What Type of Goals Should You Have? A Guide to Effective Goal Setting in Coaching

Organisations invest significant time in setting goals. Leadership development plans, performance objectives, succession frameworks and transformation programmes all depend on some understanding of what people are expected to achieve. Yet the quality of the goals themselves receives less attention than the processes used to record and review them. For HR, Talent, L&D and organisational leaders, this creates a practical challenge. A leader may have a clearly documented development objective but make little progress towards changing their behaviour. A team may meet its performance targets while continuing to rely on working practices that limit collaboration or adaptability. An employee may pursue a goal that satisfies organisational expectations without developing the capability needed for their next role.

The distinction matters because different types of goals influence how people direct their attention, approach challenges and evaluate progress. Goal-setting research provides a strong foundation for understanding these differences. Locke and Latham's review of 35 years of goal-setting research explains how goals influence effort, persistence and the strategies people use, while recognising that their effectiveness depends on factors including commitment, feedback, task complexity and ability. Within professional coaching, goal setting provides a structure for connecting reflection with action. The most useful coaching goals establish a meaningful direction, identify what the individual can influence and create opportunities to develop and apply new behaviours.

Why the type of goal matters

A goal describes a desired future state, but goals can differ substantially in their purpose and psychological effect. Some focus on achieving an external result. Others emphasise developing capability, changing behaviour or improving a process. Some encourage movement towards a desirable outcome, while others are framed around avoiding an unwanted situation. These distinctions affect how people interpret success and respond when circumstances change.

Consider a leader whose objective is to improve team performance. That ambition might translate into several different goals: increasing productivity, becoming more effective at delegation, strengthening team decision-making or reducing the need to intervene in everyday decisions. Each goal creates a different developmental focus.

A performance target may clarify the result the organisation needs. A learning goal can identify the capability the leader needs to develop. A behavioural goal can specify what the leader will practise differently. Effective coaching helps people examine these connections and determine which goals are most useful for their circumstances.

Approach goals and avoidance goals: What are you moving towards?

One distinction in goal-setting psychology is between approach and avoidance goals. Approach goals focus on achieving or developing something desirable. Avoidance goals focus on preventing or reducing an unwanted outcome.

For example, a leader might describe their goal as:

• Avoidance: "I want to stop micromanaging my team."
• Approach: "I want to develop a team that can make more decisions independently."

Both concern delegation, but they direct attention towards different aspects of the challenge. The avoidance goal identifies an existing behaviour the leader wants to reduce. The approach goal describes a desired leadership capability and team environment.

Research into approach and avoidance motivation demonstrates that these orientations can be associated with different motivational and wellbeing outcomes, although the findings depend on the context and type of goal. It would be too simplistic to conclude that avoidance goals are always ineffective. Avoiding safety failures, ethical breaches or serious performance risks may be entirely appropriate. Some leadership situations require attention to preventing harm.

However, coaching can help individuals move beyond identifying what they want to stop and clarify what they intend to create. For HR leaders, this distinction is particularly useful when development goals are framed around perceived weaknesses. An objective such as "be less defensive when challenged" may become more actionable when expressed as "seek alternative perspectives and respond constructively to challenge". The second formulation creates clearer opportunities to practise and observe the desired behaviour.

Performance goals and outcome goals: What can you actually influence?

Another important distinction concerns the relationship between the desired result and the actions that contribute to it. An outcome goal describes the end result someone wants to achieve. A performance or process goal focuses more directly on what the individual needs to do to improve the likelihood of achieving that result. A senior leader might have an outcome goal of improving employee engagement across their business unit.

That outcome is influenced by multiple factors, including organisational structure, workload, reward, leadership behaviour, career opportunities and business conditions. The leader can influence some of these factors, but does not control them all. A related behavioural goal might be to introduce more effective team discussions, improve the quality of feedback or involve employees earlier in decisions that affect their work. These actions are more directly within the leader's influence. Both types of goals have value.

Outcome goals provide strategic direction and help establish why development matters. Behavioural and process goals make it easier to identify what the individual can practise, review and adjust. For organisations, this distinction helps connect coaching to business priorities without expecting individual leaders to control every factor influencing organisational performance.

A useful coaching engagement can therefore begin with an important organisational outcome and work backwards towards the behaviours and capabilities that could contribute to it.

Learning goals and performance goals: When development requires experimentation

Performance goals are often appropriate when individuals already possess the knowledge and capability required to complete a task. However, leadership development frequently involves unfamiliar challenges.

A newly appointed executive may need to develop systems thinking, influence across a matrix or lead through ambiguity. The individual may not yet know which behaviours or strategies will be most effective. In these situations, learning goals become particularly relevant. A learning or mastery goal focuses on developing knowledge, capability or a more effective way of approaching a challenge. For example, a leader navigating organisational transformation might establish a learning goal to improve how they engage stakeholders with competing priorities.

