Management by Objectives

First promoted as a concept by Peter Drucker in his 1954 book The Practice of Management, management by objectives is the process undertaken within an organization to create consensus around an organization's objectives and goals. Through this process, management and employees agree to the content of their work and understand what their respective roles and goals for this work are within the organization. This process underpins the foundational assumptions within the world of schools through the constructs of accountability, backward design, data-driven decision making, evidence-based assessment, learning organizations, laws such as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reform, school improvement plans, and the standards movement. This entry reviews how objectives are created; explains how this process of management by objectives translates into the world of education; and identifies some of the challenges, unique to educational institutions, when employing this process.

The objectives, or learning outcomes as they are referred to in education, are set either in a collaborative fashion between management and staff or are set by management and then communicated to staff. Within either process—be it collaborative or top-down, for the objectives to be meaningful they must be “SMART.” Smart goals were first popularized through Drucker's aforementioned work and transported to education through the work of Robert Eaker and Richard and Rebecca DuFour. Smart objectives must adhere to the following criteria: S = specific, M = measurable, A = achievable, R = relevant, and T = time specific. In recent iterations of these SMART principles, most notably developed in 2002 by Eaker and the DuFours in their response to the NCLB accountability measures, many educational institutions have adopted the notion of “SMARTER” objectives, with the E = extendable (to acknowledge the need for continuous improvement in the face of a changing reality) and R = recorded (to acknowledge the need for documentation of progress and accountability).

Any organization, whether in business or in education, constructs its management by objectives process through a three-step procedure. In 1975 C. P. Heaton, editor of Management by Objectives in Higher Education: Theory, Cases and Implementation described this method as one that involves (1) having the institution's constituents define its central purpose and goals, (2) requiring all personnel to mutually determine and agree upon their responsibility in achieving these goals, and (3) necessitating each individual to establish his or her own performance criteria. Peter Senge, in his 1990 book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, stresses that if the objectives are to be meaningful, there is a critical need for this process to be one that is collaborative and reflective of the culture of the school and its constituents.

In particular, Senge stresses that in order for these objectives to truly facilitate school improvement for all learners, the objectives must be created in a fashion that acknowledges the realities of what educators hope schools to accomplish. In order for schools to be true learning communities, the creation of such objectives or standards must foster the following attributes: (a) the creation of norms of continuous critical inquiry, (b) the promotion of norms of continuous improvement, (c) the facilitation of a widely shared vision for what all children can achieve, and (d) the empowering of all constituents to act in a manner that requires all to be involved in the decision-making process.

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