I haven’t read Schweitzer, so I don’t know how my observations fit with his, but I’m also not a big fan of goal-setting. Now I have goals, mind you. But I have internalized them–they are not for everybody to read on the refrigerator. And I have met or exceeded most of them.

The goal-setting process that I encountered on my mission, which wanted everything written out and displayed to enforce accountability, was just wrong-headed. The philosophy was “It’s better to shoot for the stars and land in the trees than to shoot for the trees and land in the mud.” In other words, you are going to fail, so at least fail at something big and maybe you will succeed at something small in the process. How motivating. Here’s a radical thought. Why not shoot for the trees and hit the trees? Then, once you are in the trees, shoot for the clouds and hit the clouds, etc. Success feeds on itself and you might eventually even hit the stars. But at least you’re succeeding.

I like setting goals, and have found some success in the “shoot for the stars” approach. I do, however, understand and agree with Last Lemming to some extent: it’s often more motivating to succeed at a small goal rather than fail at a big one, even if you still accomplish something good. The problem as I see it is one of mindset. If we are going to set goals as an organization, we need to get buy-in from everyone. In order to do that, the goals need to come from the bottom up, not the top down. We find out what our stake goals are by setting goals in families, then wards, then adding up those goals to get the stake goal.

That said, annegb’s last paragraph is dead on: people are always more important than goals. If we care about people and act that way, then the goals will take care of themselves. Unfortunately, most people need a goal to get them off their butts and doing something.

@4-LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this!

Re: Goal setting by regimentation:

I was in a university ward where the Elders Quorum President had the brilliant idea of using public naming and shaming to get people to do their home teaching. In a quorum meeting, he showed the class several pins of differing colors and explained as follows, “Those who had 100 percent home teaching in the previous month will wear the blue pin. Those who had 50-99 percent will wear the red pin. Those who had 0-59 percent will wear the white pin. Those who ‘don’t give a damn about the Lord and their priesthood duties’ will wear nothing.”

The “don’t give a damn” language is practically an exact quote. It’s the kind of language that sticks with you.

Despite qualifying for one of the other colors, I proudly wore nothing from then on. Thankfully, the plan was never mentioned again and quickly died out within a few weeks. The snarky side of me sometimes wishes I had shown up the next week with a yellow star of David on my lapel. No, probably much too tasteless and the EQP didn’t strike me as the type who would have recognized the symbol anyway.

Bet you haven’t heard anything like this. In my hometown, some leaders have found it appropriate to name and shame those who have not contributed to the indexing project. One or two wards went as far as publishing members names, non-contributors as they call it, on the bulletin board. Members found it distasteful and inappropriate and so it was dealt with and no member of that ward was named and shamed since. However, on the stake level recently, it went as far as using the stake’s Facebook page to publish around. 200 names of members most with their phone numbers and email addresses were published publicly. It was only pulled down after a reasonable complaint was made.It wasn’t exactly approved by stake but the person looking after the project found it appropriate to do so. This person issued a public apology.