Stretch Goals Aren't Helping

Why tiered goal-setting can backfire in a high-performing environment.

A conversation in May

I was talking with someone recently about how their organization is doing this year. They’re tracking well against their revenue target, and it’s only May. By summer, it looks like they’ll hit it. Then they said: “We might even achieve our stretch goal. Or maybe even our transformational goal.”

Being on track to deliver the goal is great news but somehow they weren’t allowed to be excited about it. Hitting their number wasn’t going to count as the win. The win was somewhere else, perched one or two tiers above where they were tracking.

That hasn’t been said out loud. It’s been structured so the higher numbers exist as aspirations rather than expectations. The organization gets the upside of aiming higher without the accountability of having asked for it.

The broader pattern

There are other versions of this framing. “We’re looking for strong execution.” “This is a critical year.” “We need elevated performance.” These phrases communicate higher expectations without specifying them, and they put the burden on the people receiving the message to decode what’s being asked.

Most leaders who talk this way aren’t trying to be indirect. The framing has become normalized. It’s how organizations communicate ambition. The gap between what’s said and what’s wanted feels normal because everyone uses the same vocabulary.

But the gap has effects. People spend energy figuring out what the organization actually wants. They live with chronic uncertainty about whether they’re meeting expectations, because the expectations were never named honestly.

Why this approach is outdated

There may have been a time when this kind of framing served a purpose. If you assume people will coast unless you keep pushing them, a linguistic ladder of goals makes some sense. It keeps a target visible above whatever’s been achieved.

That assumption doesn’t match the environment most organizations are operating in now. The people inside these companies are not coasting. They’re working at or beyond capacity. They’re already self-critical, already running internal monologues that say “what you did wasn’t enough.” The ambiguity of stretch language adds noise. It doesn’t add useful pressure. It validates the voice that’s already telling them they’re falling short and gives that voice institutional backing.

What would clarity look like?

Here’s the revenue number we need to make our budget. Here’s why it matters. If we hit it early, here’s what we’d want to do with the rest of the year. If we significantly exceed it, here’s what that would mean for our customers and our stakeholders.

That’s the same conversation stretch goals are trying to have. It just doesn’t hide behind tiered labels. It treats people as adults who can hold the complexity of “here’s what we need” and “here’s what would be better, and why.” It gives them information they can act on instead of signals they have to decode.

The pragmatic case

I’m not arguing for directness because it’s nicer. I’m arguing for it because it works better. The doublespeak version of leadership communication evolved in a context where pushing people harder was the main job and ambiguity helped maintain pressure. That’s not the job now. The job now is helping people who are already at capacity make good decisions about where to put their effort. Ambiguity makes that harder. Clarity makes it easier.

The leaders who figure this out will get more from their teams than the ones operating in inherited frameworks. Because they’re being honest about what they want, and that honesty lets people respond to it.