the final link in a chain: organisational strategy flows into departmental priorities, which inform team objectives, which shape individual goals. In practice, this cascade is often broken, incomplete, or entirely absent. Either the organisational strategy hasn't been translated into departmental terms, or it has but was never communicated beyond the leadership team, or – in the most frustrating variant – it was communicated once in a town hall, in language so broad that it's impossible to derive individual action from it.

When employees sit down to set goals without clarity on what their team or department is trying to achieve, they are, quite literally, writing fiction. They're guessing at what might matter, hedging with vague language, and defaulting to BAU because at least that's something they can defend.

Kaplan and Norton described this as the strategy execution gap over two decades ago – the chasm between what the C-suite articulates and what appears in individual scorecards. The gap hasn't closed. In many organisations, goal-setting season begins at the individual level, with a form and a deadline. It should begin at the top, with leaders clearly sharing three to five priorities for the year, explaining what success looks like, and giving teams the raw material from which individual goals can be meaningfully derived.

If your team can't set good goals, the first question isn't whether they understand SMART. It's whether anyone has told them what matters.

4. The framework assumes stability that doesn't exist

An objection I hear often, and one that deserves more respect than it usually gets: "If the sales target, or the project pipeline, or the client allocation isn't in my control, how can I set a goal tied to it?"

This is a legitimate challenge, not an excuse. It's especially acute in project-based, consulting, or client-servicing teams where the work six months from now is genuinely unknown. Traditional SMART logic assumes a degree of environmental stability and individual agency that simply doesn't exist in these contexts. Forcing specificity where none can honestly exist doesn't produce better goals – it produces fiction or, more commonly, goals so vague they satisfy nobody.

The solution isn't to abandon specificity. It's to shift the type of goal. Research on goal-setting in complex environments – notably by Drach-Zahavy and Erez – shows that learning goals outperform outcome-based performance goals when tasks are uncertain and changing. For a consultant who doesn't know what project they'll be on in Q3, the right goal isn't "achieve 95% client satisfaction on Project X." It's something like "develop and pilot a reusable stakeholder alignment framework across the next two client engagements." That's specific. It's measurable. It's within their control. But it's a capability goal, not an output goal – and that distinction matters enormously.

The fix: Build legitimate space for learning and capability goals alongside output goals, especially for roles with high uncertainty. Not as a soft option, but as the strategically sound one.

5. Goals are a form-filling event, not a living conversation

In many organisations, goals are set in April and resurrected in December. The intervening eight months are a dead zone. No check-ins. No recalibration. No mid-year conversations about what's changed, what's working, what should be abandoned. The goal sheet sits in an HRMS, gathering digital dust, until it's pulled out for year-end review – at which point it's used primarily to justify a rating that, in many cases, the manager had already decided on anyway.

When goals live in this kind of system, people are right not to invest effort in them. Why spend time crafting a thoughtful, specific, ambitious goal if it's never going to be discussed again? If the only moment it matters is the annual review, and the review is largely a foregone conclusion? The rational response to a dead system is minimal compliance – which is exactly what most organisations get.

Cappelli and Tavis documented this shift in their research on the performance management revolution: the organisations seeing real value from goal-setting are the ones that have built a conversation architecture around it. Not elaborate bureaucratic check-ins, but lightweight, regular touchpoints – quarterly reviews, monthly one-on-ones that use goals as a live navigation instrument, mid-year recalibration when priorities shift. Goals that are discussed are goals that are taken seriously.

The fix isn't a better goal template. It's a better rhythm. Design the conversation cadence first, and the quality of goal-setting will follow – because people will know their goals actually matter beyond the form.

So what should HR actually do?

If you're in HR or L&D and a business leader comes to you asking for a SMART goals training, resist the instinct to comply immediately. Instead, diagnose. Which of these five problems is actually operating? Is it a knowledge gap (unlikely, if they've been through it before), or is it a clarity gap, a cascade failure, a system design problem, or an incentive misalignment?

The answer changes the intervention entirely. It might be a workshop – but not on SMART. On distinguishing KRAs from goals, or on writing capability goals for uncertain environments. It might not be a workshop at all, but a conversation with the leadership team about articulating priorities before expecting individuals to set meaningful goals. Or it might be a redesign of the performance management rhythm – building in quarterly reviews, normalising mid-year goal changes, delinking goal achievement from rating algorithms.

And if you're a business leader: the quality of your team's goals is a mirror of the clarity you've provided. If goals are vague, check whether your strategy communication has been specific. If goals are all BAU, check whether your system rewards ambition or penalises risk.

SMART, as a formatting framework, is perfectly fine. Forty-five years on, the acronym does what it was designed to do – it helps you check whether a goal statement is well-constructed. But you can't format what doesn't exist. And no amount of SMART training will fix the upstream failures that make goal-setting feel, for so many teams, like an exercise in futile compliance.

The practice leader who reached out to me had actually done the hard part – she'd cascaded her own goals to her team for alignment. The strategy was there. The direction was clear. What her team lacked was the ability to translate that direction into well-formed goals, instead of defaulting to job descriptions and daily operations. She didn't need another session on the acronym. She needed an intervention on the distinction between KRAs, KPIs, and goals – and on separating business-as-usual from real objectives.

Photo by Karolina : https://www.pexels.com/photo/rock-climber-scaling-steep-czech-sandstone-cliff-33169567/