Learning Goals vs. Performance Goals: When to Use Each

Most goal advice assumes you already know how to do the thing. Run a faster 5K. Read 20 books. Save a set amount each month. In each case, the main question is effort and consistency.

But many personal goals involve something you don't know how to do yet: learning a language, picking up a new kind of software, speaking in public, or managing a budget for the first time. Goal-setting research suggests that for these, the usual advice to set a specific, hard result target can backfire, and a different kind of goal often works better.

This guide explains the difference between learning goals and performance goals, what the research found, and how to choose between them.

Two kinds of goals

In their 2002 review of goal-setting research in American Psychologist, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham defined the terms this way. A performance goal refers to the score you attain on a task, such as how many problems you solve in a set time. A learning goal refers to the number of ideas or strategies you acquire or develop to do the task well.

Put simply, a performance goal is about the result. A learning goal is about the method. "Hold a 10-minute conversation in Spanish by June" is a performance goal. "Find and try five different ways to practice speaking, and note which ones help most" is a learning goal.

Both can be specific. Both can be challenging. The difference is what you are aiming at.

When a hard performance goal backfires

Locke and Latham's core finding is that specific, difficult goals generally lead to higher performance than vague "do your best" goals. But they described an important exception.

When a task is complex for the person doing it, urging them to do their best sometimes led to better strategies than a specific, difficult performance goal. The reason, as they explained it, is that a performance goal can make people so anxious to succeed that they scramble for strategies in an unsystematic way and fail to learn what is effective.

One study they cited, by Kanfer and Ackerman, used an air traffic controller simulation, a highly complex task. Having a performance-outcome goal actually interfered with learning the knowledge needed to do the task, and people did better when simply asked to do their best.

Locke and Latham also reported a sharper warning: if the strategy a person is using is inappropriate, a difficult performance goal can lead to worse performance than an easy goal. Pushing harder on a method that doesn't work only gets you further down the wrong road.

The 2009 "Goals Gone Wild" paper by Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky and Bazerman made a related point: someone narrowly focused on a performance goal is less likely to try alternative methods that could help them learn the task.

Why learning goals help

The fix, according to Locke and Latham, is not to drop goals but to change their type. They described specific, challenging learning goals, such as discovering a certain number of different strategies to master a task, as the antidote to the anxiety a performance goal can create on complex work.

In a study by Winters and Latham that they cited, a specific, difficult learning goal led to significantly higher performance on a complex task than a general instruction to do your best. A study by Seijts and B. W. Latham found that people who naturally lean toward performance goals did as well as natural learners when they were given a specific, difficult learning goal.

Learning goals also seem to affect interest. Locke and Latham described findings from Harackiewicz and colleagues with college students: performance goals improved grades but did not affect interest in the class, while learning goals increased interest but did not affect grades. Each type of goal did something the other didn't.

Locke and Latham also noted that, at the time of their review, almost no studies had tested using both types together. Any advice on combining them, including the sequence suggested below, is practical judgment rather than settled science.

How to choose

A simple test: Do you already know how to do this, so that the main barrier is effort and consistency? Or do you still need to figure out how?

• If you know how, use a performance goal. Locke and Latham reported that when people had been trained in the proper strategies, those given specific, high performance goals were more likely to use those strategies.
• If you don't know how yet, start with a learning goal. Aim at discovering, testing and comparing methods.
• If you are unsure, treat the first few weeks as a learning phase and set the performance goal once you know which methods work for you.

For example, imagine someone who wants to start tracking personal spending for the first time. A performance goal like "cut spending by a set percentage this quarter" assumes she already knows where the money goes and what she can change. A learning goal fits the first month better: "Try three ways of tracking spending, one week each, and pick the one I'll keep using." Once she has a method and a baseline, a specific savings target makes sense.

Break distant goals into nearer ones

Another tool Locke and Latham described for new, complex tasks is proximal goals: nearer-term targets set along the way to a distant one. In a business-game study by Latham and Seijts, adding proximal goals to a distant goal led to higher self-efficacy and profits than either a distant goal alone or a do-your-best goal.

Proximal goals also give you more frequent feedback, which tells you sooner whether your method is working. If you are learning a skill over six months, a monthly checkpoint gives you six chances to change course instead of one.

The same idea appears in OKR practice. The What Matters OKR site describes "learning OKRs" for when learning something new is the most valuable outcome of a cycle, built around the question of what you most need to learn in the next 90 days.

Writing a good learning goal

• Make it specific: name a number of methods to try, questions to answer or experiments to run.
• Make it challenging enough to require real exploration.
• Set a time frame, such as two weeks per method.
• Record what you tried and what happened, so the learning is visible.
• End with a decision: which method you will keep, and what performance goal comes next.

Key takeaways

• A performance goal targets a result; a learning goal targets finding and mastering methods.
• Locke and Latham reported that on tasks that are complex for the person, a hard performance goal can hurt by triggering unsystematic, anxious strategy search.
• Specific, challenging learning goals outperformed do-your-best instructions on complex tasks in research they cited.
• Use performance goals when you know the method and learning goals when you don't; nearer-term checkpoints help with both.
• Research on combining the two was thin as of Locke and Latham's review, so treat any sequence as a sensible experiment.

Sources

• Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey, American Psychologist (September 2002)
• Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky and Max H. Bazerman, Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting, Harvard Business School Working Paper 09-083 (2009)
• Ryan Panchadsaram, What Matters, What Is an OKR? Definition and Examples