Stretch Goals: Any Recourse for Managers?
By Jennifer Gilbert

Lucent Technologies recently settled a lawsuit with its former head of North American sales, Nina Aversano, who had claimed she was forced out of the company in October 2000 after criticizing Lucent management for its overaggressive sales goals and for questionable accounting and forecasting practices.

The lawsuit and its ultimate resolution beg an important question: What recourse do sales managers have if they believe the sales goals being set by top management are overly aggressive and impossible to attain?

"None," says Ann Kiernan, an attorney in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who conducts preventative law training for managers in connection with the Fair Measures Corporation, a management training firm in Santa Cruz, California.

Of course, employees are expected to report illegal activities and are protected from employer retaliation under state whistleblower laws. Aversano filed suit under New Jersey's whistleblower law, for example. But if it's just a case where sales managers feel that sales goals are set too high, there's not much they can do-unless they have an individual contract of employment, Kiernan says. Otherwise, they are considered to be at-will employees, who can be fired at any time as long as the reason is not discriminatory or otherwise illegal.

That leaves sales managers with two choices when faced with unattainable goals: deal with it or quit. "In a perfect world I see sales reps and sales management realistically assessing what their optimistic and realistic goals should be for the year, and then sales management taking the same approach with top management," says Alan McAnally, president of Commonwealth Sales Consulting, in Andover, Massachusetts. "The outcome should be agreement and buy-in on attainable goals and everyone walks away happy. This rarely happens."

Sales managers, then, are obligated to follow top-down directives, McAnally says. But he suggests managers keep a few things in mind when faced with the pressure of sky-high goals.

Maybe the most important tool for managers in this fight is to find ways to support their beliefs with facts-present data related to geography, competition, past results, or market trends to document your views, and tell them what you believe to be the real consequences of forcing unattainable goals, such as defections and low morale. "Sales managers have little or no chance of changing top management's view of sales realities if they can't offer compelling reasons for their objections," McAnally says.