Caroline Adams Miller has pioneered groundbreaking work to understand why most goal-setting advice is wrong and what entrepreneurs need to do to achieve much more.
Positive Psychologist Caroline Adams Miller's Latest Book Explains the New Path to Reach Very Big Goals
If you have found that it is much harder to achieve your major goals than expected, it's probably because almost everything taught about how to take that journey successfully has been wrong, according to positive psychologist Caroline Adams Miller, author of “Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life.”
"Most of the methods that are popular with the general public, like the Law of Attraction, visualizing goals, and writing them down don't actually help much, while business spends nearly $5 billion a year trying largely in vain on ways to make workers more productive," she told Startup Savant. "Most companies now use half a dozen tools that are not entirely compatible and increasingly expensive."
A young engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, started the craze for efficiency in 1881 with his theory, now known as Taylorism, that companies would become much more profitable if workers did not waste their movements. By the 1950s, new ways to set and measure results thrived, such as Management By Objectives (MBOs), Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). In the 1980s, it was SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). But the priorities of achieving rigid budget numbers at the expense of everything else led to long-term disasters like General Electric and Boeing.
More recently, the toolbox has included Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and incentives like flexible schedules, but while companies have become more profitable and executives and shareholders richer, the turnover in employees and customers because of dissatisfaction has increased.
"The good news is that a better way exists that balances the pursuit of profit with a positive approach to hiring, retaining, and training workers, with goals set collaboratively," Miller said. She points to the work of Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, who published their first documentation of the science of what is really effective in goal-setting in the 1990s “Goal-Setting Theory” (GST).
Locke began studying this while doing graduate work in industrial and organizational psychology. He replicated dozens of lab studies that showed that setting hard and specific goals of varying complexity were attainable if the individual received feedback during the process to change strategies as needed. This led to more pride and self-esteem than easy goals.
Miller reports that during this time Latham was writing his master's thesis on how job performance for the most and least productive loggers was due to the one thing: the most effective ones set specific and challenging daily and weekly goals for cords cut per hour. Instead of seeing their work as tedious, this gave them a sense of meaning as they achieved high goals.
Locke and Latham have added to and updated their conclusions since then, including distinguishing between performance and learning goals. Common performance goals would be to improve anything from flying a plane and teaching a class to having a meeting with a direct report or cleaning a hotel room.
Learning goals would be achieved by strategies, procedures, and processes that would help someone to master a task.
Miller only discovered their work in 2005 when she was working on a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) at the University of Pennsylvania. At that time, she was already a credentialed graduate of one of the top coach training programs in the world. Despite the significance of their findings, this research remains virtually unknown in popular, business, and academic circles. According to Miller, this is because the original authors had no interest in self-promotion, and their work has been overlooked by modern tool-makers, social media personalities, speakers, and podcasters.
Miller also praises the well-documented value of checklists, as in surgeon Atul Gawande's 2009 book “The Checklist Manifesto.” These are now standard on everything from making sure pilots have done everything before take-off to building safety guidelines.
Locke and Latham also drew on Albert Bandura's "self-efficacy theory" that argued that as individuals achieve goals they build self-confidence in their ability to exert control over their motivation, behavior, and environment. Miller calls this the "I Can Do It" muscle, as people become able to do things they were not sure they could. To develop this, aim for small goals first, have someone you trust to be honest in encouraging your ability to reach them, remain calm instead of anxious about your progress, and observe a role model who is doing or has done what you are pursuing.
Miller's Own Journey From Theory to Success
In 1984, when she was a 22-year-old newlywed, Miller was in her seventh year of trying to overcome bulimia nervosa, an eating disorder that had no known successful treatment at the time. She had kept it secret, but began recovering after joining a self-help group for compulsive eaters in Baltimore.
"I began to get better one day at a time, a state of health that I have maintained unbroken for 40 years," she writes. "In hindsight, I can see that my triumph over my addiction was one of my finest examples in my life of using goal setting theory without knowing what it was. I set a hard goal, committed to it with a clear strategy and persistence through setbacks, and I used feedback and support from people who believed in me to do something that was not widely thought to be possible at the time."
Her book, “My Name Is Caroline,” was published in 1988, the first for the mass market by a survivor of bulimia.
She had learned about GST through studying not only Locke and Latham, but a research paper "The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect" by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ed Diener, and Laura King. "This meta-analysis showed that—contrary to most beliefs—we only succeed in our goals when we are in a flourishing emotional state beforehand," Miller notes. "We do not become happy because we achieve something; we prime the pump for success when we elevate our well-being first in a variety of ways, from practicing gratitude and having a regular meditation practice."
Miller had a Eureka moment about this in 2005, when she realized that she had spent much of her life as a high-achiever without putting a high value on happiness. When she tells her workshop audiences about how important this is to reaching goals they are as amazed as she was. "What was missing from Goal Setting Theory was that happiness needs to precede success."
This led to her 2009 book, “Creating Your Best Life.” "But my executive coaching clients now are exclusively CEOs and they're really, really busy and need a shorter, streamlined explanation of GST, which they've generally never heard of and why I wrote ‘Big Goals,’" she explained.
Miller uses a variety of tests and worksheets to help clients (presented in detail at the end of the book). While studying for the MAPP, she found great value in the Values in Action (VIA) Character Strengths Survey, a free test that ranks an individual's personality strengths that can play an important role in achieving goals. She recommends then writing a "Me At My Best" essay to imagine the future.
Miller also notes the research on differences between women and men in their approaches to well-being and success in business, especially given the poor track record that still persists in the corporate world.
Her 2017 book “Getting Grit” explained how cultivating self-regulation, humility, hope, passion, and persistence can help in the pursuit of goals.
Crossing the BRIDGE to Success
Miller pulls together the practices and issues that everyone needs to be able to set up a successful battle plan for achieving goals:
- Brainstorming every aspect of setting specific goals (all too often in business meetings mediocre groupthink dominates). Write out everything from what needs to be learned and the skills that have to be developed to reach performance goals.
- Relationships need to be evaluated for how they help or hinder reaching goals. The evidence is that the most important factor in whether workers feel fulfilled and not stressed out is if they believe they are making meaningful progress towards a goal. This is often based on the feedback they get from managers or others. Find those in your network who will support you.
- Investments may need to be made in oneself to be successful. Big goals require big investments of time and effort and Miller notes that the average person has 35-40 hours a week of leisure time. Invest some of it in improving one's skills to reach goals, such as building willpower, doing spiritual practice, learning a language, or exercising more.
- Decision-making factors that may matter the most in becoming successful. You may not realize that you are biased in your decisions or that you too often make different ones when confronting similar challenges (called "noise"). Do a self-audit of what may be wishful thinking or failure to get more input from others to find opportunities to make better decisions.
- Grit must be developed to overcome challenges. "This is the passionate pursuit of hard goals outside your comfort zone. Remind yourself constantly of your big goals."
- Excellence needs to be defined and a timeline set. "The most powerful examples of excellence in goal pursuit usually include a person's top values." Self-reflection should be constant, acknowledge others who have helped you succeed, be sure to make it clear you are open to constructive criticism, cultivate empathy, and acknowledge that achievements may be transitory.
In the end, one of the most important goals you can set may be simply to read Miller’s new book. She's positive you can reach your personal and business goals if you implement its ideas.