Progress could involve experimenting with different communication approaches, gathering feedback, reflecting on stakeholder responses and adapting their behaviour. The objective is to develop a more effective leadership capability through experience.

Locke and Latham's goal-setting research recognises that task complexity affects how goals influence performance. When individuals need to discover effective strategies, an exclusive emphasis on immediate performance can be less useful than supporting learning and strategy development. This has implications for leadership development programmes.

If organisations evaluate leaders only against immediate outcomes, they may unintentionally discourage experimentation in situations where new capabilities are required. Coaching can provide a structured environment for leaders to examine their assumptions, test alternative approaches and learn from experience while remaining accountable for their responsibilities.

SMART goals are useful, but they are not sufficient

SMART goals are widely used in performance management and professional development. They typically encourage goals to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. This structure can be helpful when an individual has a reasonably clear objective and needs to translate it into an actionable plan.

For example, "improve my delegation" might become a commitment to delegate defined decisions to team members over a specified period, establish clear decision boundaries and review the results through regular conversations. The greater specificity makes progress easier to observe. However, not every developmental challenge begins with a clearly defined outcome.

A leader may enter coaching because they feel ineffective in a new role, struggle to influence peers or recognise that their established leadership style is no longer working. The underlying developmental need may become clearer only through reflection and exploration. Imposing a narrowly defined SMART goal too early can limit the opportunity to understand the challenge.

A more useful approach is to treat SMART as one tool within a broader coaching process. The coach and coachee can begin by clarifying the developmental issue, identifying what matters and exploring the behaviours involved. Specific milestones can then be established where they help create focus and accountability. For further discussion, see BOLDLY's article on when goal setting can backfire.

Why some goals fail: Commitment, competing priorities and organisational conditions

Even well-defined goals can be neglected. A leader may genuinely intend to spend more time developing their team but continue prioritising urgent operational work. Another may want to delegate more responsibility while believing that maintaining personal control is necessary for success.

These situations reveal an important feature of goal setting: progress depends on more than the quality of the written objective. Goals can compete for attention, time and resources. They can also conflict with personal values, established beliefs or organisational expectations.

Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory highlights the importance of autonomy, competence and relatedness in motivation and wellbeing. Their work also distinguishes between different reasons for pursuing goals, helping explain why personal commitment and the social environment matter. For organisational coaching, this creates several questions.

Does the individual understand why the goal matters? Do they have meaningful ownership of how they pursue it? Are the required behaviours supported by their working environment? Are competing priorities making progress unrealistic? A leader may be committed to developing their team but face incentives that reward individual problem-solving and immediate delivery. In that situation, coaching can help the leader examine their choices, but organisational systems may also need attention.

This is particularly relevant to organisational transformation, where leaders are often expected to adopt new behaviours while operating within structures and performance expectations established for a previous strategy.

How coaching helps people turn goals into behavioural change

Professional coaching creates a structured developmental relationship in which individuals can examine their goals, motivations, assumptions and behaviours. A coach may help a leader clarify what they want to achieve, identify competing commitments, explore different approaches and determine how progress will be recognised.

The coaching process can also support experimentation. A leader working on delegation might identify a specific decision to transfer to a team member, clarify expectations, observe their own response to uncertainty and reflect on the results in a subsequent coaching session. Over time, this creates opportunities to develop a more deliberate leadership practice.

The evidence for coaching supports its role as a developmental intervention. A meta-analysis by Theeboom, Beersma and van Vianen (2014) found positive effects across outcomes including performance and skills, wellbeing, coping, work attitudes and goal-directed self-regulation. These findings do not establish that every coaching engagement will produce the same result. The effectiveness of coaching depends on the developmental need, coaching relationship, individual engagement and wider organisational context.

For organisations, the practical implication is to connect coaching goals with meaningful leadership behaviours and create opportunities for those behaviours to be applied in everyday work.

Connecting individual coaching goals with organisational priorities

Enterprise coaching introduces an additional dimension to goal setting. The organisation is investing in development for a reason. It may need stronger succession capability, improved collaboration, more effective change leadership or greater adaptability. At the same time, coaching is a developmental relationship in which the individual needs sufficient ownership, trust and confidentiality to explore their challenges. Both interests need to be considered.

An organisation can establish the broad developmental purpose of coaching and identify relevant leadership capabilities. The coachee and coach can then work together to define meaningful individual goals within that context. For example, an organisation implementing a new operating model may identify distributed decision-making as an important leadership capability.

Individual leaders might then work on different goals: delegation, influencing peers, managing uncertainty or changing how they involve their teams. These goals contribute to a shared organisational priority while recognising that each leader has different developmental needs.

