**Conducting a Successful Goal-Setting Discussion: A Manager\'s
Checklist**\
*By Lynn Summers, PhD*

  -----------------------------------------------------------------------

  ![](media/image1.png){width="1.0416666666666666e-2in"
  height="1.0416666666666666e-2in"}

  -----------------------------------------------------------------------

  -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- --
     You\'ve shared with your employees the information they need to     
     draft their goals. Now it\'s time to meet with them one-on-one,     
     take a look at what they\'ve drafted, and help them finalize their  
     goals. But don\'t expect a productive meeting if you waltz into the 
     session planning to just \"walk through\" the draft goals and see   
     what issues come up. Important discussions always benefit from      
     structure. And there are, predictably, certain things to look for.  
     We have compiled a ten-point checklist you can use to keep this     
     meeting on track and help your employees assure their goals are     
     properly aligned, coordinated, calibrated, focused, and supported.  

  -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- --

  -----------------------------------------------------------------------

  ![](media/image1.png){width="1.0416666666666666e-2in"
  height="1.0416666666666666e-2in"}

  -----------------------------------------------------------------------

You\'ve done the preparatory work - set your own goals, assuring their
alignment to your manager\'s goals and to your company\'s higher-level
goals, and shared information with your direct reports so that they can
draft their goals for the upcoming performance period. The task now is
to work with your employees to ensure they have meaningful goals - that
is, goals that will do a good job of guiding their work efforts to
everyone\'s mutual benefit (the company\'s, most certainly, included).

These sessions with your employees are important. Performance management
(PM) is a structured process, designed to deliver organizationally
relevant results, and it is a process that can be facilitated by
technology. But, no matter how good the technology is, the essence of PM
is in the interaction between manager and employee. And one of these
interactions is the goal-setting discussion in which you and your
employee arrive at mutually agreed upon goals, which the employee will
be held accountable for achieving.

In a group of employees, each probably has a slightly different (or,
sometimes, dramatically different) way of setting goals. But it\'s
important to have some standardization, a common structure and method,
and comparable ways of measuring performance and gauging achievement of
goals. This helps make things fair and equitable. You want to avoid
having employees set goals that are either too difficult or too easy.
And you want to minimize gaming of the system.

### A Checklist

As you review your employee\'s draft goals with him or her, are there
some criteria against which you can compare the drafts? Are there
specific questions to ask to facilitate constructive discussion of the
goals? The following questions may be helpful. Try it out as a
checklist. Use it to guide your discussion.

### 1. Are the goals relevant?

This question is intended to cut to the heart of the matter. If your
employee were to achieve this goal, would it make any difference to you
(the manager) and to the organization? Since your employees\' goals will
demand their attention, consume their energy, and tap their talent for
the next three to twelve months, they ought to be goals whose
achievement will make a difference.

The best way to determine relevance is to \"look up.\" Look up to see if
the goal in question supports any of your own goals. Look up to see if
it aligns, ultimately, to any of the higher-level goals of the company
and to the company\'s strategy. Is it consistent with the company\'s
vision and values? This is the discipline of alignment. Your employees,
of course, should have drafted their goals in full knowledge of your
goals, so that alignment would be assured. If a goal isn\'t relevant,
eliminate it or rethink it.

### 2. Is the scope of the goals neither too grand nor too small?

Goals are useful when they provide practical guidance. If your employee
has a goal with a 5-year timeframe and a scope broader than his or her
(or even your) job, it loses its ability to guide the person\'s
performance in the short run. For example, \"Achieve division
profitability in 5 years\" would be a good higher-level goal or
strategic objective, but too grand in scope for an individual working on
a 12-month timeframe. Such goals need to be trimmed down to size.

Goals do take on a different complexion as they move from the executive
suite to the rank and file. At the top, goals - by definition - will be
more strategic. At middle levels of the organization, goals are more
tactical and are purposefully set to support the more strategic goals.
At lower levels, goals are operational and consist of carrying out the
actions and producing the results necessary to support the tactical
goals. So it is natural for an executive\'s goals to be considerably
broader in scope than the goals of an employee further down the
hierarchy.

More common than overly grand goals is the tendency to set goals that
look like items on a to-do list, such as \"Submit expense reports on
time,\" \"Complete report by next Tuesday,\" or \"Fill vacancy in
production department by next Friday.\" These are not really goals but
tasks. Setting goals that are at the task level and are short in
duration invites micromanagement. If your employees set goals of this
limited scope, you will soon be so preoccupied with the bark of the
trees that you\'ll forget there is a forest.

