Setting the Right Coaching Goals
Why coaches need to focus on process over outcome
Principle: Knowing What Underlies Success
This is a results-driven industry. From youth sport to professional, everyone is measured by outcomes.
So when it’s time to set goals, that’s where most coaches start. Pick the target. Find a framework to fit around it.
SMART. OKRs. Some variation on both.
Those tools have their place. But there’s a step that comes before any framework — and most coaches skip it.
Before you set the goals, understand what actually drives the result.
Not the result itself. The behaviours, habits, and standards that, done consistently, make the result more likely.
For most high-performance environments, the pillars look something like this:
Routines. Relationships. Practice quality. Mindset.
None of those are outcomes. All of them sit inside your control.
The goal-setting conversation changes completely when you start here — with what underlies success — rather than at the finish line.
Perspective: What Is In Our Control?
Most coaches can tell me their win target in under thirty seconds.
Very few can tell me with the same clarity what they’re genuinely trying to build — the standards, the culture, the daily behaviours — that would give them a credible shot at hitting it.
The obsession with outcomes is understandable. Wins are visible. They’re what a board cares about, the headline everyone reads.
But outcomes are downstream. You can’t control the opposition’s squad depth, the injury that hits in week four, or whether the referee has a poor day.
What you can control: how prepared your team is. How connected. How much your athletes trust each other when things get difficult.
The coaches who build sustained success aren’t the ones who want to win the most. They’re the ones who’ve identified the specific, controllable things that put them in a position to win.
That’s not semantics. That distinction is everything.
Story: Coach K and the Goals That Built a Dynasty
By the time Mike Krzyzewski retired from Duke, he had won more games than any coach in college basketball history.
The goals he set with his teams weren’t “win the championship.”
They were: be the best defensive team in the country. Build bonds strong enough that you compete for each other. Play as hard as you can for forty minutes.
Demanding goals. Specific, measurable, and entirely within the control of his players.
The championships were a consequence of hitting them — not the target itself.
What Coach K understood: process goals are not a soft alternative to outcome goals. They are more rigorous. Because they require you to identify — honestly — what actually produces the result, and hold yourself accountable to that every single day.
Championships followed. They almost always do when you get that foundation right.
Question
What are the two or three things inside your control and your team’s that, if done well consistently, would genuinely put you in a position to succeed?
Have you named them clearly? Do your athletes know what they are?
Closing Thought
The goal isn’t the goal. The goal is what builds toward it. Know those things. Focus there. Let the result be the consequence.
Until next week,
Caleb