If Your Goals Are Just Numbers, You’re Doing It Wrong
- Brainz Magazine
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
Written by Joe Patneaude, Executive Coach
Joe Patneaude is an Executive Coach and creator of the STAR Scalability℠ Method. He helps business owners and leaders scale financial services firms efficiently. He is the author of Follow the STAR: Unlock Monumental Business Growth and a certified Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioner.
It’s goal-setting season again. Most business leaders are mapping out revenue targets, growth projections, and team expansion plans for the new year. The spreadsheets are filling up, the benchmarks are getting higher, and for many, the pressure is already starting to creep in. But here’s the hard truth. A lot of those goals won’t move the business forward. Some will even cause harm. Because when goal-setting becomes just a numbers game, divorced from values, team capacity, and strategic alignment, it stops being a tool for growth and becomes a source of frustration, burnout, and churn.
If you’ve ever hit a goal and still felt behind. If you’ve ever set a goal and quietly hoped you wouldn’t actually reach it. You’re not the problem. The goal might be.
The problem: Numbers without meaning
In most organizations, goal-setting is a ritual tied to performance cycles or calendar years. The process often starts with a simple question, “How much more can we do next year?”
Revenue targets are raised, headcount goals are added, and sales quotas are bumped. And just like that, the pressure to "do more" becomes the central focus of the year ahead.
But here’s the problem, goals built solely on growth metrics rarely account for the reality behind the numbers.
Is your team already at capacity?
Have your processes caught up to your size?
Are your people aligned with the direction you’re pushing?
When these questions aren’t asked, the goals become disconnected from execution. Leaders start chasing outcomes their business isn’t structurally or culturally ready to support. The results can be costly:
Burnout across key roles
Rising tension between leadership and staff
Increased attrition, often among top performers
Mounting recruiting costs to fill avoidable gaps
Missed targets, not due to lack of effort, but lack of alignment
Worse, even when the numbers are hit, the business doesn’t feel healthier. It feels heavier. The team is more stressed, the systems more strained, and the leadership less connected to what’s really going on.
Because hitting a number doesn’t mean you’ve set the right goal. It just means you managed to survive the push.
What goals should actually do
Goals aren’t inherently the problem. The issue is how they’re created and what they’re meant to serve.
Too often, goals become about hitting arbitrary benchmarks, impressing a board, or keeping up with industry expectations. But goals are at their most powerful when they’re tied to intentionality, alignment, and clarity of purpose.
In a well-led business, goals don’t just chase more, they reinforce direction and create focus. They allow teams to say “yes” to what matters and confidently say “no” to what doesn’t.
The best goals do four things:
Reflect purpose – They tie back to the business’s deeper “why.”
Support capacity – They match the readiness of the team, not just the ambition of leadership.
Reduce noise – They clarify priorities so people can stop reacting and start executing.
Create energy, not exhaustion – They’re motivating because they make sense, not because they sound impressive in a meeting.
You can grow without overreaching. You can stretch without snapping. And you can create goals that support the business you’re building instead of the pressure others expect you to feel.
The case for caution: When goals get disconnected from reality
A few years ago, I worked with a mid-sized Registered Investment Advisor firm that had built an incredibly positive, growth-oriented culture. The leadership team was forward-thinking, the staff was highly engaged, and the firm had tripled its assets under management in just two years. Things were working.
But in year three, the tone changed. Growth goals became aggressive, unrealistically so, and suddenly everything revolved around chasing AUM at a scale the business simply wasn’t ready to support.
Sales roles were added to drive the targets, but no additional resources were given to operations, compliance, or service teams. Internal systems weren’t upgraded. Processes weren’t revisited. And the reward structure shifted from celebrating meaningful contributions to narrowly fixating on a single number.
As pressure mounted, the culture began to fracture.
Team members who had once been vocal and engaged stopped offering input
Concerns were dismissed
Gossip started to replace collaboration
The CEO became reactive and accusatory
Bottlenecks returned as every decision was pushed back to the top
Attrition followed. Growth stalled. And for nearly a year, the business hovered in a state of operational and cultural gridlock.
What went wrong?
The CEO had overestimated the team’s capacity, viewing it through the lens of how he had managed things in the past rather than the reality of the present. He discounted data that didn’t support his expectations. And, perhaps most critically, he set goals rooted more in nostalgia and optimism than in truth.
Experience and nostalgia can be helpful in decision-making, but they can also be dangerous. They convince us the past was either better or worse than it really was, and when those beliefs drive today’s goals, leaders end up chasing outcomes that don’t reflect the business they have.
Strategy and rewards that actually align
This is where the STAR Scalability℠ Method brings clarity back into the picture. The “S” in STAR, Strategy, isn’t just about setting aggressive targets or pursuing growth for the sake of it. It’s about intentional direction. It’s about making sure your goals are grounded in reality, aligned with your values, and supported by the actual structure of your business.
That means understanding capacity before setting expectations. It means checking the readiness of your systems, team, and leadership, not just the market opportunity.
And it means building goals that your business can grow into, not ones that pull it apart. Then comes the “R,” Rewards. This is where many leaders get it wrong.
Too often, rewards are built entirely around results, the final numbers. But results are a measurement, they tell you what happened. Rewards, on the other hand, are a motivator. They influence how people show up, collaborate, and pursue the goal in the first place.
When rewards are tied to unrealistic outcomes or misaligned with real contribution, they become a point of friction. But when rewards reinforce values, celebrate process, and recognize smart execution, they strengthen the culture. And a strong culture is what actually sustains growth.
Strategy sets the course. Rewards fuel the journey. Without both, even the best goal can pull your business in the wrong direction.
Goals shouldn’t work against you
It’s easy to get caught up in metrics, to set a number, chase it hard, and hope that somehow the results will justify the pressure. But real leadership, scalable leadership, requires more than ambition. It requires alignment.
The most effective goals aren’t just bigger. They’re better aligned with your capacity, your values, and your long-term vision. They support your team. They protect your culture. And they create energy that’s sustainable, not draining.
So before you finalize next year’s goals, ask yourself, "Are you designing them to push harder, or to build smarter?" If you’re ready to set goals that actually move your business forward without burning out your team or breaking your systems, explore the STAR Scalability℠ Method here.
Read more from Joe Patneaude
Joe Patneaude, Executive Coach
Joe Patneaude is a Certified Executive Coach who helps business owners and leaders scale with purpose, clarity, and confidence. After rising through the ranks in financial services, from the mailroom to the C-suite, Joe realized that true success isn’t just about growth, but about alignment with personal values. This insight led him to develop the STAR Scalability℠ Method, a practical framework that guides business owners to scale in a way that supports both profitability and well-being. Today, he coaches leaders ready to move beyond burnout and build thriving, scalable businesses. He is also the author of Follow the STAR: Unlock Monumental Business Growth and a certified NLP Practitioner.
