CHAPTER 1

Using This Book to Write Better Performance Goals

Before we start you on the path to writing better performance goals, and beforewe explain how to use this book to help improve both individual work performanceand overall performance of your work unit or company, we need to placeperformance goals within the business and management context and examine whyit's important to take the time to establish performance goals for employees.

No. Scratch that. Important isn't the right word. Crucial, critical, andessential are better. If you want better employee performance, engaged staff,higher productivity, and, believe it or not, better morale, you MUST haveemployees who understand what constitutes their jobs, what they need to achieve,and the levels of achievement needed. Goals and objectives do all that.

Wait, we're jumping ahead.

After all, if you don't see the sense or value in working with employees to setgoals, it's not likely you're going to do it.

What Are Performance Goals Used For?

There's a popular misconception that the way to improve performance, whether onan individual basis or for a work unit, is to appraise and evaluate it after thefact. You're probably familiar with the performance appraisal process that isoften used once a year. You know the one. It's the time of the year wheremanagers and employees would rather crawl across cut glass than meet to do theappraisals.

Eventually, if nagged enough, manager and employee sit down to discuss andevaluate performance for the past year, or at least the employee's performance.Forms are used to record the conversation and convince everyone that somethingvaluable is going on. They don't convince anyone.

Sometimes the process goes smoothly and sometimes not. More often than not, theappraisal meetings do little to meet the needs of employee or manager, andneither considers them helpful. Or worse, they dread them. Mostly they dreadthem.

The performance appraisal can be valuable, but not as a stand-alone process. Infact, the many benefits of managing and appraising performance are lost whenmanagers focus solely on the appraisal process as the end point. It's likedriving while looking in the rearview mirror: you see what's already past andbeyond your control.

If we want to improve performance, we need a forward-looking process toprevent performance problems. We need a forward-looking process toharness and coordinate the work of individual employees so we increase theeffectiveness of the work unit and the company in general. After all, that'swhat we really want—for each employee to contribute to the effectivenessof the whole and, to whatever extent possible, to have everyone win: themanager, the work unit and company, and, most of all, the employee. When theperformance management is used to help the employee "win," everyone ends upwinning.

The secret of success—for organizations, managers, and employees—isto put more emphasis on making sure employees and managers know what needs to beaccomplished in the present and future. When an employee understands what he orshe needs to do to succeed, it's much easier to contribute. It's also mucheasier for managers to do their jobs, to improve productivity, and to manageproactively, rather than spend time stamping out small fires after the fact.Clear purpose helps everyone succeed, and, bottom line, that's what we all want.

Enter performance goals. Like the bull's-eye on an archery target, performancegoals specify what the employee needs to aim at. Let's look at how they canhelp.

For the Organization

To succeed, organizations need to be able to coordinate the work of individualemployees and work units, so that everyone is pulling in the same direction.Performance goals provide the foundation to allow this kind of coordination tooccur.

The process of setting individual performance goals provides the mechanism fortranslating the goals of the organization as a whole into smaller chunks thatare then assigned or delegated to individual employees. That's necessary becauseorganizations achieve their overall goals to the extent that each employee doeshis or her part...