These \"goalettes\" need to be kicked up a notch. Filling a specific
vacancy may be part of a larger goal concerning managing and maintaining
a quality staff, and filling vacancies might be a legitimate measure of
that goal. If you think a goal is too task-like, you can begin to figure
out how to kick it up a notch by asking your employee: Why are we doing
this? What value is being added?

### 3. Are there neither too few nor too many goals?

There is no magic \"right\" number of goals, but we often hear something
in the range of three to seven goals as an ideal capacity. Too many
goals and it is unlikely a person could address all of them with any
attention to quality. If your employee has proposed too many goals to be
humanly tackled, rank them in order of priority and eliminate the less
important ones. If they all seem important, determine which goals could
be assigned to someone else.

Too few goals? Has your employee included the key responsibilities of
his or her position? If not, it\'s vitally important to do so. Key
responsibilities should be the starting point for setting goals.
Sometimes, however, having only a couple goals makes sense, given the
nature of the job. We have known software engineers who had two goals:
\"Write code\" and \"Fix bugs.\" And those two were all they needed.

Having too many or too few goals might also be due to goals being either
too fine-grained or too coarse-grained in scope. For example, if goals
are set on microscopic aspects of the work (e.g., tasks), there will
likely be a bunch of them. (See the item above on \"scope\" for more on
this.)

### 4. Are your goals coordinated with other people\'s goals?

It can be wasteful of resources, talent, and energy to have people
working on goals that conflict with one another, or to have them working
on similar or overlapping goals. As you look over your employee\'s draft
goals, are there potential conflicts with other employees\' goals? Could
any of these goals overlap with others\' goals? If you suspect conflict
or duplication, check it out. You might want to bring the other
employees with similar goals, or their managers, together to discuss and
resolve the issues. Work out who is going to be accountable for what
results so that resources are best used and collaboration is emphasized.

Coordination is especially needed when work on one goal is dependent
upon other employees\' efforts on their goals. In fact, in most
organizations there are probably more dependencies to be worked out than
conflicts or overlaps to be resolved. When dependencies exist, you may
need to build in coordination as one of the goal\'s measures of
successful performance.

### 5. Are the goals results-based and verifiable?

Do the goals measure value-added results or output, not just activities?
Goals should not be activities to be completed. They should embody
desirable outcomes or results. There is a tendency, especially among
first-time goal setters, to write goals that look like activities, such
as \"Write reports\" or \"Conduct training programs.\" To counter this
natural inclination, we like to make sure everyone has at least one or
two measures for each goal. Defining measures forces people to think
explicitly about what results are expected. A measure for \"Conduct
training programs,\" for example, might be \"80% of participants pass
proficiency test with score of 90 or above.\" This puts the emphasis on
the result desired (employees whose knowledge of an important topic has
been increased) rather than on the activity (running a bunch of
employees through a training program).

In addition to specifying results, do the goals and their measures make
it possible to verify that the goals have been achieved? Check the
measures to make sure some kind of qualitative or quantitative results
are specified. How will you know if the goal has been achieved? How will
you know if it has been exceeded? You don\'t want to arrive at the end
of the performance period and not be able to agree with your employee on
whether or not a goal has been achieved.

### 6. Are the measures set at the right level?

Some employees will be overly ambitious and set unrealistically
difficult goals for themselves. It is good to have challenging goals for
their motivational value, but if a goal is impossible to achieve, it
will only lead to frustration.

Sometimes employees will set their measures too low, either
inadvertently (through naivete) or purposely (through calculation).
\"Sandbagging\" is the term typically used to describe the intentional
setting of easy goals, with the goal setter often claiming that the
goal\'s achievement will be fraught with hazards and hardships. This is
probably the most contentious item on the checklist. Negotiation may be
required to get the measures set at the appropriate level.

From your perspective as a manager, having seen other people\'s goals
and the measures they set for themselves, you will be in a better
position than your employee to know whether \"100% customer
satisfaction,\" \"12-hour response time,\" or \"\$5M in booked sales\"
are too easy, unrealistically difficult, or just right.

You will want to make sure that your employee\'s measures are consistent
with those set by other employees with comparable goals. In some cases,
measures will be dictated by the higher-level goals that they support.
For example, if your goal for a project has a budget constraint of
\$25,000, any of your employees\' supporting goals would need to have
measures set within that constraint.

