Research 2026-06-04 Executive Leadership Lucerne

Executive Leadership training in LucerneAmbitious targets: how can managers avoid rewarding the wrong trade-offs?

Ambitious targets: how can managers avoid rewarding the wrong trade-offs? — SHR, Lucerne

Setting a target does more than specify an outcome: it directs attention and everyday decisions. For SHR's « Leadership d'excellence » programme, this raises a practical question: how can managers maintain ambition without making target achievement the sole definition of good work?

1. What the literature establishes about goals

Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham (2002, American Psychologist) synthesise research showing that specific, difficult goals can improve performance more than a general instruction to do one's best. Goals direct attention, mobilise effort and sustain persistence. These effects depend, among other things, on goal commitment, skills, feedback and task complexity.

2. When the target threshold changes behaviour

Maurice E. Schweitzer, Lisa D. Ordóñez and Bambi Douma (2004, Academy of Management Journal) provide experimental evidence that unmet goals can encourage dishonest performance reporting. In their experiments, this risk is particularly apparent when participants fall just short of their target. The mechanism is therefore not simply a lack of motivation: wanting to succeed can also lead people to report a better result than they actually achieved.

Ambitious targets: how can managers avoid rewarding the wrong trade-offs? — SHR, Lucerne — Lucerne

3. The premature conclusion: abandon ambition

These findings do not mean that every demanding target produces fraud, or that vague goals would protect organisations. Instead, they invite managers to distinguish the level of ambition from the rules governing how it is pursued. A manager can demand strong results while making clear that quality, compliance and reliable reporting are not negotiable. (our executive and employee training programmes)

4. What the evidence cannot establish

An experiment on performance reporting does not directly measure the trade-offs made by a team facing sustained commercial, professional and relational pressures. Nor can it predict how frequently dishonest behaviour will occur in a particular business. In practice, meeting a metric is therefore insufficient either to demonstrate management excellence or to rule out costs shifted onto other activities.

5. A practical check in Lucerne

In Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs provide settings where short decision-making paths and the family ownership of many businesses may facilitate discussion of trade-offs, without guaranteeing it. As hypothetical examples, a hotel could pair its sales target with a check on the services promised to guests, while an industrial SME could track rework required after delivery rather than on-time delivery alone. As an application exercise for SHR's « Leadership d'excellence » programme, a manager could keep a month-long log recording the intended result, the safeguard to uphold and the trade-off made for each target-related decision. The check would examine the proportion of documented decisions that respected that safeguard, reviewing exceptions and their supporting evidence rather than focusing solely on target achievement. To go further: explore the Executive Leadership training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

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