In Lausanne, is setting a goal enough to guide work?
In medtech, higher education, international sports organisations and scale-ups across the Lake Geneva region, managers must provide direction for activities whose methods sometimes still need to be developed. For SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ “Leadership d’excellence” programme, the practical question is precise: when should leaders set a performance goal, and when should they first organise learning?
What the literature establishes
Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham (2002, American Psychologist) synthesise research showing that specific, difficult goals generally support performance more effectively than instructions to do one's best. This effect depends, among other things, on goal commitment, available capabilities and feedback on progress. Specificity alone is therefore insufficient: a goal must direct effort that people can realistically undertake.
The mechanism that monitoring can disrupt
Avraham N. Kluger and Angelo DeNisi (1996, Psychological Bulletin) show in their meta-analysis that feedback interventions do not consistently improve performance and can also undermine it. Their model notably proposes that feedback becomes less effective when it shifts attention away from the task and towards the self. A conversation focused on an employee's personal worth therefore serves a different function from a discussion of the strategy that needs to change.
The premature conclusion
It is tempting to conclude that leaders should introduce more numerical targets and checkpoints. Yet the goal-setting review invites a distinction between a familiar task and a complex task that requires discovering a method. In the latter case, making learning requirements explicit may be more appropriate than immediately raising performance demands. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot prescribe
These studies provide neither a universal monitoring frequency nor an optimal level of difficulty for every team. Nor do they establish that the same approach would suit medical device validation, a research project and the organisation of a sporting event. In practice, observing that a team meets its target is not enough to attribute that outcome to the quality of its goals: resources, experience and the actual difficulty of the assignment also matter.
A practical check in Lausanne
Within the “Leadership d’excellence” programme, a proposed exercise for a Lausanne team would be to select an uncertain project — medtech validation, technology transfer with a higher education institution, an international sporting event or a scale-up launch — and pair its performance target with an explicit learning goal. Over one month, each review would record the hypothesis tested, the evidence observed and the decision to retain or change the method. The measure would be the proportion of reviews documenting all three elements, verifiable in the project log. This indicator assesses learning discipline, not the causal effectiveness of the training; it must be considered alongside an operational outcome defined at the outset. To go further: explore the Executive Leadership training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Executive Leadership in Lausanne
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