For decades, goal setting has been promoted as a halcyon pill for improving employee motivation and performance in organizations. Advocates of goal setting argue that for goals to be successful, they should be specific and challenging, and countless studies find that specific, challenging goals motivate performance far better than "do your best" exhortations. The authors of this article, however, argue that it is often these same characteristics of goals that cause them to "go wild." Key conc...

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A strategy is no more than a piece of paper, if people at the bottom of the pyramid do not know what to do with it. The front line is where value is being created, where the rubber meets the road.

Getting the Buy-In of Informal Leaders

While most organizations have a well-defined formal leadership structure, it is quite often observed that the real centers of power/influence do not vest with them. So a critical step is managing these "informal" leaders. They often boast of disproportionate infl...
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