Your Manager Keeps Moving the Goalposts: Set Up to Fail

A manager is moving the goalposts when the target changes after you reach it, and the new target was never written down. There are two explanations worth taking seriously: an ordinary management habit that ends up setting people up to fail, and a deliberate squeeze. The record and the response are largely the same for both.

This post separates the two honestly, shows what the research says about the first one, and gives you a way to pin goals down. It cannot tell you what your manager intends. It can help you decide what to do about what they do.

What it looks like

Here is a (composite scenario), not a real person or company. Your manager says the monthly report must have an error rate under 2 percent. You get it to 1.8. In the next meeting, you hear, “What we really want now is zero defects, and it should be automated.” You work late to automate it. The next month, the report is fine but three days late: “Timeliness has always been our priority.”

From the inside, you feel a low hum of failure even though each thing you were asked to do got done. You start pre-empting every sentence your manager says. What it is: consistent with what the guide calls moving the goalposts.

Signs that it may be more than one honest change:

• The original target was spoken, not written, and no one will write it down.
• The change arrives right after you succeed.
• The new requirement is described as something that was "always" expected.
• Peers are not held to the new standard.
• A deadline that was calm last week is suddenly urgent, a move the guide calls [manufactured urgency](/guide/manufactured-urgency/).

Researchers who study bullying list related behaviors on their questionnaires, including “being given tasks with unreasonable or impossible targets or deadlines,” “excessive monitoring of your work” and “persistent criticism of your errors and mistakes.” Those items come from the Negative Acts Questionnaire-Revised, and are reproduced in a 2018 open-access paper by Makarem and colleagues. A questionnaire item is not a verdict about your manager. It shows that researchers treat these behaviors as worth measuring.

Why it happens: the set-up-to-fail syndrome

In 1998, Jean-François Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux described what they called the set-up-to-fail syndrome in the Harvard Business Review. Their article, based on their research with hundreds of executives, argues that it is frequently the bosses themselves, albeit unintentionally, who are responsible for an employee’s subpar performance.

The dynamic goes like this. A boss begins to worry that a subordinate’s performance is not satisfactory. The obvious response is to put more time and attention on that person. But the increased supervision has the reverse of the intended effect. The employee senses the boss’s lack of confidence and withdraws from the work and from the boss. The relationship spirals downward.

Two honest limits. This is a management-magazine article built on the authors’ research, not a controlled trial. And it is about supervision and expectations in general. It does not say that managers who shift goals are doing this. Fit it to your own situation with care. Our reading, not the authors’ claim, is that a manager who has quietly lost confidence in you may keep adding requirements, tighten checks and stop giving credit, without ever deciding to sabotage you. The authors’ advice to bosses is to accept that their own behavior could be part of the problem and to have a candid conversation. You cannot do that on their behalf, but you can break the loop from your side by asking for clarity and staying engaged instead of withdrawing.

The deliberate version, honestly

The guide’s entry on moving the goalposts describes a deliberate use: keeping someone striving and compliant, or blocking advancement without ever saying no. Related entries describe building a file for a later exit, which the guide calls manufacturing the record. A structural cousin is the glass cliff, where a leadership role is handed over during a crisis in a way that makes failure likely.

You cannot prove motive from outside, and you do not have to. Use evidence instead:

• Peers: are they held to the same moving standard, or only you?
• Paper: is the manager willing to write the criteria down, or do they resist every time?
• Reasons: does the explanation change each cycle while the outcome stays the same?
• Resources: do you have the time, tools and authority to meet the new requirement?
• File: are formal warnings starting to appear about issues never raised before?

If several of these point the same way, that is consistent with a deliberate pattern, though never proof of it. The research scale Bennett Tepper used in his 2000 abusive supervision study includes “breaks promises he/she makes,” “doesn’t give me credit for jobs requiring a lot of effort” and “blames me to save himself/herself embarrassment,” as reproduced in a 2023 paper by Tziner and colleagues. In that study, employees who saw their supervisors as more abusive were more likely to quit, and those who stayed reported lower satisfaction and more psychological distress. Being worn down by this is an expected result, not a personal failing.

How to pin a goal down in writing

You do not need your manager’s permission to write a goal down. You need only their reply.

• After the conversation, send: "To make sure I am working toward the right thing, success by [date] means [specific result], measured by [how]. Is that right?"
• Ask who decides that it is done, and what follows if it is met, such as a rating, a raise or a role.
• If the goal changes, reply the same day: "This differs from what we agreed on [date]. Can we confirm the updated version?"
• Keep your own dated log: the date, the goal as stated, who said it, what changed, and the result you delivered. The guide's [build the record yourself](/guide/build-the-record-yourself-make-your-work-undeniable/) entry shows how to make your results visible.

Keep the tone neutral and friendly. It is a request for clarity, not a challenge. If your manager will not confirm anything, in writing or verbally, you have learned something useful about how the goal will be judged.

The scripts in what to say when gaslit at work can help if the original target gets denied altogether. If you notice yourself holding back so the bar stops rising, the guide describes that instinct in its sandbagging entry.

When it is the exit stage

Sometimes the loop is not about the work at all. Signs that it may be a way out of the job include several cycles with no goal ever accepted as met, responsibilities removed or replaced with trivial ones, and formal warnings that suddenly cite the moving standards. Those changes are worth reading alongside being managed out.

Set your own limit in advance, in a calm week: how many more cycles, and by what date, you will accept before treating the goal as unreachable by design. Then talk to someone outside the team. The guide’s know the HR reality and when to exit and constructive dismissal entries describe the options, and this site cannot give legal advice.

If this has been going on for months, the exhaustion you feel is a reasonable reaction to an unwinnable game. You did not fail. Whether it is a habit or a tactic, you are allowed to ask for a clear target, and you are allowed to leave when you do not get one.

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