When You're Asked to Meet Impossible Goals

Harvard Business Review

07-05-2025

John, the CRO of a private equity-backed tech company, faced mounting pressure to meet sky-high sales targets tied to an acquisition. He knew the goals he was given were unachievable. Saying yes risked burnout and failure; saying no risked his credibility.
It wasn't just the sales targets. His company was undergoing multiple changes at once: shifting to a SaaS model, rolling out a new CRM, restructuring teams, and enforcing a return-to-office mandate.
John's dilemma is now common. Change is no longer an occasional disruption but a constant. Employees are now experiencing five times more planned change initiatives than they did just a decade ago. Add unrealistic goals, and the result is predictable: disengagement, burnout, and a sharp decline in execution—in short, widespread change fatigue.
As executive coaches, we've consistently seen that leaders who take on impossible goals don't do it because they lack judgment—they do it because pushing back feels risky to them. Pressure from the top, a culture of 'yes,' and intense market competition make committing the only safe choice. Many leaders also fall into the well-known traps of optimism bias, perfectionism, or a need to prove their worth, all of which skew their decision-making ability.
The real leadership skill is not figuring out how to do it all; it's knowing when and how to push back. That's where strategic refusal comes in. Strategic refusal is a structured method to force prioritization and push back on unrealistic demands that jeopardize team productivity, morale, or well-being. The idea isn't to avoid responsibility, but rather to protect the team, maintain long-term performance, and ensure sustainable outcomes—all while safeguarding your reputation.
Strategic refusal has two main components: a matrix to help you determine when to act and a framework to guide you on how to act.
The Strategic Refusal Matrix
Prioritizing work under competing demands can be difficult, especially when pushing back feels risky. The strategic refusal matrix provides a structured way to assess whether to commit to, renegotiate, deprioritize, or decline a request based on both strategic importance (i.e., how critical is this initiative to long-term business success?) and execution feasibility (i.e., do we have the capacity, resources, and timeline to execute effectively?).
Low Strategic Importance + Low Feasibility → Decline & Justify: 'This initiative is unlikely to drive meaningful results, and we don't have the capacity to execute it effectively. Let's focus our resources on higher-priority efforts.'
High Strategic Importance + Low Feasibility → Renegotiate: 'This initiative is critical, but we don't currently have the resources to execute it well. Can we adjust the timeline or allocate additional support?'
Low Strategic Importance + High Feasibility → Deprioritize: 'While we could execute this, it would divert focus from higher-value work. Let's pause this initiative and revisit it later.'
High Strategic Importance + High Feasibility → Commit & Focus: 'This is both critical and feasible. Let's allocate the right resources and move forward.'
The Strategic Refusal Framework
Once the strategic refusal matrix has helped you determine that a request should be declined, renegotiated, or deprioritized, the next step is execution. This is where we've seen leaders get stuck because they don't want to be perceived as difficult, uncommitted, or defiant. The four steps below provide a tactical approach and long-term plan for pushing back in a way that's constructive and strategic, protecting your team from change fatigue and yourself from reputational damage.
1. Reframe saying no.
Because a message's framing significantly influences how it's received, reframing how you present your refusal will shape whether it's seen as an obstacle or a demonstration of strong judgment. Framing refusal as a leadership decision focused on impact shifts the conversation toward having to make a choice.
Reframe refusal as prioritization. Simply saying 'This initiative will overwhelm our team and lead to missed deadlines' can be interpreted as negativity. Connect your decision to the company's strategic priorities. For example:
'We can take this on, but only if we pause X.'
'I want us to succeed—let's focus on X and Y and do them well.'
Reframe the conversation from tasks to impact. Rather than discussing what can't be done, frame the conversation around what's most valuable to achieve. For example:
'If we take on this new initiative, we won't be able to execute some of our critical projects on time. To ensure we deliver on the new initiative, we would need to deprioritize X or Y. What's more important from your perspective?'
Key Insight: Loss aversion means people prefer avoiding losses over gaining rewards. Therefore, reframing a refusal as avoiding negative business consequences (like missed objectives, resource dilution, and execution failure) is often more persuasive than focusing on personal capacity limits.
2. Show the cost of saying yes.
