Managers set goals for their employees all the time. But when workers fall short of those goals, whose fault is it? Although it’s easy for managers to blame workers for not meeting goals, it’s just as likely that managers are to blame for not framing goals in a way that motivates workers.

There is nothing inherently wrong with setting goals. People do it all the time. For example, students who are determined to get into the best colleges set academic goals. Athletes who want to improve their game set practice goals. And employees who want to advance their careers and enhance their lifestyle set occupational goals.

Such goals have a high probability of being achieved. Why? Because each is an example of a personal goal. None are about selling more products, producing faster reports, billing more hours or meeting company-driven goals. When setting goals, managers often forget that most employees don’t work for the sake of working, they work to achieve something for themselves.

Think seriously about the absurdity of a sales manager meeting with a salesperson to discuss how many more shoes or copiers or life insurance policies the salesperson is expected to sell next year to meet the company’s goals. Do you really think the salesperson wakes up each morning thinking, “Today, I will be the shoe hero!”?

For more than 30 years, I’ve watched companies and their managers set goals for others as part of what they think is an effective performance management system. At the beginning of each year or quarter, almost everyone agrees with these preset goals. After all, agreeing provides job security and is what upper management wants to hear. However, most people will do what they believe they can do and, most importantly, what they want to do — not what their manager sets a goal for them to do.

Ultimately, the secret to effective goal setting is understanding the other person’s personal and business goals. For most people, the personal goals drive the business goals. As a manager, one of your most important functions is to leverage this concept.

For example, maybe you have a salesperson who has a personal goal of traveling to Europe to visit family members he hasn’t seen in several years. As his manager, you should be very interested in this. You should ask, “How can you use this job to help you achieve this personal goal?” In this case, he will probably need his job to make money to pay for the trip. Rather than establish quotas or sales goals for him, it would be much more effective to help him figure out how many sales per quarter (or month) he will need in order to generate the income to cover his current expenses and save for the trip.

Once he has his goal clarified and the steps he needs to take to achieve mapped out (X number of sales by Y date), his personal motivation should kick in. And in working to get something for himself, he’ll be working toward the company’s goals as well.

The key is to remember that people work hardest and are most successful when they are doing something that’s important to them. And when personal goals and business goals support each other, that’s a win-win situation for everyone.

Martin Freedland co-founded Berke Assessment and is president of Berke Consulting. He’s been helping organizations continually improve the way they recruit, hire, train, manage and motivate their people for more than three decades. He has personally worked with hundreds of companies throughout the United States to assist them in increasing profits and productivity through better people management practices. He can be reached at martin@berkegroup.com.