If you were flying from New York to Miami but landed in Chicago, it wouldn’t matter if you made it there on time and under budget. You would still be in the wrong city. When goal fulfillment is seen as an end in itself and not a means to an end, we eventually land in places that miss our overall objectives. This happens every day in businesses across the country and with coaching engagements that focus solely on goal fulfillment. That’s why goals, in and of themselves, don’t work, and why we need a better way to set them.

Context is critical to goal setting. It is foolish to build a bridge—fulfill one’s goal—and lose the war. It is foolish to sell lots and lots of product at the lowest price and not make any money. It is foolish to expand to hundreds of locations and jeopardize the financial health of your entire business. In the name of goal fulfillment, however, all of these things have been done, and more. The cost of this kind of goal fulfillment is very, very high. Like the real estate agent who strives year after year to make the $10-million club. When he finally sells the piece of property that puts him over the top, he comes home to an empty house and divorce papers.

Goals make great servants, but terrible masters. A goal that is set without understanding the bigger picture of overall business objectives and fundamental priorities can ruin us. That is why context is critical to goal fulfillment. Context tells us where we need to go first (Miami or Chicago?) before we get on the plane, roll down the runway, and take off into the sky. Goals by themselves do not provide us with this context and will fail us without it.

We began our work together, however, in the middle of his worst year in sales, which followed the three stellar ones. What happened? One of the reasons for his slide was the failure of goal fulfillment alone to bring satisfaction. The drive to produce year after year left him empty and disillusioned. Without a cause greater than making money, this very talented and gifted sales professional hit the wall and was almost lost to a company he loved.

Nietzsche wisely said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” A goal gives us the how, but without a greater why we lose our energy and endurance. With a how we have a job; with a why we have a cause. A cause is what ignites our passion and empowers us to act. “The glorious cause” fueled the fire of the revolutionary heroes who founded this country and led them to make the sacrifices that allow us to live in freedom today. A cause separates a soldier from a mere mercenary, and that’s exactly what goal fulfillment turns us into without a deeper cause, corporate mercenaries.

All goals need a context, the overall strategy in which they function, and a cause. There must be a set of underlying values it seeks to serve, a deeper why to sustain the how. Goals alone do not supply these and do not work without them.

I did not fulfill a very important goal of mine in going to college and could have used a motivational speech or two to rise above my circumstances and press on. But somehow, I knew in my heart that my goal had not been set with an honest appraisal of who I was, and I stumbled onto opportunities that had not even been on the list of things to do with my life.

Goals have no judge of talent. For goals to be our servants and not our master, they must be rooted in reality. They must be based on an understanding of who we are and how we have been made to function, our strengths and weaknesses, and gifts and talents. No amount of positive thinking should unhinge us from the reality of who we are. Apart from this, our goals will destroy us.

Goals have no judge of character, either. Accomplishment alone does not make a person—or an organization—great. Lately the corporate landscape is littered with leaders who fulfilled their goals but lost their soul. Goals must serve the greater good of society. When they do not, they result in misleadership, another way in which goals do not work.

Consider goal setting as a hammer in the hands of a skilled craftsman. A craftsman does not pull out a hammer at the beginning of a project, like many coaches do at the start of a coaching engagement. A skilled craftsman pulls out the blueprints to look at the overall plans. He cuts, trims, rounds, notches, and sands the wood. Then, and only then, does he pull out a hammer and nail the pieces together into a finished product.

This is the role goal setting plays in an effective coaching engagement. It is best used in the service of assembling various pieces of one’s personal and professional life crafted from the blueprint of one’s values, strengths, and priorities. In other words, goals must be set in a strategic context with a cause bigger than itself, aligned with one’s true gifts and abilities. In short, for goals to work they must be SMART.

Most of us are familiar with the SMART acronym for goal setting: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound. But few have given little more than cursory attention to the formula. It is the difference, however, between goals that work and goals that don’t.

Part of the problem of goal setting is that often no metrics exist for important objectives. For instance, how do you measure weight loss if you don’t know how much you weigh, or how do you reduce employee turnover if you don’t know what your current turnover percentage is? SMART goal setting begins by establishing a baseline and measuring progress from there. We must always ask ourselves, “How will I know when I get there?”

