Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail Essay Example for Free

Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail Es translateThose who fail to plan, plan to fail, or at least plan not to improve, according to the management literature. Look at school value, and theres similar agreement pretty a great deal across the literature that the schools that improve are the ones that plan. They establish a clear educational romance and consequent shared mission identify goals or objectives that modify them to achieve that mission and thereby realise that mass audit themselves, thereby identifying areas for improvement and develop and implement educational programs on the basis of departership 57 that audit that address areas for improvement n ways that help them achieve the mission. That process, much of the literature suggests, is recursive or cyclical. The key in the school improvement literature seems to be that theres a first step, identifying your vision and shared mission, that then informs the next step, the planning process of identifying goals or objectives a ligned with the vision and mission. Whether you look at the management literature or the school improvement literature, at its simplest, goal mise en scene is a way of asking what do we involve, do we affirm what we need so that we fundament develop and implement what we plan, do our various goals elate to one another or are any in conflict, and is there anything weve overlooked, including internal and external blockers?There, in 200 or so words, you have the whole clear-peasy school improvement planning story, and can stop training and go and get that coffee right now. Or not. The problem, if youre still reading, is that planning and goal knackting can sometimes lead to fragmented, uncoordinated programs with conflicting objectives that actually work against one another. Yes, setting particular, challenging goals, and developing and implementing educational programs to meet them can drive school mprovement, but as Adam Galinsky, informant with Lisa Ordonez, Maurice Schwei tzer and Max Bazerman of Goals gone wild, in the 58 teacher june/july 2009 Journal of the Academy of Management Perspectives, told the Boston Globes Drake Bennett, goal setting can lead to crazy conducts to get community to achieve them. We contend, write Ordonez, Schweitzer, Galinsky and Bazerman in Goals gone wild, that goal setting has been over- prescribed. In particular, we argue that goal setting has powerful and inevitable side effects. Rather than being offered as an over-the-counter salve for boosting action, oal setting should be prescribed selectively, presented with a warning label and closely monitored. Tunnel vision To be fair, Ordonez, Schweitzer, Galinsky and Bazerman have their eyes set on performance management, and its tendency to an outcome orientation like a defined sales target, say, or lessen time spent on a process, rather than school improvement, and its tendency to the systemic development and implementation of programs. Nonetheless, people in a school who want to improve it will end up setting, or having set for them, some kind of performanceoriented goal. The message from Ordonez,Schweitzer, Galinsky and Bazerman is that they should pursue that goal with care. Lets consider wherefore goals, as Ordonez and colleagues put it, go wild. The first reason, they argue, is that a goal might be inappropriate or so specific that in pursuing it, people ignore important elements of their behaviour, and maybe even their attitudes and values, that are not specified by the goal. Suppose that a university department bases tenure decisions primarily on the enactment of articles that (academics) publish, they write. This goal will motivate (the academics) to accomplish the narrow objective of publishing articles.Other important objectives, however, such as research impact, teaching and service, may suffer. Worse, say Ordonez and colleagues, referring to Barry Staw and Richard Boettgers Task revision A neglected form of work performance in the Academy of Management Journal, goals can give us turn over vision. In their study on the effects of goals, Staw and Boettger asked students to proofread a paragraph that contained both grammatical and content errors. They found that those asked simply to do your best correct both grammatical and content errors, while those who were asked specifically to correct grammar gnored content, and those who were asked specifically to correct content ignored grammar. The reason? Goals inform the individual about what behaviour is valued and appropriate, argue Staw and Boettger.The goal-setting problem, Ordonez and colleagues add, is that when we plan we tend to latch on to specific, measurable standards rather than complex sets of behaviours, and the attitudes and values that underlie them, precisely because specific standards are easy to measure and complex sets of behaviours are not. Command performance The goal-setting problem, essentially, depends n whether a goal is set by command or b y consultation, negotiation or horror genuine collaboration. Goals set by command are, by definition, set by those with the power, whether you like it or not, to set them. The risk of such goal setting is that, first, it may lead to goals that are inappropriate or overly specific and, second, that leaders and their followers can be prone to what could be called target fix or what Christopher Kayes, calls destructive goal pursuit in Destructive Goal Pursuit The Mount Everest disaster, to which Ordonez and colleagues also refer.As they note, Kayes identifies warning signs of leaders who have pass excessively fixated on goals. These occur in leaders who express narrowly- defined goals, associate goals with destiny, express an idealised future, offer goal-driven justifications, face public expectations and attempt to deal in face-saving behaviour. Its a useful checklist to use to audit yourself or a leader in your institution, but remember, we tend to latch on to specific measurab le things rather than complex sets of behaviours, and the attitudes and values that underlie them, precisely The goal-setting problem s that when we plan we tend to latch on to specific, measurable standards because specific standards are easy to measure. leadership 59 because the specifics are easy to measure and complex sets of behaviours are not.Performance anxiety Of course, one of the main planks of the education polity of this and the previous Commonwealth government is the standards agenda the benchmarking of student achievement outcomes, which educators and schools then strive to achieve, and which at their worst could end up as league tables. Whether youre a fan of the standards agenda or not, its clearly the mother of all oals in Australian education, and worth considering in terms of goal setting. Ordonez and colleagues have some interesting observations to make, particularly about what they call the serious side-effects of setting challenging or so-called stretch goal s. These, they argue, can lead people to drive riskier strategies and to cheat, and can create a culture of competition that erodes cooperation.On ethics, they argue, The interplay between organisational culture and goal setting is particularly important. An ethical organisational culture can command in the harmful effects of goal setting, but at the same ime, the use of goals can influence organisational culture. Specifically, the use of goal setting, like management by objectives, creates a focus on ends rather than means. Goal setting impedes ethical decision making by making it harder for employees to recognise ethical issues and easier for them to rationalise wrong behaviour. Given that small actions within an organisation can have broad implications for organisational culture, we postulate that aggressive goal setting within an organisation will treasure an organisational climate ripe for unethical behaviour.That is, not only does goal setting irectly motivate unethical be haviour, but its introduction may also motivate unethical behaviour indirectly by subtly altering an organisations culture. Handle with care If the bad news of the government-mandated standards agenda is that theres a risk of a form of goal setting that creates a focus on ends rather than means, the good news for schools is that the school-improvement literature puts a premium on one thing thats evident in the first 200 words of this story collegiality. With any luck, your school- improvement planning process and the goals that you consequently set are the result of onsultation, negotiation and collaboration, not command and, if they are, chances are yours are learning goals, not performance targets. As Ordonez and colleagues observe, performance goals inhibit learning.When individuals face a complex task, specific, challenging goals may inhibit learning from experience and degrade performance compared to exhortations to do your best. An individual who is narrowly focused on a per formance goal will be less likely to try alternative methods that could help her learn how to perform a task. Overall, the narrow focus of specific goals can inspire erformance, but prevent learning. As Edwin Locke and Gary Latham recommend in Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task demand A 35-year odyssey in American Psychologist, we should be setting learning goals in complex situations rather than performance goals. The problem, as Ordonez and colleagues note, is that, In practice, however, managers may have fear determining when a task is complex enough to warrant a learning, rather than a performance, goal. The goal of setting the right goals is itself a challenging affair. perhaps its time for a new axiom those ho fail to plan carefully, plan at their peril.