Objectives, and the Stairway Nobody Builds

Most objectives are written once, in a document, in January, and read once, in a different document, in December. In between they sit there doing nothing, which is a strange fate for the one tool whose entire job is to tell people what actually matters this quarter.

Peter Drucker called the underlying idea Management by Objectives: you set goals with your people that ladder up to where the company is trying to go. Sound in theory. In practice it rots into a compliance ritual. The acronym everyone reaches for here (yes, SMART, I've complained about its lies elsewhere) is the least of it. The rot has a specific cause, and it isn't laziness. It's that the objective arrives as something done to the person instead of something built with them.

Make it theirs, or don't bother

An assigned objective and a chosen one can read identically on the page and behave like different species. The assigned one gets you compliance: the person does the minimum that lets them report it green and move on. The chosen one gets you someone who actually wants the outcome, because it's their outcome. The entire difference comes down to who did the choosing.

So I don't show up to objective-setting with finished objectives. I show up with problems and directions. "We're getting killed on on-call, I want that genuinely fixed this quarter." Then the engineer writes what "fixed" means, because they're the one who'll live inside the definition for three months. "Improve code quality by 20%" handed down from above is a sentence nobody owns and nobody can even picture. "Stop getting paged twice a night by the ingestion pipeline" is a thing a tired human will actually chase. The work is to hand over the choosing without handing over the direction, and most managers do precisely the reverse: they dictate the objective down to the letter, then wonder why they have to nag to get it done.

Not the same bar for everyone

You want one standard and zero favoritism, and you also cannot set the same bar for the engineer who's done this five times and the one doing it scared for the first time. The veteran needs a stretch big enough that they might miss it, or they'll coast and quietly resent you for wasting their year. The newcomer needs a target they can actually reach, or they'll drown and read the drowning as proof they don't belong. Identical objectives feel fair and are, in practice, the least fair thing you can do: you've simultaneously under-challenged your strongest person and crushed your newest.

So calibrate, on purpose, and say out loud that you're doing it. Calibration looks exactly like favoritism to anyone you haven't explained it to, which is the whole reason you explain it. It's a bit like having kids. You hold everyone to the same values and you do not pretend the eight-year-old and the fifteen-year-old can carry the same load. Treating them identically isn't fairness. It's laziness, and calling it fairness doesn't change which one it is.

Build the stairway

Most objectives name the destination and skip the steps, which is exactly why they feel like one terrifying cliff in December. Break the thing into a short list you can actually cross off, so there's a small win every couple of weeks. This is not bureaucratic box-ticking. People will climb toward the next checkbox long after they've stopped feeling anything about the abstract goal at the top. The stairway is how an objective survives the stretch of the quarter where motivation goes to die.

The look nobody takes, and the kill nobody makes

An objective you check twice a year is wall art. Block real time, monthly at least, to walk the ladder and find the step that's quietly stalled before the stall becomes a postmortem. That part most managers will at least nod along to.

This is the part they skip. When you take that monthly look and find an objective that reality has overtaken, the project got cancelled, the priority moved, the thing it was solving stopped mattering, kill it. Out loud, on the spot, with no ceremony. Do not let it limp to December so everyone can solemnly mark it "not achieved" in a review that helps no one. A dead objective left on the books is worse than no objective at all, because every day it sits there it teaches the team that this entire exercise is fiction. The nerve to kill an objective in month two is rarer than the discipline to write a good one in January, and it matters more, because it's the thing that tells your team the objectives are real. I have watched managers keep a corpse on the board for two quarters out of pure inertia, then dock the owner for not delivering it.