Is it Goal Time?
I know it’s that time of year where a lot of people are going through and doing the performance eval (or whatever your company calls it) process. There is a debate of the value of these processes and I personally believe that you get out what you put in. What I valued most, regardless of the company, is collaborating on goals. Here are some ideas on how leaders or managers can approach goal setting for themselves and their individual team members.
The Most Important Parts of Goal Setting
To a certain extent, I think the actual final goal you put into a performance system is way less important than the journey you go through agreeing on the goal and then more importantly the effort you put in to mapping out the plan to achieve the goal. I know we all have worthwhile goals but I’m a believer that the journey to the goal is almost always as important or even more important than achieving the goal itself. Why - because the journey is about change and effort and helps you become something you maybe weren’t before.
So the point of collaborating on goals are probably in this order:
Collaboration: I love the process of collaborating with my team on goals, regardless of the performance eval cycle. Part of their 1x1’s were always centered on their goals and how they were progressing towards them. This processes is also good to build trust and confidence between both parties.
Current state understanding: anytime you talk about a goal or goals, it’s an opportunity to make sure you are on the same page as to what the current state is. You can’t really set goals and build the plans to meet them unless you understand where you are today and are on the same page.
Agreement on what is going well: this is not one of my strengths but you should absolutely start off with what is going well. That could be goals completed or the progress towards existing goals, a review of key metrics or other measurements, etc.
Agreement on opportunities: this one is great because if you have built up trust through collaboration, then this part of the discussion allows you to talk about opportunities to improvement (for both of you) regardless of whether the items make it to the formal performance plan or not. I almost always have smaller items that don’t need to be part of the formal process but regularly come up during our partnerships.
Roles action plans and follow up cadence: this is the heart of the action plan and should drive your interactions for however long the timeframe needs to be. This is the ongoing collaboration between you. Make sure each parties knows what they are responsible for, how you will measure success and how you will follow up and execute.
Agreement on what you will partner on for the next time frame - this is the actual goal itself with agreement on however you are going to measure it.
Goals - How Many
I’m a fan of going as simple as possible here. If your company has a minimum number of goals, then you need to meet that. If you get to decided then I would recommend no more than 5 goals. The shorter the time frame, the few the number of goals I would put in place. I personally like 4-5 annual goals with the flexibility to modify and update along the way.
Goals - What Kinds
Again - simplicity is best. You can see an example below.
1-3 Business Goals: these goals should align with team/department/corporate objectives and generally 1 of them should be very specific to the individual.
1 Personal Development Goal: this should be something that the individual wants or needs to work on to improve their performance, help them achieve their longer term goals or is something they are personally interested in. I like this to be a skill or behavior that they want to improve on.
1 Education Goal: the greater the responsibility or importance of the position the individual holds, the more important this one is. This could center around professional or formal education, personal research or anything like that.
If I Were Working with Me on My Goals
Business:
Improve my efficiency and quality of podcast production (Leaders Lift)
Iterate on my operational processes to improve efficiency
Continue to refine products and services
Personal Development
Improve my content development skills
Education
Identify the key areas where I need to learn more to improve my business
Podcast production
Small business management
Marketing
Wrap Up
We could probably go on for a while on this topic. But in the spirit of simplicity and since I know you are super busy, let’s just stop there. Think about this the next time you work on your own goals for the year or are working with your teammates.