Ask them one at a time, write the answers down, and compare the sheets afterwards. A goal announced once and never asked back is a goal whose arrival was never checked, and silence in the room where it was announced is not agreement. Locke and Latham, summarizing 35 years of goal-setting research in the American Psychologist in 2002, are precise about which half of this the owner controls: an assigned goal is as effective as one set jointly provided that the purpose or rationale for the goal is given, while a goal assigned tersely, without explanation, leads to performance that is significantly lower than for a participatively set goal.
The test costs an afternoon and produces a number instead of an impression. Four people, four separate conversations, the same question in the same words, and the answers written down before anyone hears anyone else’s. What comes back measures distance, not morale, and it is the only reading that says whether written mission, vision and values and a goal with a number and a deadline ever left the room they were drafted in.
What the test is, exactly
Same question, same words, one person at a time, in writing. Ask what the farm is trying to reach in the next five years and by when, and record the answer as it was said rather than as it was meant. Do it separately, because a second person in the room converts the test into a rehearsal, and the first confident answer becomes everyone’s answer.
Count distinct answers and not correct ones. Two sheets count as one version only when the destination and the deadline both match: same destination with a different year is two versions, and so is the same year with a different destination, because the question asked for both halves. Four people producing four versions is a reading of four, and it stays a reading of four even when every version is defensible on its own.
The owner’s version is one of the four and carries no privilege in the count, since the point of the exercise is the spread and not the verdict. What the count measures is the declared standard against what actually reached the field, which is why it belongs to the planning axis even though nothing about it is planning.
Why the answers differ when nobody ever disagreed
Because most of what a farm family agrees on was never said out loud. Kaplan and colleagues ran 20 semi-structured interviews with adult members of nine small Pennsylvania farm families in 2003 and 2004, sometimes with more than one relative in the same interview, so the 20 counts interviews and not people. The families were selected for annual sales between $100,000 and $249,000 in US dollars, respondents ranged in age from 22 to 80, and the authors reported in the Journal of Extension that many of them could be described as passive communicators, who placed more emphasis on what was implicitly understood rather than explicitly communicated.
One father in the study put the mechanism in a single line: I don’t know if my grandfather ever expected it to be sold but it was kind of a nonverbal agreement between my dad and me (that we would get the farm out of debt and keep it in the family). The parenthesis is where the content of the agreement lives, and it is the half that never got said. A nonverbal agreement holds perfectly until two people have to act on it in different fields on the same morning. That is a sample of nine families and not a population estimate, and the authors say so.
What the owner owes the goal, and it is not a vote
The reason it was chosen, stated in words the person executing it can repeat. The two findings Locke and Latham carry here are not their own measurements.
Latham and colleagues, in 1994, found that with goal difficulty held constant, participation in goal setting had no beneficial effect on performance, and Wagner and Gooding, pooling studies in 1987, found the gain from letting people take part in the decision small enough that the review treats it as close to nothing, once performance was judged by something checkable rather than by what people said about themselves. Neither study was run on a farm, and the practical translation is blunt: taking the crew’s temperature on which number to hold buys about as much as not asking.
Both reach the reader through the 2002 review, which is where to check them. What did work was participation of a different kind: people who participated with others in formulating task strategies performed significantly better and had higher self-efficacy than those who did not participate in formulating strategies.
The practical reading is unpopular in both directions. Consulting the team on which number to hold buys close to nothing, and announcing the number without its reason costs measurably. The meeting worth holding is about how the goal gets reached, not about whether it is the right goal, and that is the meeting most farms skip in favor of the other one.
Locke and Latham add one more thing that costs nothing and survives the same test, that making a public commitment to the goal enhances commitment, presumably because it puts the person’s own integrity behind it. Said to the group, written where the group can see it, and repeated when the group is asked again.
Who was never asked in the first place
Usually everyone except one person. A systematic review published in Heliyon in 2023, pulling together 24 studies published between 2013 and 2022, describes a monopolization of farm decisions by one decision-maker as a common approach, while noting that some tactical and strategic decisions are shared or delegated to farm staff, family members and technical advisors.
