Pain-Free Performance Management: Setting Goals

I kicked off a series on making performance management pain-free with last week's post. This week, I'll focus on the critical first step of performance management - agreeing on goals. Just like agreeing on a specific final destination ensures everyone ends up in the same place, collaborating with your team members on to create mutually agreeable goals ensures that they end up where you are expecting them to end up, reduces stress levels and can actually make getting to your destination a lot more fun.

I always talk about "agreeing" on goals because getting your team members' buy-in is critical. When your team members are committed to their goals, they have a much greater chance of being successful, and your life is much easier. If you've ever tried to get somewhere with a toddler who had no interest in getting to the same place you did, you'll know how challenging it can be to get someone who is not committed to the same goal as you to stay on track.

When agreeing on goals, there are five criteria you can use to increase your team members' chances for success - create goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART).

Specific

My favorite story about setting specific goals (not!) comes from a colleague with whom I taught performance management programs in the UK. While reviewing his performance for the year prior, he asked his boss what he needed to do to get to the next rating level during the upcoming year. His boss' response? "Be better." Essentially, his boss told him "I'll know you're there when you get there."

Just think about starting a trip saying we'll know we're there when we get there. You would have no idea how long it would take, what resources you would need, what direction to go... I don't know about you, but I wouldn't start a trip that way!

Use the following questions to help you craft specific goals:

• What: What does this person need to achieve?

• Why: What makes this goal important?

• How: Where and with whom will it be achieved? What are the conditions and/or constraints under which it will be achieved? 

Measurable

Think about what you and your team member will see, hear and/or feel when the goal has been achieved and then look at how you can measure one or more of these. Choose tangible metrics so that anyone evaluating your team member can see whether s/he has succeeded.

Generally, you should agree on metrics in advance, but as people's roles evolve and they have goals they have never achieved before, you will likely need to be more flexible. Think about trips you have taken over and over versus a trip to a brand new destination. You know how long the former takes and how much fuel you need, so it is easy to measure success. For a brand new goal, you can estimate what it will take and what success will look like, but just like taking a trip to a brand new destination, these will only be estimates and may change once you are on the way.

Achievable

Your team member has to believe that the goal you agree on is achievable. You do this by balancing the level of challenge with the level of support that you and others provide. I'll talk in a future post about what to do if you and team member have a fundamental difference of opinion about whether a goal is achievable or not.

When the goal is one the person has achieved before, s/he knows it is achievable and needs less support and guidance from you. If you agree on a very challenging goal, especially one your team member has never achieved before, s/he will need much more support from you and others. Without that support, s/he may not believe it's achievable and may not even try to achieve it. How many of you would start climbing Mount Everest with no advance planning, special equipment or help from others?

Relevant

This is where you tie the achievement of the goal to what matters to your team member - his/her personal values and goals, the team's mission, and the organization's mission. Employees who know how their individual goals affect the overall success of the organization are more engaged and more likely to persist even when times get tough. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." 

Time-Bound

Lastly, set a deadline for when the goal needs to be achieved. These deadlines are what get most of us moving. Again, be realistic about goals your team member has never tackled before. Use your best judgment about what is reasonable but be open to adjusting deadlines. When it's a familiar goal, you can be much more concrete about deadlines.

Personally, I love the process of sitting down with a blank slate for the year and creating a vision of what I will have achieved by the end of the year. Maybe I'm just a goal-setting geek, but setting goals inspires me. I hope these guidelines will help you inspire your team by creating a clear vision of success for each of them.