Goal Diggers
The price of outcome obsession.
For this newsletter, the first 20 readers who email me answers to my quiz (below) will receive a free signed book. Don’t forget to send your mailing address with your quiz answer to info@psychologyofleadership.net. Act fast!
Quiz: What book, which sold 5 million copies, explores how our behaviors, emotions, and personal experiences influence financial decisions?
High-performing organizations diligently use goals. Individuals, teams, and even entire countries are motivated by setting goals and measuring outcomes.
“We choose to go to the moon,” President John F. Kennedy said in 1962, “…because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
For years, I’ve evaluated employees’ performance on outcomes against goals. A strong compliment in my performance evaluations would be that you’re “outcome-oriented.” By that, I mean that you focus on results. You don’t let distractions get in the way. You get things done. Some people seem wired that way—it’s a trait I’ve noticed in high performers.
Measurable goals are a subset of goals. In today’s data-driven business world, metrics have become indispensable, and, as an executive at a Fortune 500 company, I couldn’t do without them. The measure can be continuous (a company’s profits, the score at a football game, the number of pounds you want to lose), or discrete, i.e., pass or fail (getting promoted, reaching the top of Everest, landing on the moon).
However, there are some downsides to measurable goals. You may have noticed that the past few weeks I’ve been exploring the counterintuitive downsides of measurable goals and how to manage them.
Research in psychology has revealed three important side effects:
Goal-induced blindness
Reduced intrinsic motivation
Failure to differentiate between luck and skill.
And if we’re not careful, if we adhere too much to the measurability of goals, then we will encounter these problems. You can explore each of the following in the posts below:
I hope you enjoyed this and it was helpful. Please leave me a comment. I look forward to your thoughts.
Seb
When he decided to write a book on leadership and self-improvement, Sébastien Page was rejected by over 200 literary agents.
He was asked, “Why would a finance expert write about leadership?” He was told to stay in his lane.
Sébastien has more than two decades of leadership experience. As an author, he believes breakthroughs often happen when experts venture outside their field. That is why, in "The Psychology of Leadership," he went beyond finance and economics to study research in psychology.
He is currently Head of Global Multi-Asset and Chief Investment Officer at T. Rowe Price. He oversees a team of investment professionals actively managing over $500 billion in assets under management.
Sébastien won research paper awards from The Journal of Portfolio Management in 2003, 2010, 2011, and 2022 and the Financial Analysts Journal in 2010 and 2014. In addition to The Psychology of Leadership, he is the author of Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation (McGraw Hill, 2020) and the coauthor of Factor Investing and Asset Allocation (CFA Institute Research Foundation, 2016).
Sébastien is also a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Financial Analysts Journal, and the Board of Directors of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance (Q Group). He regularly appears in the media, including Bloomberg TV and CNBC, and was recently named amongst the 15 Top Voices in Finance by LinkedIn.