Objective setting: a 6 step guide

A short, hands-on guide for setting SMART objectives with your direct reports.

Planning

Plan 2 1-hour sessions to set goals. It is good to have some time in between sessions to reflect.

For the first hour aim to identify the set of goals (steps 1 and 2) and complete at least one (up to step 6).

Schematic representation of 6 step goal setting.

Step 1: Discovery

The first step is to identify possible goals. Your report should do this themselves. You want to discover goals they feel committed to, so resist the temptation to come up with them yourself.

Emphasize that objectives can relate to anything that is relevant to work: soft skills, technical skills, career advancement; anything goes at this stage.

If your report is struggling to come up with something, here are some questions that may help the process along:

• Have you gotten any feedback recently that you would like to address?
• What things would you like to have delivered in six months time?
• Are there any skills that you would like to improve on?
• What do you see as a logical next step in your professional development?

Step 2: Check completeness

Once you’ve found something, write it down but don’t challenge or drill into it yet. Rather see if you can find a couple more and get some sort of flow going.

There is no hard rule on what is the right number of goals, but as a rule of thumb:

• Try to find at least three; including one hard deliverable and one developmental goal.
• More than five seems like a lot. After all, we still have jobs to do. You don’t set someone up for success by giving them a list of the 27 most important things to work on. Prioritize if you have too many.

It also depends on the role. Roles with more control over their own priorities are likely to need more goals.

When defining hard deliverables be careful not to create potential conflict with your team’s process for setting priorities. You can look for tasks in your team’s scope that will help your reports development. But you should not set something as a goal that is still to be prioritized in the regular process.

Questions you could ask to check completeness:

• Do these objectives address the developmental feedback from the last performance review?
• Do these objectives align with the team or wider objectives?
• Do (some of) these objectives push the employee report to their learning edge?

Step 3: Define success

Now that you have a set of goals you can start to drill down into each one individually.

Goals are often vague initially. A nice way to start defining them more precisely is to look at the outcome your report expects. A goal like “I want to improve my communication skills” can mean many things. But if a desired result is “I’d like to make sure that I don’t miss important points when I give a presentation” you have something more concrete to work on.

Some questions you could ask in this phase:

• What concrete result would you like to achieve?
• What would success look like?
• If you work on this goal, how would we know that you have made progress?

Make sure you end up with something that is measurable and that seems realistic for the timeframe that the goals are set for. If the goal is too big, break it up into achievable chunks.

Step 4: Understand relevance

A lot of people will identify the next career level as their objective. Of course there is nothing wrong with that. But if you write down for an engineer “become senior engineer in n months” do you really understand what that represents for them? Do they want to earn more money; or get recognition for their craft, or improve their CV? Trying to understand this can lead to a deeper conversation about motivation and values.

Some questions you could use to uncover this:

• Why is that important to you?
• What do you expect to get out of that?
• What important thing would that change for you?

This is really the core of the conversation, so take your time. And don’t hesitate to ask why a few times. Even if it takes you off the immediate path of goal setting it’s probably time well spent.

Step 5: Reformulate

By now you should have a better understanding of the goal. What you’ve quickly noted down during the discovery phase may no longer be accurate. Reformulate the objective together into something that reflects your new, shared understanding

Step 6: Identify steps

It’s time to identify some steps. Again here it is best if the employee identifies those themself. But it is good to wonder how task-mature they are with regards to the goal that they have set for themselves. If they are not it may be more effective to revert to mentoring and provide guidance about the steps to take.

Remember that how taks-mature someone is with regards to a goal is not dependent on the seniority of their position. An experienced developer that has the goal to optimize the storage for a service is likely to need only light coaching on the steps to take. But if the same developer is struggling to give peers direct feedback because they do not come from an environment where that is common it could be better to take a mentoring approach.

Change

Things change, priorities shift. You should be able to reliably set goals for personal development for six month periods. But goals around deliverables may become obsolete quickly.

Revisit the set of goals from time to time together to check in on progress and drop what is no longer relevant. In the end what matters is the quality of the conversation that you have with your report about where they want to go and what they value in their professional.