You will be able to review goals often enough that they guide each week's work.
Open the shared one-on-one document you keep for each person on your team, the one set up in Lesson 2.3, "A shared document that makes each meeting count". Look at the top of it and check whether that person's current goals are there. If they aren't, the goals are probably sitting in a file that nobody opens between the day they were set and the end-of-period review.
Take Wei Ling, a manager whose team agreed its quarterly goals in one afternoon in January. Everyone left with a list. In week three, a big client changed its contract and two of the goals stopped making sense, but nobody updated them. By mid-February, nobody had looked at the list at all. When the quarter closed and Daniel asked how the team had done against its goals, Wei Ling had to find the file before she could answer. (Wei Ling, her team and the dates are an invented example.)
A goal that is set once and reviewed only at the end usually guides people for about a month, and after that it guides nothing. The reasons are ordinary. Daily work is louder than quarterly targets. Priorities shift and nobody updates the goal list. People aren't sure whether a goal still applies, so they stop thinking about it. When a goal only comes up at the year-end review, people learn that it only matters at the year-end review.
You don't need a new process to fix this. Bring the goals into a meeting you already hold: the weekly or fortnightly one-on-ones from module 2, and each person's shared one-on-one document.
Going through every goal in every meeting turns the one-on-one into a status report, which Lesson 2.1, "Why the one-on-one is the most useful hour you spend", warned against. The rule is to check one goal per one-on-one and rotate through the goals. That is often enough to catch a goal that is drifting, and light enough to leave most of the meeting for the team member's own topics.
Farid, for example, has 3 goals and meets you weekly. With one goal per meeting, each goal comes up roughly every three weeks, and the rest of each meeting stays his.
The check itself takes a few minutes:
Pick the next goal in the rotation. Ask where the goal stands. Ask what has helped. Ask what is in the way. Mark the goal's status in the goals section of the shared document.
Three statuses are enough. On track means the goal is likely to be met by its date. At risk means it may not be met unless something changes. Changed means the goal itself has been updated, with a note of why. Keep these in a small goals section near the top of each person's document, above the meeting notes, so both of you see it every time either of you opens the document.
Some goals should change when circumstances change: a client leaves, a project is cancelled, the company shifts its priorities, or a team member goes on extended leave. Holding someone to a goal that no longer makes sense wastes their effort and teaches them that goals are paperwork.
The rule is to change goals openly and record why. Discuss the change with the person, update the goal in their sheet, mark it as changed, and add a dated line giving the reason and the new scope. A note might read: "Changed on 12 Feb. The Tampines client moved to monthly reports, so this goal now covers the remaining 12 weekly clients." If the change affects a team outcome, tell your own manager as well.
Avoid changing goals quietly. If a goal is dropped without a word because it was going badly, people learn that missing a goal makes it disappear. A goal that is changed openly, for a reason you both agree on, stays honest.
When a goal is missed, ask why before you decide what the miss means. There are two kinds of miss.
A wrong target miss is one where the goal was set too high, depended on something that didn't happen, or the world changed. Wei Ling set Arjun a goal of resolving routine escalations within two working days. Mid-quarter, the company switched its ticketing system, and every resolution slowed for a month. Arjun missed the goal, and the miss says almost nothing about his work.
A performance problem is a miss where the target was reasonable, conditions were roughly as expected, and the person didn't do what was needed. That calls for a different conversation, covered in module 5, especially Lesson 5.3, "When someone is falling short".
Mixing the two up is costly in both directions. Treating a wrong-target miss as a performance problem is one of the fastest ways to lose a good person's trust. Treating a performance problem as a wrong-target miss is how a real problem goes unaddressed for a year. Regular check-ins help with both, because you see the miss coming and already know the reason, so you aren't finding out at the end of the quarter.
By the end of the quarter, a goal handled this way has a history. It was set with a date, checked three or four times, perhaps marked at risk once with a note of what was done about it, and then met, missed for a known reason, or changed for a recorded reason. With that history in the document, you have nothing to reconstruct at review time, and when someone like Daniel asks how the team did, the answer is at the top of each person's page.
Add the goals section to each person's one-on-one document now, with today's status beside each goal.
Add a goals section to each one-on-one document, with a simple status for each goal: on track, at risk or changed.
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