The Hidden Cost of 'Efficient' Goal-Setting

Slow down at the start. Your team will move faster later.

Photo by ThisisEngineering on Unsplash

It’s 8pm and the dinner delivery has just arrived. The CEO and CFO start to inhale the food without even looking at it, as they push forward on day 3 of drafting end-of-year goals for the business.

Meanwhile, the rest of the exec team is at home, wondering what is being cooked up, when the next round of “emergency” inputs are needed, and whether what gets shared resembles anything practical.

The CEO and CFO are wearing their hero capes with pride, thinking they are bearing the heavy lifting on behalf of the leadership team.

But really, they are simply trading the short-term facade of speed and efficiency for mid-term misalignment and rework, and long-term distrust and execution risk from disillusioned team members that were never brought along.

Sound familiar?

I’ve sat on both sides of the experience. And neither wins.

It took me years to reconcile how early narrow conversations that feel expeditious can actually create friction that is hard to undo and later slows down the business in ways that are truly painful.

But there is another way. It’s counterintuitive and has a delayed payoff, but it’s the only way to drive to the outcomes that really matter: an aligned team that feels real ownership over their goals and is ready to attack them with all their energy.

The Core Problem

What leaders who optimize for efficiency and accuracy often miss is the relational cost and the downstream execution cost of going too fast too early.

Moving fast and keeping things tight feels efficient in the moment—but creates wasted cycles later when people have to make sense of decisions they weren’t part of and don’t feel bought in. These are the costs that are harder to see when you’re rushing to get things started:

Four Specific Friction Points

1. Timeline and steps unclear — Finance and CEO work in a black box sounds efficient, but it’s really just an opaque black box. Without a clear path for how other people get brought in by function and by level, everyone either resigns themselves to the sidelines (slowly starting to check out) or their anxiety starts to grow as they wonder what’s really happening behind closed doors. You don’t need to have it mapped out day-by-day, but even a weekly or monthly view, along with key deliverables, will help everyone anticipate what they need to budget time for and what they can expect.

2. Decision authority and responsibility muddled — A leader who’s used to calling all the shots and having full authority may feel it’s not necessary to specify who decides what, who makes trades, and why. But when people don’t know what they control versus what gets funneled up the chain, they start to get stressed. Conversations also quickly become personal negotiations between leaders if they don’t have a reference point on how to engage. Relationships don’t just get tested; they can often be pushed into zones where they are hard to repair.

3. Communication blackouts — When executives are in the thick of planning, they often forget to message their teams. I know I did, and it’s understandable. The work is intense, and the stakes feel high. But information vacuums create uncertainty, which leads to fear. This builds distrust and can hurt team productivity as people start to guess or assume the worst might be happening.

4. Unstated hypotheses and assumptions — One of the biggest misses in goal setting is when leaders have preconceived notions and don’t share them upfront. It’s easy to blow past this step when you’ve been thinking about the details 24x7 for weeks. But when you unveil everything as a finished product, it feels like a black box, which is harder to understand and even harder to accept. People need time to digest, disagree, and contribute their best thinking. When you rush through these steps, you don’t get the benefit of their inputs, and you delay or hurt their ability to become fully bought into the path forward. It also means you didn’t pressure-test your foundation, soliciting input or data points that could augment the current strategy or even indicate a better path forward. That means you run a higher risk of pushing forward without a complete picture in addition to poor team buy-in.

The Shift: Transparency as the Solution

All of these issues can be addressed by committing to planning out your process and sharing it in advance. Specify the process, roles, responsibilities, and key themes upfront. Make assumptions and hypotheses visible so people can weigh in, prepare their input, and actually understand the thinking. This builds trust and gets better thinking from across the organization.

And don’t over-engineer your approach. The best ones are clear, simple, and acknowledge that you won’t get everything right. Committing to getting feedback, learning, and making adjustments is just one more way to build trust.

Last but not least, time-bound all of this work. It’s easy to get into rabbit holes and add more details, more decision-points, more, more, more. But your initial instincts that guided you to keep this process efficient and not overtake the core work of running the business were correct. You just needed to make sure you weren’t anchoring towards speed above all else.

Why Start Now (July)

It may feel early, but outlining the process now means that when you get to the real goal-setting work in Q4, you’ve already laid the groundwork. You’ve alerted your team, set expectations about what happens when, and created a path for inclusion. This requires more upfront work but generates far more leverage, speed, alignment, and execution later.

Your Turn

The goal-setting process doesn’t have to be a bureaucratic waste of time. It can be a moment to reinforce a culture of inclusion, transparency and of strong decision-making.

The payoff: People who actually want to execute because they were brought along. Better alignment. Faster execution. And teams that trust the process because they were part of building it.

What’s one thing you can start outlining now so that your team gets the benefit later as you set your goals for 2027? I’d love to hear about it in the Comments.

And if this post resonated, give it a like or even better, share it with a friend who needs the reminder to get started now.

May you lead without limits,