A Concept to Challenge Your Status Quo
"The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score." — Bill Copeland
Imagine giving your team a map and then leaving the destination off. A recent engagement with a tech sector client revealed just how costly that ambiguity can be.
My client, a fast-growing software company, was hitting a wall: quarterly objectives were clear on paper but felt distant to the team. Standups were full of broad updates, but no one felt truly connected to the impact of their daily work. After months of frustration, one department lead confided, "We’re working hard, but I can’t tell how today’s effort matters tomorrow."
We shifted our approach. Inspired by what sports scientists at the University of Essex proved with young athletes, giving immediate, actionable cues and analogies yields outsized results, we moved the goalposts closer. Instead of chasing “Q4 milestones,” teams began tracking daily wins and getting feedback within hours.
Picture a Formula 1 driver: during the race, their mind is on the 12 inches of asphalt ahead, not the finish line. Performance surges when attention is focused this close to the activity. In my client’s company, daily, visible results created momentum almost overnight.
A study on Tottenham’s soccer academy found that young players ran faster by 3% when given immediate, visceral analogies (“sprint like a jet taking off”) instead of distant, generic instructions. My client saw similar gains: teams didn’t just move faster, they understood how each sprint affected success.
Close goals trigger psychological momentum. When my client’s product engineers could see their daily deployments shape user experiences within 24 hours, commitment skyrocketed.
Research consistently finds that leaders who shorten the gap between goals and activity see higher team performance. This isn’t micromanagement, it’s engineering proximity between aspiration and execution.
Audit your goal proximity:
- Transform monthly goals into daily wins
- Make every win visible, within 24 hours of effort
- Link every task to an immediate result, not just a long-term metric
Great CEOs don’t just set ambitious goals; they architect the path so each step visibly matters.
Share this with your team. Ask: “How many 12-inch goals are we setting for our people, and how many are still just distant benchmarks?”
Elite organizations close the gap and keep the win close enough to grasp.
