You will be able to write a one-page goals and expectations sheet with one direct report and agree it together.
Choose one person you meet regularly and open a blank document. At the top, write their name, their role, the quarter ahead and the team outcomes their work connects to. This will become their goals and expectations sheet, a one-page document for one person. It combines three things you already have: the team outcomes from Lesson 4.1, the draft of your team's working expectations from Lesson 4.2, and the way of keeping goals alive from Lesson 4.3.
If you don't manage anyone yet, write the sheet for a composite team member, an imagined person on a team like the one you expect to run. When you get to the review stage, ask a friend to play that person and edit the sheet as they would.
The sheet has four parts: a short header, three goals, the expectations that matter most for the person's role, and a review section. All four should fit on one page. The header is the part you've just written: name, role, the quarter the sheet covers, and the team outcomes it connects to.
Draft the three goals from the team outcomes. Each goal has a measurable result and a date. Next to each goal, note which team outcome it supports and how it will be measured. Check each goal against the SMART checklist from Lesson 4.1, From team purpose to individual goals, and make sure the person can affect the result.
For the expectations section, choose three to five working expectations and write them as behaviours. Take them from the team list you drafted in Lesson 4.2, Write down the expectations you assumed were obvious, and keep the ones that matter most for this role. Then add any that are specific to the person's own work.
The review section holds the date of the end-of-quarter review and a status column for each goal. The goal status is one of three options: on track, at risk or changed.
Wei Ling manages Farid, a client operations executive who compiles the weekly client reports. She drafts his sheet for quarter three and links it to two team outcomes, weekly reports and escalations.
Goal one is to send every weekly client report by Monday 6pm (the team's own figures, given as an example) for all 13 weeks of the quarter. It supports the weekly reports outcome and is measured from the sent-mail log. Goal two is no client-reported errors in weekly reports for the quarter. It also supports weekly reports and is measured by client complaints logged in the CRM. Goal three is to write a one-page guide to the weekly report process and train a colleague, Hui Min, to cover it, by the end of week 8. It supports both outcomes because it removes a single point of failure. It is met when Hui Min produces one report alone.
Wei Ling picks four expectations for his role:
Reply to client emails within four working hours, except on Mondays before 6pm, when an auto-reply buys time for the report. Tell Wei Ling, with the reason, as soon as any report looks likely to miss 6pm. Check figures against the warehouse data before any report goes out. When covering a colleague's client, read the last two weeks of the thread before replying.
She sets the review for the last week of the quarter, in their one-on-one.
Send the draft a few days before the one-on-one and ask the person to edit it directly. Make it clear you mean it. You could write something like: "This is a first draft. Please change anything that seems wrong, unclear or unrealistic." People tend to be more honest when they edit a document on their own than when they respond to it face to face, and more so with a new manager.
Farid made two edits and added one question. In the first edit he changed goal two from "no errors" to "no client-reported errors", because small typos he catches before sending shouldn't count. Wei Ling had already written it that way, so they agreed on it quickly.
The second edit was the more important one. He moved the training deadline in goal three from week 6 to week 8, because week 6 was when he'd be running the quarterly survey he took over in Lesson 3.1, Delegate outcomes, not instructions. Wei Ling had forgotten about the overlap. If he hadn't made that edit, goal three would have been set up to fail from the start.
He put his question next to the email expectation: does "four working hours" include time spent on client visits? They agreed it doesn't, and added "when in the office or online" to that line. All three changes came from Farid. He knew his own quarter in more detail than Wei Ling did, and his edits picked up things she had missed.
In the meeting, go through the person's edits one at a time. Accept the ones that make the sheet better, talk through the ones you disagree with, and write down what you agreed and any changes. Make sure you both keep a copy. File the sheet in the person's one-on-one document and put the end-of-quarter review in both your calendars.
The sheet is finished when it fits on one page and has three goals, each with a result, a date and a measure, plus three to five expectations written as behaviours. By that point the person has edited it, you've discussed it, and the changes are written down. You each have a copy, it's in their one-on-one document, and the review date is in both calendars.
Draft the sheet, send it to the person for edits, and bring it to your next one-on-one.
Finish the sheet, go through it with the person at your next one-on-one, and note any changes they asked for.
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