Want to set a stretch goal? It\'s probably a good idea. The way to do
this is to first define the results that constitute the \"meets
expectations\" level of performance and then define what \"exceeds
expectations\" looks like. The \"exceeds\" level represents the
\"stretch.\"

### 7. Are the measures practical?

Measures are intended to make it possible to track progress as a goal is
being worked on and to determine how well it\'s been achieved when you
are completing the employee\'s performance evaluation. But they should
be practical. It shouldn\'t require as much effort to measure progress
on the goal as it does to actually work on the goal itself - nor should
it be unduly expensive, intrusive, or resource consuming.

For example, it would be difficult to track progress on a customer
service representative\'s goal if its measure was: \"Every customer
inquiry handled in exemplary fashion.\" That would require somehow
monitoring every call. A more practical measure would be based on
exception reporting: \"No complaints regarding how customer inquiries
were handled.\"

### 8. Is achievement of the goals under your employee\'s control?

This principle may seem obvious but we\'ve seen it violated so many
times it is well worth including it on the checklist. The principle is:
If a result is beyond the employee\'s power to control, he or she
shouldn\'t be held accountable for achieving it.

A classic example is holding HR accountable for employee turnover.
Turnover has many causes and HR can, at best, only indirectly influence
most of them. One could argue persuasively that managers should be held
accountable for the turnover of their staffs. Managers have a more
direct influence on employees\' decisions to leave the company. But
consider all the other factors involved: people are more inclined to
leave when the economy is strong, unemployment is low, and they are
highly marketable. You wouldn\'t want to punish managers or HR because
the economy is doing well and they are hiring and developing talented
people, but that would be an outcome of holding them accountable for
turnover.

On the other hand, no one ever has complete control over the results
they are attempting to produce. But people still need to be held
accountable. To minimize the control issue, it would be a good idea to
identify the obstacles and problems you and the employee expect to arise
as he or she works on a goal. What are the additional resources needed
to ensure success? What preventive actions can be taken to forestall
anticipated problems? What contingency plan should be put in place just
in case? In short, if you are going to hold an employee accountable for
this goal, how can you provide the resources or authority needed to make
it a fair game?

### 9. Does the employee have the skills needed to achieve the goals?

Another way to look at the idea of a \"stretch goal\" is that it is a
goal whose achievement requires a bit more skill than the employee
currently possesses. Now it\'s not possible to precisely measure this -
it is an estimate. But in many cases you know, and the employee knows,
that fully achieving the goal will require him or her to stretch beyond
his or her present capabilities. When you know this is the case, there
are a couple routes you can take. One is to back off on the goal - trim
it down and scale it back so that the employee can handle it - or,
alternatively, to reassign the goal to an employee who is fully capable
of achieving it.

Taking this route, however, would pass up one of the reasons many people
go to work every day - the opportunity to learn and to grow in their
positions. So, the other - and recommended - route is to assist the
employee in identifying the competencies and skills needed to
successfully pursue the stretch goal and to craft a development plan to
run in parallel with and support their work on the goal. Working on
challenging assignments is a primary stimulus of employee development.

### 10. Is each goal truly a goal rather than a competency masquerading as a goal?

In the end, you\'ll evaluate your employee on results (how well they
achieve their goals) and behaviors (how well they apply the competencies
associated with their position). We have often seen competencies get
reflected as goals, such as, \"Improve teamwork\" or \"Communicate more
effectively.\" If the competencies on which you will evaluate your
employees include \"Teamwork\" and \"Communication,\" there is no need
to establish \"Teamwork\" and \"Communication\" goals. Doing so would
set up a kind of double jeopardy for the employee - you\'d end up
evaluating the employee twice on the same thing. It is an unnecessary
duplication.

Now, it\'s perfectly OK to create development plans focusing on
improving teamwork and communicating effectively. The logic of
performance management, after all, is that people apply their
competencies in order to achieve their goals, and if they are lacking in
a particular competency, they devise a development plan to bolster that
competency.

  -----------------------------------------------------------------------

  ![](media/image1.png){width="1.0416666666666666e-2in"
  height="1.0416666666666666e-2in"}

  -----------------------------------------------------------------------

*You can use this checklist in your meetings with your employees. Use it
to stimulate critical discussion of the employees\' goals and to help
your employees refine their goals. We know that goal setting is a
powerful management tool and is capable of driving high levels of
performance. The criteria included in this checklist can help fulfill
this promise. But equally important is conducting these sessions with
your employees so that they are open, two-way discussions. Your
employees need to be committed to the achievement of their goals - to
\"own\" them - and the best way to gain this commitment is to ensure
your employees have a significant hand in fashioning these goals.*