BOLDLY's resource on defining coaching outcomes provides a practical starting point for establishing and reviewing goals within a coaching engagement.

Measuring progress without reducing development to a score

Measurement should reflect the type of goal being pursued. An outcome goal may require business or talent indicators. A behavioural goal may be evaluated through stakeholder feedback and observed changes in leadership practice. A learning goal may involve evidence that the individual is applying new approaches, responding to feedback and developing greater capability.

These measures can complement one another. For example, an organisation developing leaders for succession might consider whether participants demonstrate stronger strategic judgement, greater delegation and improved readiness for broader responsibilities.

Relevant evidence could include developmental assessments, stakeholder observations and structured reviews of leadership behaviour. The organisation should also recognise that coaching is only one influence on outcomes such as promotion, retention or team performance.

Measurement is most useful when it helps HR understand whether coaching is contributing to the intended development, where progress is occurring and what additional support may be required. Confidentiality remains important. Programme-level reporting can evaluate agreed outcomes without disclosing the content of individual coaching conversations.

How human and AI coaching can support goal progress

Leadership goals often require attention between formal coaching sessions. A leader may identify a behavioural change during coaching but encounter opportunities to practise it throughout the working week.

Human coaching can provide relational depth, contextual understanding and challenge as the individual examines more complex patterns of thinking and behaviour. AI coaching can complement this by making structured reflection more accessible in the flow of work.

A leader preparing for a difficult conversation, for example, might use AI coaching to explore possible approaches and clarify their intentions. Afterwards, they might reflect on what happened and identify what to practise next. BOLDLY's AI coaching capability, momentLeader, is designed to extend developmental support alongside professional human coaching.

For HR leaders, the objective is to establish appropriate roles for each modality within a governed coaching ecosystem, including clear expectations for quality, privacy and the handling of sensitive information. Technology-enabled coaching operations can also support consistent goal-setting processes, programme coordination and appropriate measurement across larger coaching populations.

What should HR and Talent leaders consider when designing coaching goals?

For organisations investing in leadership coaching, five considerations can strengthen the connection between development and organisational performance:

1. Start with the organisational priority. Identify the leadership capabilities and behaviours required to support strategy, transformation or talent objectives.
2. Distinguish between outcomes and behaviours. Establish the results the organisation wants while recognising which actions the individual can realistically influence.
3. Create room for learning. Use developmental goals where leaders need to acquire new capabilities or experiment with unfamiliar approaches.
4. Examine motivation and context. Consider individual commitment, competing priorities and organisational conditions that may support or constrain progress.
5. Review goals as circumstances change. Revisit objectives as leaders develop new insight or organisational requirements evolve.

These principles help coaching programmes maintain strategic relevance while preserving the flexibility required for meaningful individual development.

Effective coaching goals connect direction, learning and action

The most useful coaching goals provide clarity without oversimplifying development. Approach goals can help individuals identify what they want to create. Outcome goals establish direction, while behavioural and process goals clarify what people can influence. Learning goals create space to develop capabilities that are not yet established.

SMART principles can provide useful structure once the developmental purpose is understood. Coaching helps individuals work with these different goal types, examine competing commitments and translate reflection into purposeful action. For organisations, the wider opportunity is to connect individual development with the leadership capabilities and behavioural changes required for organisational transformation.

That connection depends on more than goal setting. It requires appropriate coaching, leadership expectations, opportunities to practise, supportive organisational systems and credible evaluation.

How BOLDLY supports goal-focused coaching for organisational transformation

BOLDLY approaches goal setting as part of Coaching for Organisational Transformation. Our integrated ecosystem combines evidence-based human coaching, AI coaching through momentLeader, and technology-enabled coaching operations.

Our global network of screened and vetted coaches supports executive, leadership, team, group and career coaching. Human coaches provide relational depth, professional judgement and contextual understanding, while AI coaching can extend access to reflection and developmental support in the flow of work. Technology-enabled coaching operations support consistent delivery, governance, quality assurance and measurement across enterprise coaching programmes.

As part of the Bendelta Group, BOLDLY can also connect coaching with broader expertise in leadership, culture, organisational design and transformation.

If your organisation is reviewing leadership development goals, designing a coaching programme or looking to connect coaching more closely with strategic priorities, talk to BOLDLY about building an evidence-based coaching approach that supports meaningful behavioural change.

About the Author: Alexandra Lamb

Alexandra Lamb is an organisational development practitioner with more than 20 years of professional experience across APAC, North America and MENA.

Her experience spans talent strategy, leadership development, psychology, coaching, product development and human-centred design. She combines commercial understanding with evidence-based coaching practice to support leadership and organisational capability development.