Why “SMART” goals are stupid

Faced with the annual mandate of placing themselves in an accountability box of their own making – developing SMART goals – what’s a self-aware human being to do? Create the required number of goals that are simple, easily attainable, fully under your control, and – if you’re playing chess to management’s checkers – rooted in tasks you were already planning to do anyway.  

This is the predictable response to the "Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound" framework. SMART goals shift the focus from meaningful, multi-faceted, complex, and team-based ambitions toward low-level individual outputs aimed at perfunctory compliance. 

Why is this dumb? 

1. The Relevance criterion is vacuous. The Relevance criterion is a lame attempt to smuggle meaningfulness into the framework. Of course goals should be relevant – deliberately pointless ones aren’t a competing school of thought. Also, relevance exists primarily in the eye of the beholder – unless wildly role-incongruent, who wants to tussle about what is/not relevant? The fact that the “R” has meant different things to different people over the years says more about the mnemonic appeal of the acronym than any coherent theory of goal setting. 

2. It turns a potentially meaningful exercise into a cynical one. What could be a deep, reflective conversation about growth, direction, competence, and contribution becomes a box-checking exercise that no one takes seriously, including the people who required it. 

3. It rewards sandbagging. Employees who set ambitious goals risk falling short; those who set easy ones always deliver. When the game becomes goals you can hit in your sleep all on your lonesome, the incentive is to aim low. SMART goals punish ambition.

4. It individualizes collective work. Most meaningful outcomes – especially in health and human services – require coordination across people, systems, and time. SMART goals strap an individual accountability box over work that is fundamentally shared. 

5. It promotes supervisory passivity. Because SMART goals are designed to stand on their own, most supervisors skip any meaningful dialogue about competencies, professional aspirations, or how an employee's ideas might move the organization forward. And because you can easily tell whether the perfunctory SMART goal was hit via a form or email, there’s little reason to follow up on how it all went, what was learned, or what it helped accomplish. 

6. It wastes time and signals distrust. The hours spent constructing, reviewing, and filing SMART goals aren't just opportunity cost. They're a message that employees can't be trusted to pursue meaningful work without micromanagement. That's corrosive to communicate to the professionals you depend on. 

7. It is pseudo-scientific. Despite being treated as the gold standard in management, education, and program evaluation,* the evidence suggests the framework may be counterproductive. The benefits of formalized goal-setting frameworks may have been overstated and the harms ignored; the "Attainable" criterion directly contradicts the fact that challenging goals consistently outperform realistic ones; and SMART goals can impede progress compared to simply asking people to do their best. 

Lots of people smarter than me have been making these arguments for years – see the resources section below for a few good reads.  

Resources 

Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting — Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky & Bazerman, Harvard Business School / Academy of Management Perspectives (2009). Makes the case that goal-setting frameworks have been oversold: the benefits overstated, the harms — including reduced intrinsic motivation and corrosion of organizational culture — largely ignored. Link 

So-called 'SMART goals' are a case of style over substance — Psyche (October 2025). Takes the framework apart letter by letter, including the point that "Attainable" directly contradicts evidence on what drives performance. Link 

SMART goals are no more effective for creative performance than do-your-best goals — Educational Psychology (2024). Peer-reviewed research showing that for complex or creative work, rigid goal frameworks get in the way — a finding with direct Relevance to most of what we do. Link 

* The spread of SMART goals from performance management into program evaluation and grant reporting may be an even more insidious application of the framework — a conversation for another day. 

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Jim Fauth is the Director of the Behavioral Health Improvement Institute (BHII) at Keene State College.