Simply put, what gets measured gets done. I took over a sales force that had collections percentages in the 80s. In other words, only about 80 percent of what was sold was collected in cold, hard cash payment. Together we accepted the challenge of raising it above 95 percent. Over the year, all the salespeople in that department competed with one another to achieve the highest collections percentage. The winner came in at 98.9 percent against the team’s average of 96.5 percent. That was SMART goal setting because it was measurable.

Achievability also echoes our earlier discussions of gifts and talent. I remember standing up at my eighth grade graduation and announcing to the bemused crowd that I was going to be a professional basketball player. I am a heavy, 6¢1≤ klutz with no jump shot and a vertical leap of 4 inches, not a very achievable goal. Self-awareness is critically important in setting goals. No amount of “I think I can! I think I can!” was going to get me into the NBA. Self-help motivation without the insight of self-awareness will fail us every time.

Talk with others about the feasibility of your goals. Look at industry standards and reflect on the accomplishments of those who have gone before you. President Kennedy didn’t declare in 1961 that we would put a man on the moon out of arrogance and pride. His goal, a great example of SMART at work, was a stretch, but one based on research and reliable information. Read the speech; it’s filled with details.

Relevance is key to sustained goal fulfillment. We won’t accomplish something over time that we are not internally committed to with all our heart. Again, goals are our servants, not our masters, and must serve the greater purpose of our values and priorities to truly be SMART.

Intermediate time targets, called milestones, can also be set for your goal. Milestones keep a person on track with reasonable progress toward the finish line. A salesperson may have a goal of selling $2.4 million of product in 2008 with $600,000 milestones in place every quarter. You can schedule milestones on your calendar and measure progress toward your goal, making any midcourse corrections that may be needed along the way.

Note how this goal is very specific and measurable, by both amount and product. In analyzing his accounts at the beginning of the year, it became obvious that it was achievable and the dates were set in line with the growing season of his customers. It was also aligned with the overall business objectives of the company he works for and his own family’s financial goals.

I had a friend who was building his business and wanted to buy a new truck. He didn’t want to go into debt for this truck. He wanted to pay cash. So what he did was get a picture of the exact truck he wanted to buy, right down to the color red, and posted it on the wall of his office next to the financial goal he had set for his business. When he hit that goal, he would buy the truck. The picture, a tangible benefit of his goal, acted as a magnet that drew him to its completion.

Here are some of those steps of action:

Most goal planning omits this critical step. The flush of fresh plans can often lead us to ignore the storm clouds on the horizon. These clouds should not keep us from moving ahead, but realizing they are coming can remind us to bring an umbrella on our trip.

In setting my fitness goal for this year, I noticed that I kept getting derailed in my weight loss. I would make great progress for a month or two, and slip back to where I was before. I listed backsliding as one of my obstacles and began to think of a solution. The solution I arrived at involved hiring a personal trainer. Not only does he keep me accountable each month for my fitness goals, he has made exercising fun with creative workouts and challenging exercises. I am 25 pounds into my 35-pound weight loss goal without backsliding. He even gave me a series of simple things I can do when I travel to feel better and stay in shape. Apart from listing the obstacles to this goal and finding a solution, I am convinced my progress this year will be the same as in the past.

To my surprise, however, at our next session this client brought me his goals. Nine pages, single spaced. I was thrilled. Now we had something to work on, I thought. Six months later our time together ended with no significant progress on anything in the nine pages. No wonder this person didn’t believe in goals!

Two years later, again to my surprise, this client hired me again to be his coach. Much wiser, I insisted that we focus our six months together on three things and all three, with their steps of action, had to fit on one page. In five months we got everything done on that page.

How many goals should you have? Less is more. I recommend focusing on two, at the most three, SMART goals at any one time. Beyond that I have observed that a person gets overwhelmed and performance diminishes. At the beginning of this year, I set five goals for myself. Two of them have to do with my business, one has to do with my finances, one with my fitness, and one with my family. At any one time, however, I am actively working on only one or two of those five until they are completed. Then I can move on to the others.