Management for Beginners - Performance Goals

Team members cannot be inspired if they don’t know what they’re working toward and don’t have explicit goals. Performance goals are individual work goals based on the team members’ position and their position accountabilities.

Team members must care about achieving their goals, whether because they stand to gain extrinsic rewards, like recognition, pay, and promotions, or intrinsic rewards, such as satisfaction and a sense of meaning. 

As team members are motivated to pursue individual initiatives with your support, there should be an expectation that they will deliver excellence and be more passionate. Goals should be stretch goals creating an internal drive to accomplish the difficult.

Performance goals need to

·      Work towards achieving your strategic goals by being clear with reasoning to allow team members to easily understand how and why their goals are necessary and how they fit in.

·      Relate to the position's responsibilities.

·      Support achievement of improved team performance.

·      Act as individual Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

·      Be measurable so that the achievement of a goal is easily identifiable.

·      Have beginning and endpoints, so team members can work to reach the finish line.

Examples

·      Improve communication skills over the next quarter.

·      Implement new quality assurance methods within three months.

·      Increase team productivity by 30% over the next 12 months.

·      Support, manage and achieve change targets within the allocated time when it occurs.

·      Increase your team’s staff retention rate to 80% over the next 12 months.

·      Clear all high-priority work requests within two months.

·      Meet monthly budget revenue targets.

Actions

1.     Have copies of the organization's vision, your own strategic needs, and each team member’s position responsibilities.

2.     Using these documents, identify the team members’ goals, aiming for goals that support your business and management goals. Try to make them challenging by making them outside of the team members’ ordinary knowledge and comfort zone.

3.     Ensure that each goal is measurable.

4.     Complete your performance goals documentation and schedule a meeting with each team member to discuss.

5.     Do not assume that the team member always knows how to accomplish their goals. Be prepared to discuss approaches with them but only if a team member raises the question of ‘how’.

Summary

1.     Performance goals. - Team members cannot be inspired if they don’t know what they’re working toward and don’t have explicit goals. Performance goals are individual work goals based on the team members’ position and their position accountabilities. Team members must care about achieving their goals, whether because they stand to gain extrinsic rewards, like recognition, pay, and promotions, or intrinsic rewards, such as satisfaction and a sense of meaning.

2.     Performance goals need to. - Work towards achieving your strategic goals by being clear with reasoning to allow team members to easily understand how and why their goals are necessary and how they fit in. Relate to the position responsibilities. Support achievement of improved team performance. Be measurable so that a goals achievement is easily identifiable.

Management and TeamsRussell FutcherPerformance Goals