Why Ambition Without Realism Is Just Pressure With A Deadline
Have you ever thought about what it takes to put a man on the moon? I mean what it REALLY takes. I bet if we were to sit in a motivational conference right now and I were to ask each person in the room, the answers might be pretty vague. They might sound like: “training”, “grit”, “determination”, or “a lot of math”. Now imagine what that probably sounded like to people in, say, 1965. Some people might even have said “you can’t get there from here.”
Imagine NASA explaining this goal to their new engineers. Our goal, our plan, is to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. You all are going to help. (Whoa so cool!) The new hires high-five each other. Someone raises their hand and asks how? NASA says, “training, grit, determination, and a lot of math.” That’s a great answer for day 1. Then someone circles back next week.. “Okay, but how?” (?!)
Obviously NASA had a real plan, and perhaps not every situation or team has high-stakes outcomes like these; but, every situation or team is at risk of failure if there’s no realistic roadmap after posing a lofty goal. What does leadership usually say when you tell them their goal really isn’t achievable (at least not the way they’re presenting it)? “Shoot for the moon and you’ll land among the stars!” Cool. Thanks.
We celebrate ambitious goals as the sign of strong leadership, but no one talks about what unrealistic goals actually do to a team. The “shoot for the moon” mentality comes from OKRs (Objective/Key Results plans), hustle culture, and startup lore. Google famously operates on the idea that hitting 70% of an OKR is considered a success because if you always hit 100% of your goals then your goals aren’t high enough. Hustle culture and startup strategy operates off the idea that if you have time to eat, breathe, or sleep, that’s energy you could have put toward the business so “anything” the business sets their mind to becomes achievable. Unfortunately, for every one inspiring-but-unlikely success story you have 100 failed launches shortly after. Teams end up being handed impossible targets dressed up in a legitimate-sounding framework.
Impossible goals are usually affectionately referred to as “stretch” goals. These really aren’t the same thing though. If you stretch a muscle slightly beyond its normal capacity, it lengthens and grows. If you overextend a muscle by force, you end up with torn fibers and in a lot of pain. Overextension needs recovery: think high turnover, low motivation, and even lower effort. Research (and experience) shows that goals that are slightly beyond reach will motivate, but goals that feel unattainable will demoralize.
Unrealistic goals cost your team in a lot of ways. Psychological safety erodes because your team will stop surfacing problems when the bar is already set too high. The team creates a culture of sandbagging and people set low expectations to protect themselves. Your best people burn out first because they’re the ones who usually try. Honest reporting evaporates through vanity metrics and performance progress replaces real data. If you’re the one driving these goals, be mindful that while you believe you’re inspiring, your team may see you as out of touch.
So what does realistic goal setting actually look like? It’s not necessarily lowering the bar, it’s just anchoring the bar in reality. There are three ingredients to a realistic goal: data, input from the people doing the work, and room for iteration.
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Data: Data is information that tells you what’s happened in the past and/or what should be based on current circumstances. You have to take an analytical approach here. Let’s say you have a business that’s been open for 10 years. Their goal has always been to do a million dollars in top-line revenue within one fiscal year; sadly, they’ve never achieved above $500k, but the goal has never changed. Why?
You need to know what business patterns and team behaviors drive sales. If you have those answers, you can then work to identify the gap. When you know the gap, you can communicate it to the team. Once the team knows, they become more aware and you also create organic training opportunities. So your first question is are you digging deeply enough into the data to surface patterns between when the company is succeeding and when they’re not? The second question is does the team have enough training, ability, and follow-through to consistently drive the successful behaviors forward? The third is what outside influences have you missed and may not be adjusting for? Deep analysis is required beyond seeing the numbers and throwing a pizza party or stopping at the liquor store on your way home.
Input from the people doing the work: Have you ever stopped to ask what the field team thinks is achievable? No? Start there. Then what do you do if they say no, they sure don’t? You’ve actually got a couple of options. One, you can storm into a long-winded tirade on how a lack of faith is no way to win and assure them they are quite wrong. Another (better) option many leaders simply don’t think of is to just ask why. “That’s disappointing to hear. What experiences have you had that lead you to this conclusion?” That’s an eye-opener for sure.
When you involve your team in a discussion around what they think they can deliver, you open the door to learn about where their struggles actually are, discover their own unrealized gaps in training, gain their buy-in to what their expectations will be, and still give your motivational speech. Having this conversation exposes failing dynamics and creates the conditions for success with a team that’s willing to commit to what they tell you. Why? Because they’re the ones who just told you it was possible!
Room for iteration: When things start moving in the right direction, you can take behaviors that have already worked and scale them to larger goals. Your team will need a win or two under their belt to buy into this part, but it creates the ability to adjust what’s working and not working in real time since you have a solid foundation to work from. Fine-tuning for scale will keep the machine oiled and operating while battling through challenges. No oil, no working machine. Teams that hit realistic goals consistently build the confidence and endurance to tackle harder things over time.
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You can add a lot of power to your goals by sequencing milestones effectively. Small things add up to be big things. Before you set your goal (and the stages that lead to them), ask yourself, “What would have to be true for this to be achievable?” Ask yourself at every milestone before considering what success looks like at the next.
Realistic goals create clarity, and clarity creates momentum. When people believe a goal is possible, discretionary effort goes up – they choose to give more. Then your leader can shift from being an enforcer to an enabler. The truth is the highest performing teams aren’t the ones with the biggest goals. The highest performing teams are the ones with the most consistent follow-through.
Here are some practical actions for leaders to move forward:
- Audit your current goals. Which ones does your team actually believe in?
- Build a goal setting conversation into your process. Avoid top-down delivery.
- Normalize recalibration. Adjusting a goal mid-cycle isn’t a failure. It’s good management.
- Separate aspirational vision from operational goals. Both matter, but they live in different conversations.
- Ask your team this week: “On a scale of 1-10 how confident are you that we’ll hit this goal?” Then actually listen.
None of this is about lowering ambition, it’s about making ambition actionable. The best leaders aren’t the ones with the biggest dreams. They’re the ones with teams who wake up every Monday morning believing the week is worth giving everything to.
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