Every leader has one. The team member who meets deadlines, causes no trouble, and delivers work that is entirely acceptable. And every leader has quietly wondered: what would it take to get more from them?
The answer is rarely talent, it is clarity.
Most of us set goals the same way for everyone on our team, regardless of what we actually need from that person. That single habit — treating all performance as one undifferentiated category — is why so many organisations stagnate. They achieve reliability. They rarely achieve a breakthrough. At a recent Internal Communication and Strategic Leadership workshop that I conducted, I explored the issue of setting crystal-clear expectations, with a focus on SMART vs HARD Goals for different performance levels.
The Performance Paradox
Here’s the pattern: most performance conversations are risk-mitigation conversations. We’re making sure nobody falls below an acceptable standard. That matters. Baseline performance keeps an organisation functioning. But when every goal is built to be safely achievable, we’ve removed the very conditions that produce genuine innovation, often without meaning to.
The fix isn’t to abandon structure. It’s to apply two different structures to two different kinds of work.
Good Work versus Great Work
Good Work is operational excellence: predictable, measurable, essential. It’s the finance team closing the books accurately every quarter, the operations team hitting production targets. Without it, nothing runs.
Great Work is transformational. It reinvents how we do things, rather than making the existing process faster. It’s the redesigned workflow that cuts costs by 40 per cent, the initiative that opens a new market. Without it, an organisation stalls.
Both deserve recognition. Neither should be measured the same way, which is where SMART and HARD goals come in.
SMART: the foundation
For the most part, we’re all familiar with SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound. They are built for Good Work. They give people certainty: exactly what success looks like, by when, and how it will be judged. Their strength is also their limit. Because “Attainable” means staying within current capability, SMART goals will never, by design, produce a breakthrough. That’s not a flaw. It’s the point.
HARD: the catalyst
On the other hand, HARD goals — Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult — were developed for exactly the territory SMART cannot reach. A ‘Heartfelt’ goal connects to something the person genuinely cares about. An ‘Animated’ goal paints a vivid picture of the future state. ‘Required’ places ownership of resources and problem-solving with the individual, not the manager. And ‘Difficult’ means the goal cannot be reached using current methods. It demands new capability.
Crucially, HARD goals need HARD-compatible evaluation. Judging someone’s ambitious, unfinished experiment by the metrics you’d use for routine output sends one message: stop trying. Partial progress on a genuinely difficult goal, paired with real learning, is often worth more than full completion of a safe one.
The Dual-Track Portfolio
The most effective leaders don’t choose between frameworks, they build a portfolio. For most operational roles, that means roughly 70–80 per cent SMART goals and 20–30 per cent HARD goals, with strategic and innovation-facing roles shifting further toward HARD.
SMART goals fund the stability that makes risk-taking possible. HARD goals build the capability that keeps an organisation relevant. You need both, deployed deliberately, not interchangeably.
The difference between good and great was never about talent. It’s about whether you’ve set expectations with enough precision and chosen the right framework for the outcome you actually want.
If your team is delivering consistently acceptable work and you sense there’s more underneath it, the goal-setting conversation is where to start.