You will be able to review goals regularly so they guide weekly work rather than sit in a file.
In January, Wei Ling's team spent an afternoon agreeing goals for the quarter. Everyone left with a list. By mid-February, nobody had looked at it. When the quarter closed, Daniel asked how the team had done against the goals, and Wei Ling had to go and find the file before she could answer. Two of the goals had stopped making sense in week three, when a big client changed its contract. Nobody had changed them.
That is the normal life of a goal that is set once and reviewed at the end. It guides people for about a month, then quietly stops guiding anything.
Goals fade for ordinary reasons. Daily work is louder than quarterly targets. Priorities shift and nobody updates the list. People are unsure whether a goal still applies, so they stop thinking about it. And if the only time a goal comes up is the year-end review, people learn that it only matters then.
The fix is to bring goals into a meeting you already have. You don't need a new process. You have one-on-ones every week or fortnight, from module 2, and a shared document for each person, from lesson 2.3, A shared document that makes each meeting count.
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. Instead, check one goal per meeting and rotate through them.
If Farid has three goals and you meet weekly, each goal comes up roughly every three weeks. That is often enough to catch a goal drifting, and light enough to leave the meeting for his topics.
The check itself takes a few minutes. Ask where it stands, what has helped, and what is in the way. Then mark it with a simple status in the document. Three are enough: on track, at risk, or changed.
On track means it 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 the status in a small goals section near the top of each person's one-on-one document, above the meeting notes, so it is visible every time either of you opens it.
Circumstances change, and some goals should change with them. A client leaves, a project is cancelled, the company shifts priorities, a team member goes on extended leave. Sticking to a goal that no longer makes sense wastes effort and teaches people that goals are paperwork.
The rule is to change goals openly and record why. Discuss it with the person, update the goal in their sheet, mark it as changed, and add a line: "Changed on 12 Feb: Tampines client moved to monthly reports, goal now covers the remaining 12 weekly clients." If the change affects a team outcome, tell your own manager too.
What you want to avoid is goals changing silently. If a goal is quietly dropped because it was going badly, people learn that missing a goal makes it disappear. If it is changed openly, with a reason both of you agree, the goal stays honest.
When a goal is missed, ask why before deciding what it means. There are two very different kinds of miss.
The first is a wrong target. The goal was set too high, or 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, then the company switched its ticketing system mid-quarter and every resolution slowed for a month. Arjun missed the goal, and it says almost nothing about his work.
The second is performance. The target was reasonable, the conditions were roughly as expected, and the person didn't do what was needed. That is a different conversation, covered in module 5, especially lesson 5.3, When someone is falling short.
Treating the first kind as the second is one of the fastest ways to lose a good person's trust. Treating the second as the first is how a real problem goes unaddressed for a year. Regular check-ins help with both, because you see the miss coming and know why, rather than discovering it at the end.
By the end of a quarter, a goal kept alive 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 either met, missed with a known reason, or changed with a recorded one. When review time comes, there is nothing to reconstruct.
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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