Senior leaders often make decisions without fully grasping operational constraints, resources, and risks, and can fall into planning bias, causing them to assume best-case scenarios and underestimate challenges. Prioritization is easier when the cost of saying yes is visible to them.
Expose leadership to operational realities. Bringing senior leaders into execution discussions forces them to confront the reality of feasibility. You could suggest:
'Let's have leadership sit down with the teams who would execute this to get a clear sense of timeline, risks, and capacity.'
'Before we approve this, let's hear from the teams executing it to confirm feasibility.'
Expose the trade-offs. Help executives weigh consequences by framing decisions around priorities. Guide them to make informed choices by laying out the consequences and what will be delayed, deprioritized, or compromised. This reframes your refusal as responsible leadership. You can say:
'We can hit that number, but we'll need to cut back on product development—are we okay with that?'
'Are we willing to accept these execution risks to achieve this new goal?'
Present feasible alternatives. Offering what's possible instead of rejecting what's not keeps you in solution mode, reinforcing your credibility while making you appear less resistant. For example, you might say:
'Given our core priorities, I know my team won't be able to launch the new business line in six months. But we could complete the necessary research and draft a product design to set us up for launch in the new year.'
'Instead of a 40% increase now, what if we commit to 25% but make it sustainable?'
Key Insight: Planning bias is a product of System 1 thinking, which is fast, confident, and overly optimistic. Slowing decisions down surfaces trade-offs and sharpens strategic focus.
3. Build a culture of strategic refusal.
Prioritization should be a built-in process, not an individual struggle.
The most effective organizations don't leave tough decisions to individuals alone; they build a decision-making process that embeds discernment—normalizing questioning goals and evaluating change initiatives before committing—into their culture. By systematizing the process, you ensure that decisions are made deliberately and strategically and are backed by solid data and rationale.
Implement red team reviews. Before approving any major initiative, convene a cross-functional team to stress-test its feasibility and evaluate its potential impact. One CEO we worked with adopted this approach and ultimately narrowed their annual priorities from eight to three, driving significantly better execution. This prevented leaders from overcommitting and helped the company focus on high-impact initiatives.
Conduct pre-mortems. Before committing to an initiative, conduct a session to predict potential failure points. Ask: 'If this initiative fails in six months, why did it fail?' This forces teams to surface risks and capacity constraints up front, which helps them create more realistic plans.
Establish kill criteria. For every major initiative, establish predefined signals that would trigger a pause or stop. This allows you to manage expectations up front and reduce sunk-cost bias if conditions change.
Key Insight: Decision fatigue leads to poor prioritization. Systematizing refusal reduces mental overload and ensures consistent execution quality.
4. Model strategic refusal.
The strongest leaders aren't the ones who take on the most; they're the ones who prioritize the best. The most effective CEOs and executives we've worked with actively want their teams to speak up when goals are unrealistic instead of ultimately underdelivering. As one CEO put it, 'I'm always going to have more ideas, but I need my leaders to tell me what's possible, what's not, and why.' Blind agreement followed by missed delivery is the worst outcome.
Frame pushback in business terms. Frame your refusal around impact, risk, or trade-offs. Do not position your refusal as a personal bandwith issue. Executives tend to respond best when the conversation is focused on outcomes, customer experience, or business risks. For example, you could say:
'If we focus on solving these three core problems, we'll make the biggest impact for customers and the bottom line. If we spread ourselves too thin, we risk underdelivering across the board.'
Support your case with data, not emotions. A leader in a healthcare organization we worked with created a formal resource-planning process to quantify what each new initiative would require. This transparency transformed prioritization discussions, shifting them from subjective debates to fact-based decisions. The result? Normalizing prioritization in public and therefore setting the tone for their organization.
Key Insight: Leaders with a strong decision-making process gain credibility, whereas those who agree blindly erode trust when they underdeliver.
. . .
Saying yes to everything doesn't strengthen your leadership—it overloads it. Being able to say no when needed is what separates strong leaders from struggling ones. Leaders who push back strategically aren't seen as difficult but as credible decision-makers, trusted advisors, and the ones who drive sustainable results. They don't just work hard; they prioritize relentlessly.