I’ve set a lot of goals in my life: run a hundred miles, help build a trusted company with my dad, and raise five incredible kids who actually like each other. Just to name a few. They’re the big picture, ambitious goals that you’d see someone put on a vision board.
And look, those goals are great. I’m not knocking big goals or aiming high. But you know, a goal without the right process to support it is about as effective as wishing on a star. Realizing that is when I started falling in love with process goals, not just outcome goals.
Process VS Outcome: What’s the Difference?
Simply put, an outcome goal is the destination. Finishing the race, closing the deal, hitting that revenue number—they all mean it’s a done deal. They’re great for setting your focus in the right direction, but I see so many high achievers get tripped up when they measure themselves entirely against the outcome.
They’re evaluating themselves against something they can’t fully control, and what might be fairly far in the future. That’s a recipe for discouragement, even abandonment of the goal, along the way.
We can all train perfectly and have a bad race day. We can have the perfect pitch deck and the best people in the biz and still lose the deal. Sometimes, my kids fight.
So when the outcome is your only metric, one bad week can feel like a total failure. Even when you did everything right.
Process goals, though: they’re different. They’re about the inputs, the habits and behaviors you do control. When they’re well-constructed, they create a feedback loop for you that a) keeps you moving forward and b) shows you where you really stand, even if results don’t reflect effort.
What Makes a Good Process Goal
Here’s the simplest rule of thumb for your process goals: can you look back at the end of the day and say definitively whether you did it or not? If the answer is fuzzy, go back to the drawing board.
So, “run more consistently” is not a process goal. It’s not measurable. “Run four days a week for a minimum of 30 minutes and log it by Sunday night,” is. That’s a process goal—specific, binary, and entirely within your control.
“Be a better leader” is little more than an aspiration. But “conduct a 30-minute one-on-one with each direct report every two weeks” is a process goal. The former just makes you feel vaguely guilty with no clear antidote.
I want to stress here that being specific isn’t about being rigid. I don’t hit all my process goals perfectly. But what they do is remove the negotiations we can have with ourselves at 5:45 a.m. when the sun isn’t up yet, and you’re feeling particularly unmotivated.
Do Process Goals Really Work?
So why do process goals work where outcome goals might fall short? There's a psychological reason this works. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions found that people who specify when, where, and how they'll perform a behavior follow through at dramatically higher rates than those who set the same goal without that structure.
A vague intention leaves room for compromise at the exact moment willpower is lowest. A specific process goal removes that negotiation before it starts. You're not deciding whether to run on Thursday morning. You already decided. Thursday is just execution.
The same thing plays out in business. Teams that obsess over quarterly numbers to the exclusion of everything else tend to get reactive and short-sighted. Teams that also hold themselves accountable to process—the calls made, the proposals sent, the reviews completed—stay steadier when the numbers are bumpy.
Our Practical Starting Point
Maybe you’re already setting process goals in one area of your life, but not in others. Maybe you’ve been sitting with outcome goals with no progress to show for it. Where to start?
Pick one outcome goal you care about. Then work backward and ask: what are the two or three behaviors, done consistently, that give that outcome the best shot? Make those your process goals. Keep them specific, keep them binary, and track them honestly.
You'll probably find that the outcome takes care of itself more often than not. And on the days it doesn't, you'll still be able to say you did your job.
That's worth so much more than people give it credit for.
What's one process goal you've built that's moving you closer to your desired outcomes?