My framework for defining goals that actually help people grow

Defining good goals is hard. As managers, we care about our team’s growth, and goals should be a wonderful tool for making it happen. However, in most cases, they don’t.

From my experience, this is what often happens to goals:

• They are viewed once during a performance review and then lost forever (or for 6–12 months until the next performance review)
• They are not clear — too wide, too big, too subjective (“Improve tech skills”) and might be misinterpreted and not bring the value that was originally intended
• They are not measurable — the employees don’t really know if and when have they achieved the goal (“I feel I’ve improved”)
• They don’t reflect the actual expectations of the manager from the employee and, therefore, don’t help the employee grow as expected
• They aren’t personal and are generated by ChatGPT (a quiet recent phenomenon)

Let’s look at an example:

“Improve your technical skills”

The original purpose is great, the manager wants to level up her team member. However, this goal means nothing to the employee and isn’t actionable, or measurable. Is it related to the employee’s backend skills? Frontend? Both…