The beautiful game

Football has become a numbers game¹, with comprehensive statistics analyzing each player for team formations – distance covered, tackles won, and more. But winning is effectively all about scoring; the team that scores more goals than the opposition wins. In the workplace, success is not quite as straightforward, but knowing the game and understanding where hitting the “goal” counts can make winning much easier.

Sports analogies are common in business because both emphasize winning and collaboration as crucial to success. Yet, they often fail on the assumption that everyone is “on the same team” and aiming for the same goal. In reality, people in the workplace often play very different games.

For instance, is your sales team set up to win in the same way as accounting or HR? Are they aiming for the same goal?

In this article, we will share our insights into how different types of work require In this article, we will share our insights into how different types of work require unique approaches to goal setting and commitments.

The different games to play at work

In workplaces, productivity has long been the ultimate game plan. The idea is simple: more productivity leads to better profit margins and most profit wins.

Just like a sports team has specialized units – offense, defense, etc. – an organization has distinct functions or departments. The better they play together, the better the results. But this is where sports analogies break down.

Organizations don’t play just one sport; they play at least two sports simultaneously. One is operational: keeping the business up and running. The other is developing and shaping the business for future success. Without carefully considering the type of work at hand, the odds of having a winning lineup are long.

Operational work

Most management practices and organizational designs have evolved from the manufacturing industry and the pursuit of economies of scale. Tasks in this context are repetitive and specialized; so organizations often group employees into specific functions – accountants into accounting, salespeople into sales, etc.

Running, or operating, a business involves mostly repetitive work. Repetition fosters learning and optimization and is essential for predictability, enabling reliable plans and estimations. In this sport, success is directly linked to productivity through economies of scale.

But the game changes completely when the work involves creating something new or unique. For creative work, the operational playbook goes out of the window.

Knowledge work

In 1959, Peter Drucker defined knowledge work as jobs primarily handling or working with knowledge, rather than producing tangible goods².

With creative and unique work, there is far less experience and prior information to leverage. Estimations and plans become unreliable, and success depends much more on speed, flexibility, and adaptability to new information than on economies of scale³.

When experimentation, collaboration, and fast feedback are essential, functional structures are not effective. If you’ve ever been appointed to a task force, this is why. And this is the reason R&D and marketing have very little in common with accounting or legal departments⁴.

Operational work	Knowledge work
Work outputs and are repetitive	Work outputs are unique
Requirements are fixed	Requirements evolve
Tasks are bounded	Tasks are unbounded5
Results are linked to productivity	Results are indirectly linked to productivity

For more insights about knowledge work and its properties, see references at the end of the article.

Because operational and knowledge work are fundamentally different, the optimal way to organize teams and set goals also differ. The tactic that wins football matches won’t work for golf.

Goal setting

Before we dive into tactics for goal setting, let’s clarify what goals are – and what they are not.

By some definitions, a “target” is a short-term, precise aim, while a “goal” is more abstract and long-term. We use the terms synonymously, for the simple reason that having both at the same time does not make sense. Trying to achieve a target different from a “goal” is not going to create alignment and improve performance. In fact, “flexible, abstract, and long-term” goals are poor goals.

Mission and strategy are not goals

A mission is not a goal – it’s the reason for the organization’s existence or its purpose. So, while crucial, a mission cannot be used to measure performance.

A strategy is also not a goal or a target to reach. A strategy is a recipe for winning in the long term. A good strategy defines the key decisions that guide the organization through many scenarios and create a focus for the organization⁶.

Inspiring big goals

A company vision is a long-term statement of ambition, that sets direction and basis for the strategy. For example, the vision statement of the pharmaceutical giant GSK (GlaxoSmithKline) is to “help people do more, feel better, and live longer.”

Some companies prefer to express the vision in the format of a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”⁷ (BHAG) – ambitious, inspiring, and long-term aspiration aligned with the company’s mission and vision. Famous corporate BHAGs include:

While vision statements and BHAGs are essential for general alignment and inspiration, they are big, long-term goals. And this is where the strategy comes in. A clear and effectively communicated strategy will outline the achievements and performance needed to achieve the big goal.

The fair question to ask of the strategy is; how does it inform the goals you set to drive performance and progress towards the vision?

Performance goals

To develop the organization in the right direction, performance goals need to be aligned to the strategy, as described above. But alignment is not sufficient, to drive performance, goals should be consequential – i.e., important in terms of result and impact. There are many goal-setting techniques with smart abbreviations that promise to deliver performance, including:

• FAST (Frequently discussed, Ambitious, Specific, Transparent)
• SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timebound)
• HARD (Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult)
• CLEAR (Collaborative, Limited, Emotional, Appreciable, Refinable)
• Or even OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), which in turn is an update on Drucker’s MBOs (Management by Objectives) framework.

These frameworks reveal a lot of similarities but don’t explain how the goal is set in the first place. None addresses the type of work or collaboration required, making performance far from guaranteed, regardless of the goal-setting technique you choose.  How goals are set and committed to, is far more important than the phrasing.

