# Goals people accept > Specific, hard but reachable, agreed goals with progress feedback, and guardrails against what one metric does to behavior. - Course: [From Specialist to Manager: Your First Year Leading a Team](https://productovi.com/courses/from-specialist-to-manager.md) - Module: Motivation and fairness - Lesson 14/32, ~22 min - Source: https://productovi.com/courses/from-specialist-to-manager/goals-people-accept ## A bonus is a goal with money on it **Alex Tutor:** Mid-April. Iryna's bonus has run for two weeks: UAH 20 for every ticket a coordinator closes above 60 in a week. The team talks about little else. **Olha:** Yesterday a family wrote for the third time about the same lost lesson. Their ticket had been closed twice, each time without a refund. **Sofia:** Iryna wanted more throughput in the peak, and that's fair. But I need goals for the team for May and June, and I don't want more stories like that one. **Alex Tutor:** Then start with what makes any goal work. Decades of research agree on four conditions: the goal is specific, hard but reachable, accepted by the people who carry it, and followed by feedback on progress. > **Exercise:** Which goal for the Support team's May meets all four conditions of a working goal best: specific, hard but reachable, accepted by the team, with feedback on progress? ## Specific, hard, agreed **Sofia:** Isn't "do your best" kinder? People are already tired from the peak. **Alex Tutor:** It sounds kinder, but people can't tell whether they're on track, so they settle lower. A clear target with visible progress usually feels better than vague pressure. **Alex Tutor:** Hard but reachable: a stretch the team believes in. Agreed: ask the team to propose the number, or at least explain why it matters. A goal handed down without a reason gets compliance, not commitment. **Alex Tutor:** And feedback: a short weekly look at progress, for the team, not a public leaderboard. Remote people especially need to see the number move. > **Exercise:** **True or false:** for a team that is already tired, "do your best" usually produces better results than a specific, hard goal. **Alex Tutor:** Now the third condition, agreed. How would you get there? > **Exercise:** You want the team to commit to a first-reply target for May, not just comply with it. Which approach fits best? **Alex Tutor:** And the fourth condition: feedback on progress. Is this a good way to give it? > **Exercise:** **True or false:** the best way to give the team feedback on a goal is a public weekly ranking of every coordinator's numbers. ## When the goal is learning **Alex Tutor:** One exception matters. Dmytro is still learning refund disputes. Give him a number of disputes to close and he'll guess faster, not learn. **Alex Tutor:** For new, complex work, set a learning goal first: "By the end of May, handle the five common exception types, with Olha reviewing your first ten." The number comes once the skill is there. **Olha:** Ten I can review. Just put it in my week, not on top of it. **Sofia:** Fair. That's two hours of her queue time I'll cover. > **Exercise:** Dmytro is new to refund disputes, which are complex and rule-heavy. Which goal fits best for May? ## What one number does **Alex Tutor:** Now the bonus itself. It counts one thing: tickets closed. When one number decides the money, people improve the number, sometimes at the expense of what it was meant to show. **Alex Tutor:** That's **metric gaming**, and it's rarely cheating. A reopened ticket closed again counts twice. A hard ticket that takes an hour pays the same as a two-minute one, so hard tickets wait. **Sofia:** So Olha's family wasn't bad luck. The rule paid for closing their ticket, not for solving it. **Iryna:** I'll own that. I wanted speed in the peak. Show me the numbers at the end of April and tell me what you'd change. > **Exercise:** Which behaviors would you expect a bonus that pays only for **tickets closed** to encourage? Select all that apply. **Alex Tutor:** When you see a shortcut like that, how do you read it? > **Exercise:** Under the closes-only bonus, a reopened ticket that Taras closes again counts twice. How should the lead read this? ## Guardrails **Alex Tutor:** You don't need to drop targets. Pair each target with a guardrail: a second number that must not get worse. The course *Product Analytics: From Data to Decisions* uses the same idea for experiments. **Alex Tutor:** Tickets closed pairs with the reopen rate. First-reply time pairs with satisfaction. Drafts used pairs with reopens. And read them at team level, so the guardrail doesn't become a new league table. **Sofia:** And if the guardrail moves the wrong way? **Alex Tutor:** Then you talk before you pay. A guardrail is a question for the team, not an automatic penalty. > **Exercise:** Match each target with the guardrail that best catches its likely side effect. ## Your turn: one goal for May **Alex Tutor:** Iryna will want a proposal. Start smaller: one team goal for May that could replace the closes-only rule. **Olha:** Make it something we can see every week. And something Maryna can win at too. **Sofia:** A target, a guardrail, how we agree it and how we track it. **Alex Tutor:** Exactly. Four lines are enough. > **Exercise:** Write **one team goal for May** in four short lines: the target (specific, hard but reachable), the guardrail metric that must not get worse, how you'll agree the number with the team, and how the team will see progress. > **Key ideas** > > - **Goal setting** works when the goal is specific, hard but reachable, accepted by the people who carry it, and followed by feedback on progress. > - "Do your best" feels kind but gives no target; tiredness is a reason to agree a reachable number, not to drop it. > - Ask the team to propose the number or explain why it matters: an imposed goal gets compliance, not commitment. > - For new, complex work, set a learning goal first (Dmytro and the refund exceptions); the number comes later. > - One number tied to money invites **metric gaming**: closing unsolved tickets, avoiding hard ones, splitting conversations. > - Pair every target with a guardrail that must not get worse, read at team level, and talk before you pay or penalize. **Alex Tutor:** Next time: fairness. Why the same bonus feels very different to Taras and to Maryna. - Previous lesson: [Can't, won't, or doesn't believe it pays off](https://productovi.com/courses/from-specialist-to-manager/diagnose-motivation.md) - Next lesson: [Fairness and recognition](https://productovi.com/courses/from-specialist-to-manager/fairness-and-recognition.md) --- Productovi Learning. Free, no sign-up needed to read.