You will be able to link each person's goals to the team's purpose, so they can see why their work matters.
Every goal you give a team member should lead back to one of two or three outcomes you have set for the whole team this quarter. Set those outcomes first and write the individual goals after. When people understand how their work feeds into team results, they make better decisions without you, because they can tell which of two clashing tasks matters more.
Take Farid, who works for Wei Ling (both invented examples, along with every figure for her team below). Wei Ling asks him for his goals this quarter. His answer is "do the client reports and handle my accounts", and when she asks why those matter, he shrugs. He does care about the work. No one has ever linked it to anything past the next deadline. This is common: plenty of people can describe their working day in detail and still could not tell you what it is for.
Go from the team to the person, in that order. Goals written person by person first tend to become personal targets that may not add up to anything. You already have three outcomes in the manager charter you wrote in Lesson 1.4, "Write your first-90-days manager charter". Choose two or three of them for next quarter, and update the wording where circumstances have changed.
Wei Ling settles on two. Under outcome 1, each client receives its weekly report by Monday 6pm, every week. Under outcome 2, every escalation is resolved within one working day, or within that time has a named owner and a plan.
With the outcomes written, take your team one person at a time and work out which part of the outcomes each person's work affects. In Wei Ling's team, Farid compiles the weekly client reports, so much of outcome 1 rests on him. Arjun has taken over first contact on escalations, which means outcome 2 leans on them. Hui Min writes the monthly service report. It tracks both outcomes and is how Daniel sees whether they are being met.
Sometimes you'll draft a goal for someone and find it connects to neither outcome. Ask whether it belongs on their list at all, and whether it is really a growth goal. Module 6 deals with growth goals separately.
A goal states a result and a date, so when the quarter closes you can check whether the result happened. An activity states something you plan to do, so it describes effort. You need both. The goal says what success is, and the activities are your plan for getting there.
Trouble comes when an activity is written as though it were a goal. "Attend the weekly client calls" is an activity. A person could sit in on every call while the client relationship collapses, and on paper the goal would still look met. Draft the goal first, then list two or three activities you expect will achieve it.
The usual expansion of SMART is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, although you will see other versions. Use it as a checklist against a draft you have already written. Goals built letter by letter from the five words usually end up with stiff wording.
Wei Ling's first attempt for Farid reads "Improve the client reports". It fails on specific, since it never says in what way the reports should improve, and it fails on measurable and time-bound too. Her second attempt reads "Every weekly client report sent by Monday 6pm, for all 13 weeks of the quarter, with no client-reported errors." It passes all five checks. It says exactly what gets delivered and when. She can measure it from the sent-mail log and from client feedback. It is achievable now that the warehouse data comes in on Friday, it serves team outcome 1, and the quarter bounds it.
New managers skip the achievable check more than any other. If a goal relies on resources the person doesn't control, or on another team making a change it hasn't agreed to, the person is set up to miss it. You can fix this in one of two ways: sort out the dependency first, or rewrite the goal around the part the person can control. Wei Ling sorts out the dependency. One of the activities under Farid's report goal is setting up a Friday data handover with the warehouse team so his figures reach him in time. That handover removes the dependency and makes the goal achievable.
OKRs are objectives and key results. Andy Grove ran them at Intel, where John Doerr learned the method. Doerr later took it to Google and wrote about it in his book Measure What Matters. The objective is a short, qualitative statement of what you're aiming to achieve. The key results are a small number of measurable outcomes that tell you whether you achieved it.
Wei Ling rewrites team outcome 2 in this format, only to show how it looks. The targets are her own team's. Her objective is "clients trust us to fix their problems fast", with three key results:
a named owner on every escalation within one working day routine escalations resolved in under two working days on average no escalation left open more than five working days without a written plan
If your company already runs OKRs, follow its format and link your team's OKRs to the ones above yours. If it doesn't, SMART goals are the simpler place to start. Whichever you use, each goal needs a result, a way of measuring it and a date.
Two to four goals per person per quarter is usually enough. Give someone more than four and they tend to treat the list as a menu and pick off the easy ones. To test the list, see whether each person can tell you their goals without looking them up.
The person also has to agree to their goals. Draft them, bring the draft to a one-on-one, and ask what they would change. Lesson 4.4, "Write a goals and expectations sheet for one person", walks through that conversation in full.
For now, the work is the drafting. Write your team's outcomes for next quarter, then a goal for each person that traces back to one of them.
Write two team outcomes for next quarter, then one goal for each team member that links to them.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).