The hum of the projector fan was the only sound in the room for a full twelve seconds. Twelve seconds of 22 people holding their breath, waiting for the punchline. The Vice President, a man whose teeth were impossibly white, beamed from the front of the conference room, arms spread wide as if embracing a stadium.

He paused, letting the silence hang, mistaking the vacuum of shock for a wave of profound contemplation. “I can feel the excitement,” he said, his voice echoing slightly in the morgue-like atmosphere. It wasn’t excitement. It was the collective, internal sound of 22 spirits plummeting down a deep, dark well. Every single person in that room, from the junior analyst to the senior director, knew it was impossible. Not difficult. Not challenging. Impossible. The kind of impossible that makes a mockery of effort.

We talk about stretch goals as if they are some enlightened management technique, a clever psychological trick to coax greatness out of ordinary teams. We use phrases like “shoot for the moon” and conveniently forget the part where most rockets explode on the launchpad. The theory is beautiful: by setting a target just beyond the team’s perceived capabilities, you inspire them to innovate, to push harder, to unlock latent potential. But that theory rests on one fragile, paper-thin assumption: that the goal is, on some level, believable.

The Quiet Act of Organizational Sabotage

When a leader stands up and announces a target that is mathematically, logistically, and physically absurd, they aren’t inspiring anyone. They are committing a quiet act of organizational sabotage. They are telling their team, in no uncertain terms, that they are disconnected from reality. They are guaranteeing a sense of failure before a single new task is even started. This isn’t a stretch; it’s a snap.

I once knew a man, Ivan F., who worked as a hazmat disposal coordinator. It’s a job with very little glamour and a great deal of consequence. His company, in a fit of corporate wellness-speak, launched a new initiative: “Target Zero.” Zero spills, zero incidents, zero errors. The posters were everywhere. It sounded noble. It sounded perfect. To Ivan, it sounded like a declaration of war on physics. He dealt with corrosive, volatile, and unpredictable materials. His entire job was managing chaos, not pretending it could be eliminated with a slogan. He knew that a perfect record wasn’t a sign of excellence; it was a sign that someone was hiding the truth. And so, the small, unavoidable drips and minor breaches that were once documented and learned from suddenly went underground. People stopped reporting them. Why invite scrutiny for failing to achieve the impossible? The company got its perfect record for 12 months, right up until a container, weakened by a series of unreported minor corrosions, failed catastrophically. The cost of that one “unforeseeable” event was 232 times the cost of the minor incidents they had successfully swept under the rug.

That’s the poison of the unrealistic goal.

It doesn’t create high performance. It creates a culture of cynicism and fear, where people learn that the system is a game to be survived, not a mission to be believed in. The team in that conference room wouldn’t work twice as hard. They would work with a quiet, simmering resentment, knowing that no matter what they did, the end-of-quarter meeting would be a performance review of their inevitable failure.

A Personal Lesson: Target vs. Fantasy

It’s a strange thing, this impulse to demand the impossible. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I’d never done it. Years ago, managing a tiny team of two, I declared we’d increase our output by 332%. It was a number I pulled from thin air because it sounded impressive. I gave a passionate speech. I made spreadsheets. I was that VP with the white teeth, just on a much smaller scale. I remember the look on my team members’ faces. It wasn’t inspiration; it was a kind of weary pity. They knew. I, in my hubris, did not.

It was my first, sharp lesson in the difference between a target and a fantasy. Just this morning, I parallel parked my ridiculous boat of a car perfectly on the first try. The feeling of nailing a precise, difficult, but achievable goal was a thousand times more satisfying than failing at an imaginary one.

This corporate obsession with astronomical numbers reveals a deep misunderstanding of human motivation. The highest-performing teams I’ve ever seen weren’t chasing fantasy numbers. They were obsessed with tangible progress. They celebrated the brutal, brilliant, hard-won 12% gain. They respected a goal that respected their intelligence and acknowledged the constraints of reality.

The Psychological Toll and the Search for Peace

When you’re constantly living under the weight of this manufactured failure, the psychological toll is immense. The institutional burnout isn’t just a risk; it’s the intended outcome. People don’t just disengage from their work; they actively seek ways to decompress from a pressure cooker that has no release valve. Some turn to meditation, others to intense exercise. And an increasingly significant number, especially in places where it’s accessible, look into options like THC gummies UK just to persuade their nervous system to stand down for a few hours. When the workplace becomes a source of chronic, unresolvable stress, people will find an off-ramp, whether it’s sanctioned by HR or not. You can’t declare a state of permanent, unwinnable emergency and then act surprised when people seek out their own peace treaties.

So what’s the alternative? It’s not to abandon ambition. Ambition is critical. The alternative is the tethered goal. The goal that is ambitious and credible. Let’s call it an A.C.E. goal: Ambitious, Credible, and Executable. Instead of doubling revenue in a month, what about a 22% increase in a quarter? That number is terrifying. It’s difficult. It might even feel, at first, like it’s just out of reach. But nobody in the room thinks it’s a joke. It’s a goal that invites innovation and hard work, rather than despair. It asks the team, “How could we, conceivably, do this?” instead of stating, “Here is a fantasy I demand you manifest.”

The VP in my story should have asked a question instead of making a declaration. He should have presented the data, outlined the challenge, and asked, “The board wants a moonshot. Before we commit to anything, I need to know from you: what’s the most ambitious version of success that we can actually build a credible plan around?” That simple shift changes everything. It turns the team from passive recipients of an impossible edict into active participants in defining a formidable challenge. It replaces the guarantee of failure with the possibility of a spectacular, earned victory.

Leadership: Transformer, Not Conduit

It’s easy to criticize this from the outside, I know. Leaders are under immense pressure to deliver exponential results. Sometimes these ridiculous goals are just them passing along the pressure they’re receiving from 2,000 miles away. But leadership isn’t about being a simple conduit for pressure. It’s about being a transformer. It’s about converting the raw, high-voltage demands from above into a current that can actually power the machine without melting all the wiring.

The next time a leader presents a goal that feels like a fantasy, the real question isn’t whether the team will hit it. The real question is whether that leader has just revealed they don’t understand the crucial difference between an inspirational target and a thinly veiled insult.