By Steve Martin & Helen Mankin
It’s no surprise that most people express a strong preference for flexibility in choosing their goals. We aren’t good at predicting our actions, so adopting an elastic approach allows us some wiggle room in the future.
But this same logic doesn’t always apply when pursuing our goals. In fact, once people have set their goals, they’re much more likely to complete them when the steps to achievement are set out in a rigid, restrictive way.
Here’s an example from a set of studies conducted by Stanford marketing professor Szu-chi Huang and her colleagues.
Patrons at a yogurt shop were offered a reward card entitling them to a free yogurt after six purchases. However, not all of the cards were the same. Half of them required people to buy six different flavors of yogurt in any order to claim the reward. The other half required customers to buy six different flavors in an order set by the store: banana, apple, strawberry, orange, mango and grape.
People who were offered the flexible scheme were two-and-a-half times more likely to sign up for the program than those told they had to make the purchases in a fixed sequence. However, the opposite applied in completing the task. Those with loyalty cards requiring a rigid sequence of purchases were more than 75 percent more likely to complete the goal. Why?
The answer, it seems, has to do with the limits of people’s decision-making ability. We make as many as 35,000 decisions a day, so people appreciate the need to make fewer. And that’s exactly what a rigid approach to goal pursuit offers.
The received wisdom is that a leader should set rigid goals and then give his teams the autonomy they need to achieve them. But Huang’s research suggests the exact opposite: Leaders should be flexible in their approach to setting a goal, but once a direction has been agreed on, they should be rigid with the steps needed to achieve it. So which is best? Context matters. In situations where the goal is relatively simple, and the motivation is strong, a flexible approach to the steps required to achieve the goal typically works best. However, in situations where the change is hard, or if a leader believes that the motivation levels in her team might be low, creating a rigid sequence may be more effective.
Steve Martin is the author of The Small Big: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence.Helen Mankin is an organizational psychologist at Influence at Work.