Monopolized decisions and delegated execution are the combination that makes this test necessary. One person holds the whole answer and several people hold pieces of the work, so the distance between them is never visible from inside either position. The owner sees a goal that was communicated. The tractor operator sees an instruction that arrived without its reason, which is exactly the terse assignment the goal-setting evidence prices at a performance penalty. An instruction stripped of its reason and a task nobody was ever taught look identical from the owner’s chair, and telling the two apart is what a written training plan is for.
Where the answers get compared
At a meeting that has a type, a place and an agenda. Jessica Groskopf, writing for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Agricultural Profitability, separates two kinds and puts a different cadence on each.
| Business meeting | Operational meeting | |
|---|---|---|
| Who is in it | Primary decision makers, owners or managers | Management and employees together |
| What it settles | Major management decisions | Current happenings and minor issues |
| How often | Monthly or quarterly | Weekly, or every two to three days |
Two of her instructions are the ones that decide whether the meeting produces a record. The location moves out of the house, because the kitchen table is for family events and a neutral place like the office or the shop keeps the two conversations apart. And each agenda item is marked in advance for what it is, if an item is only for information, for discussion or if a decision is going to be made now or at a later meeting, which is the field that stops a farm from mistaking an announcement for a decision.
Afterwards the notes go out with the tasks and their deadlines highlighted. That same meeting is where a second reading belongs, asking the neighbors and buyers, because what neighbors, buyers and the crew say about the farm arrives as loose talk until somebody gives it an agenda item with a type.
What the meeting has to clarify, and when not to call it
Roles, responsibilities and expectations, and never on a holiday. Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture publishes a ten-item list of communication tips for farm businesses, and the last item is a scheduling rule that sounds trivial and is not: do NOT schedule farm family meetings on holidays. Item five asks the farm to discuss and clarify roles, responsibilities and expectations, and Purdue credits that one to Aadron Rausch, in The Farm’s Legacy, page 28, rather than printing it as its own.
Roles and expectations are the material the four answers are made of. Somebody who cannot say which part of the goal is theirs will hand back a version of the goal shaped by the part they assumed was theirs, and that assumption is invisible until the sheets are compared. Clarifying it is the correction, not the meeting. Where the clarification gets written down so it outlives the conversation is the farm org chart, one box per person with a sheet of tasks under it.
What gets recorded when the answers come back different
The gap itself, with a person and a date attached to closing it. Those two fields already exist wherever the farm turned a strategy into a goal with a number and a deadline, because the extension guidance on that conversion ends on exactly them, a named owner per step and a completion date. This test borrows the pair rather than inventing one. The pair needs a third field before it is worth taking twice, and a scheduled review date supplies it: without one the count gets taken once, and a single count is a photograph rather than a reading.
The move that makes this a check rather than a plan is to read those two fields from the other end. Take each named person and ask them which goal their step serves. Compare the answer against the goal the step was written under, and the difference between the two is the variance, measurable in versions rather than in dollars. A step whose owner cannot name the goal behind it is being executed on trust, and it will be executed in the direction that person assumed. The most extreme version of the same question is who takes over if the owner cannot decide tomorrow, which is what a written succession plan answers and nothing else does.
Where to start
Pick four people, including at least one who is not family, and give yourself one afternoon, about two hours split across the four separate conversations and the count afterward.
Alignment gets handled as a communication problem, and this check is not one. The control function, in the four steps management textbooks consolidate out of Fayol and which the four functions of management sets out with its sources, is to establish the standard, measure actual performance, compare the two and identify the variance, then act to correct. Asking each person separately what the goal is runs the second and third of those steps against a standard the farm already declared. That is why the afternoon returns a count rather than a feeling, and why a farm that buys one more meeting for the problem ends up where it started.
A goal that arrived and a goal that was sent are two different states of the same sentence, and only one of them can be read off a sheet of paper. So the question worth sitting with is not whether the team knows the goal. It is what you would have to change if the four sheets came back with four different years on them.