90% of goals fail: Here’s how to be in the winning 10%

Here we are, one month into 2025. One month after we set our resolutions and goals for the year. And probably about one month since we gave them up or forgot about them? Just me? I doubt it! We have all been here, both professionally and personally.

This year more than usual, I’ve had credit unions and partners reach out with questions and conversations about goal setting. How to do it? What’s the best approach? How to achieve them? 

Honestly, most goals do not work. Research from The Economist states that 90% of strategic goals fail. A similar study from Robert Kaplan in Harvard Business Review echoes the same sentiment, stating that 90% of strategies fail. Goals and Strategies are tied up in the same blame game of what works and what doesn’t—but what strikes me here is not the difference in definition, but the NINETY PERCENT. If my car had a 90% fail rate, I’d buy a new one. If a recipe had a 90% fail rate, I’d stop making it. So why do we have a 90% goal rate and then turn around and do the same thing year over year? 

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is often considered the definition of insanity. Now that we are one month into 2025, let’s take a step back, reevaluate our goals and inject some sanity into the process.

Personally, I may have an unusual view on goal setting. Similar to how we overcomplicate strategy, we overcomplicate goal setting. Y’all—it’s simple. A goal is just something that you’re trying to achieve. We may set a goal to read a certain number of books or miles to run. At work, it’s not any more complicated than that. We may add a little to the definition—I like to think of a goal as not just a thing to achieve, but a thing to achieve that will advance your Mission and Vision—but it’s still as simple. Most people are looking for a magic answer or a formula. You will not find that here. My advice is to create goals that work for you. If they work for you, they work. Period.

As we enter the second month of 2025, it's time to reevaluate our goals and strategies, acknowledging that 90% of them tend to fail, and inject some sanity into the process.

Now, here are a few of the key learnings from my experience.

Personally, I’ve tried to run more this year (stop laughing). But I’ve done nothing more than say that out loud—and now to you. I haven’t found a program to help, joined a run club or found an accountability buddy. Nada. And guess what—I haven’t run one block in 2025.

So often, the goal is dead on arrival. We want to drive change, increase revenue, get new members. We put that on our scorecard and just assume it’s going to happen. It is not. That’s 90% fail rate thinking.

Assign the goal to someone. Assign time to achieving the goal. Fund the goal.  

If the goal is about achieving over and beyond your day to day, then realize—and account for—the time and resources that are over and beyond your day to day. It takes focus to drive great change—and someone to drive it. Yes, some ONE. Not a department, or a team, or “the company”—they are all incredibly important to moving the goal forward, but back to our old friend the RACI, someone must be accountable, by name.

Making a plan for your goal (dare I say a strategy), with clear owners, time allocation, and funding will set your goal up for success.

You’ve got to stick with it! And that does not happen by hope alone. Not to brag (maybe a little), but here at FarWell, we use a weekly/quarterly system. We meet quarterly to set goals, meet weekly to track progress and address roadblocks, and then do it again the next quarter. Guess what? We have about a 90%+ success rate on meeting our quarterly goals. We’ve flipped the 90% on its head!

We are not magic. We are steady, deliberate, and accountable. We put the process in place to support our goals. We show up to the meetings. We don’t reschedule. And we don’t give each other excuses for not meeting the goal. Things happen, goals can adjust and that’s why we meet weekly. 

I’ve worked with companies that have the most beautiful balanced scorecards, or they bought really cool technology to track their goals, or they have the best looking BHAG, WIG, Leader Board, you name it—but they are still in that failing 90%. Why? Because often only the Senior Leadership Team knows about the Scorecard, another technology is honestly one more thing to log-in to and update, and the BHAG, WIG, BAG easily becomes the next corporate lingo bingo phrase to go viral among your staff.

But how did you get to this point anyway? Your CEO or some executive saw a squirrel. They talked to someone, read a book, shared an article—usually about how this one thing saved some other company and now it is going to save yours! Except it is not.

Avoid the squirrel, save money, and understand that none of these (actually, really excellent tools) will work until you are committed to the work and to the processes that drive it. You cannot have one without the other; and the commitment must be long term, not just for a few months until the next squirrel comes along. Change takes time. 

This is your permission slip to not use the same old stale language that you have for years. Take it and flex your creativity. 

Be specific: I guarantee you that almost every credit union in your area has a “grow membership” goal. Yay. But what is special about how YOU are going to grow membership? You can sub “grow membership” with grow revenue, grow loans, save money—you get it. We’re all trying to do that, but take the time to challenge your team to write a goal about how they are going to do that specific to the special skills and differentiated strengths that your credit union brings to the community.

Numbers are awesome, but not required: If you have a goal of updating your succession plan—it is A-OKAY for the measurement of that goal to be actually updating the plan. Similar to executing your core conversion. The measure can be going live with your core conversion. That is a big deal! It doesn’t need a percentage or number or ratio to know that you went live with your core conversion.

Dear reader, I have a lot of people fight me on this one, but sometimes the right goal for your credit union is just to GET. STUFF. DONE. Sure—there are a LOT of meaningful things that can be measured underneath that goal. Progress to date, approval steps, or the quality of how the goal was achieved, etc. But do not be afraid of a goal that is just “getting stuff done.”

Do not try to have the most advanced goal system if you have never had successful goals before. That’s probably an extreme, but you get what I’m saying. Start small. Find things you can achieve and learn what works. Lean into how your team reacts and rallies around a goal. If you’re not already tracking your goals somewhere—a spreadsheet or Teams Channel—then a new fancy system is not going to cause you to do it. It’s just going to waste your credit union’s money.

And honestly, if your goal this year is “just” to get three things done and you get them done – you have advanced forward! You have achieved a goal! And you’ve learned great behavior that will influence your next set of goals. Keep it simple so that it gets done!

I recently had a few CEOs tell me that they are bad at offering praise or discussing achievements. Wrong answer. If you know you are bad at that, assign it to someone else—because it may be the second most important step in goal making (right after setting the goal). We are human and we want to be seen and acknowledged. We are often putting in extra hours to achieve a goal that is over and beyond what we normally do. That is worth celebrating! Celebrating a win acknowledges the win, encourages more of it, builds a winning culture, and easily allows recognition of a person or team. All good things. And all things that feed into a fabulous goal making—and goal achieving—culture!