Goals that count

The most meaningful goals align with the customers and users that benefit from the work outputs. Not stakeholders. As Peter Drucker famously said, “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer,” reminding us that without customers, there is no business.

How goals are consequential to external stakeholders is far more important than the goal-setting technique used. This is where the uncertainty surrounding knowledge work depends on a goal breakdown strategy aligned to customers and users.

Functional goal breakdown

Breaking down goals after organizational departments and functions is effective when it’s certain that the efforts will add up and collectively lead to results. This approach is effective when the work is operational (only).

The challenge with this breakdown is that the connection between the work and its external results becomes distant. It makes it difficult to ensure that the outcomes align with results that matter for customers and users, even when every goal is reached. This problem can be illustrated by the medical dilemma of “The operation was successful, but the patient died.”⁸

For organizations with a strategy or ambition to become more customer-oriented, we recommend breaking down goals in a way that directly impacts the experience of defined customers and users. This approach ensures the focus remains on delivering value where it matters the most.

Customer-centric goal breakdown

When the work outputs are unique and requirements evolve, adaptability is more important than productivity. And reacting to feedback is more important than being efficient in task execution.

For knowledge work, success depends a lot more on collaboration, empowerment, and flexibility than productivity. Goal setting should reflect this by aligning with customers’ and users’ needs rather than organizational departments.

Team goals

For unique tasks with evolving requirements, traditional roles are less effective. Team accountability fosters shared responsibility, resilience, a learning mindset, and problem-solving skills upon unexpected challenges.

A shared goal enhances focus, trust, and alignment, creating an environment where success is a collective achievement rather than an individual one. For example, compare these two goals:

1. Develop the sign-up and login features
2. Enable users to register and login

While they seem similar and break down to the same tasks, the second goal is much better because focuses on the stakeholder and the results rather than the internal activity.

In addition to being shared among the team members, be most effective team goals are also short-term. This gives the teams opportunity to reflect and adapt to new information and new directives.

Progress and performance are also better demonstrated when based on recent actuals achievements rather than projections and partial completeness. Again, while can greatly benefit operational work too, it becomes essential when the team is tasked with knowledge work.

Goals that count

How do you know when your goals count? Start by analyzing pronouns in the questions:

• Whose goal are you working toward?
• To whom does it matter?
• Who will know when the goal is reached?

When a team is committed to a customer-centric goal, the answers will contain collective pronouns like “ours,” “them,” and “we.” In contrast, if the answers are “me, myself, and I”, the basis for team performance is completely missing. Remember that goals that are functionally broken down and individually committed to are only effective for operational work.

The legendary (American) football coach Vince Lombardy once said, “Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is. The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure.” Purpose and empowerment are essential for driving commitment to goals.

Purposeful

From the goal-setting techniques listed above, the adjectives emotional, heartfelt, and relevant all make the point of goals being personally meaningful. For a more in-depth discussion around purpose and its role in motivation, we recommend reading Daniel H. Pink’s best-seller “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates U.”⁹

Empowerment

The drive and willingness to reach a goal are easily destroyed by helplessness. A team must have skills to do the work but also trust and authority to make the decisions needed to achieve the goal. Empowerment boils down to a sober assessment of goal attainment.

Is the team in control of meeting the goal?

Winning ways

Scrappy or brilliant goals in sport, they all count. When Spain won the 2024 European championship in football, they scored the most (13) goals and the fewest own (3) goals of all teams. But perhaps even more significant, David Raya got his winner’s medal. He was an unused substitute in the final and only played in one group-stage match.

When it comes to teams in workplaces where goals are departmental, and productivity is a measure of personal performance, this would be unthinkable. But when goals are external and the team is empowered to attain them as a collective, it’s not only doable, but the best way to create a winning team.

Break down big goals so they matter to your customers or users. Recognize when the work needs flexibility and feedback. Empower your team, holding them accountable as a collective. Work may not always feel like a beautiful game, but with focus and purpose, it can can lead to meaningful achievements.

Is it time to rethink how goals are set for your teams?

If you found this article insightful, you may also enjoy reading about embracing uncertainty when making technology investments and productivity with AI. If you want to dive deeper into topics like these, explore our Insights page for more articles and practical advice.

Are you ready to take the next step? Contact us to learn how we can help your teams to achieve meaningful, customer-centred results. Let’s work together to turn big goals and ideas into impactful outcomes

References

¹ Anderson and Salley, The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football is Wrong, 2014

² Peter Drucker, The Landmarks of Tomorrow, 1959

³ Tom & Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, 2003

⁴ Esko Kilpi – on interactive value creation: Creative work is not performed by independent individuals but by interdependent people in interaction.

⁵ Parkinson’s Law “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”, The Economist, 1955, after naval historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson.

⁶ Roger Martin, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, 2013

⁷ Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, 1994

⁸ First recorded reflection on the healthcare cost and social support cuts published in Pubmed central – Canadian Family Physician by G. L. Higgins in 1994 titled “The operation was successful, but the patient died”.

⁹ Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, (2009)