You will be able to connect each person's goals to the team's purpose so they know why their work matters.
Ask Farid what his goals are this quarter and he will say "do the client reports and handle my accounts". Ask him why those matter and he will shrug. He cares, but nobody has ever connected his work to anything bigger than the next deadline. He knows what he does all day. He doesn't know what it's for.
People who can see how their work feeds the team's results make better calls on their own. When two tasks collide, they know which one matters more. This lesson shows you how to build that connection. You start from the team and work down to each person.
The order matters. If you write individual goals first, you get a collection of personal targets that may or may not add up to anything. Start instead with two or three outcomes for the team this quarter, then ask what each person contributes to them.
Your charter from lesson 1.4, Write your first-90-days manager charter, already has three outcomes. For a quarter, pick two or three of those, or update them if things have moved. Wei Ling's team outcomes for the next quarter are: every client gets their weekly report by Monday 6pm, every week; and every escalation is resolved or has a named owner and a plan within one working day.
Then go person by person and ask: what part of these outcomes does this person's work affect? Farid compiles the weekly reports, so the first outcome is largely his. Arjun now takes first contact on escalations, so the second leans on him. Hui Min produces the monthly service report, which tracks both outcomes and shows Daniel whether they are being met.
Every goal you write for a person should trace back to a team outcome. If it doesn't, ask whether it belongs on the list at all, or whether it is a growth goal, which module 6 covers separately.
A goal names a result and a date. "Every weekly client report sent by Monday 6pm, for all 13 weeks of the quarter." You can look at it at the end and say whether it happened.
An activity names something you will do. "Set up a Friday data handover with the warehouse team." It describes the effort you plan to put in.
Both have a place. The goal says what success looks like, and the activities are the plan for getting there. Problems start when activities pose as goals. "Attend the weekly client calls" is an activity, and a person could attend every call while the client relationship falls apart. Write the goal first, then add the two or three activities that should get you there.
You have probably heard of SMART goals. The letters are most often expanded as specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound, though you will see other versions. It is most useful as a checklist to run a draft goal past, not as a formula to write from.
Take Wei Ling's first draft for Farid: "Improve the client reports." Specific? No, improve how? Measurable? No. Time-bound? No. Her second draft: "Every weekly client report sent by Monday 6pm for the quarter, with no client-reported errors." That passes. It is specific about what and when, measurable from the sent-mail log and client feedback, achievable now that the warehouse data arrives on Friday, relevant to the team's first outcome, and bounded by the quarter.
The check that new managers most often skip is achievable. A goal that needs resources the person doesn't control, or a change in another team that hasn't been agreed, sets them up to miss it. Fix the dependency first, or write the goal around what they can control.
Another format you will meet is objectives and key results, or OKRs. Andy Grove used them at Intel, and John Doerr, who learned them there, later spread them to Google and wrote about them in Measure What Matters. An objective is a short qualitative statement of what you want to achieve, and the key results are a few measurable outcomes that show whether you got there.
Wei Ling's second team outcome could be written as an OKR. Objective: clients trust us to fix their problems fast. Key results: every escalation has a named owner within one working day; average time to resolve routine escalations under two working days; no escalation open more than five working days without a written plan. Those are her team's own targets, given here as an example of the shape.
If your company already uses OKRs, use its format and connect your team's to the ones above you. If it doesn't, SMART goals are simpler to start with. Either way, the discipline is the same: a result, a way to measure it, and a date.
Two to four is usually enough for a quarter. More than that and people treat the list as a menu and pick the easy ones. Each person should be able to name their goals without looking them up.
The goals also need the person's agreement. Write a draft, share it in a one-on-one, and ask what the person would change. You will do that properly in lesson 4.4, Write a goals and expectations sheet for one person.
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 and one goal per team member that connects to them.
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