Set Better Goals This Year

How can managers help set better goals with their team members?

Years ago, early in my career, I remember sitting across from my manager in a small, glass walled conference room. He took prolonged sips of his coffee. There was a long silence. I stared at an empty notebook and drummed a pencil on the table.

Our 1:1 meeting agenda? “Setting Goals for Next Half”.

He hadn’t come to the meeting with any of the vision, guidance and encouragement I had expected. And I hadn’t come to the meeting with any clear professional ambition that he had hoped for.

So, it was awkward.

We both missed a big opportunity. We mapped out a few uninspired goals.

As an individual contributor, I left the meeting feeling unengaged and as though I was not valued. I looked at the year ahead and the lackluster goals. My mind drifted to looking for another job. In fact, desire for professional advancement is the number one reason people leave their jobs.

I imagine he left feeling frustrated to see a talented team member with so little imagination. I might have seemed unmotivated. Why wasn’t I taking responsibility for setting aggressive goals? Maybe he felt he had misjudged me as a growing team leader.

We both had good intentions. He wanted to run a successful team. I wanted to have a robust professional path. So what happened?

My manager and I didn’t have an aligned expectation of what we could expect from each other. We had never talked about how we would work together to set goals. At that point in my career, I wasn’t even sure how I was being evaluated beyond the occasional, “You’re doing great! Keep going!”. Our breakdown points to some missing conversations.

Managers need to be invested in helping people — especially early in their careers — set engaging, productive goals that produce results and drive their careers forward. An Individual contributor (IC) is responsible for their professional growth, but a manager acts as a coach with more experience, more context, and a high-level point of view that can drive ICs towards better goals and better results.

Clarity, Risk and Support

How can we start conversations about goals? The fact that I didn’t know how to set my own goals could have been a flag for my manager. Obviously, I didn’t understand where I had opportunities to grow. And I probably didn’t understand the business well enough to set impactful and relevant goals.

It’s easy to get tactical with a format like SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time- Based), but as a manager there are other parameters to consider. IC goals are a shared promise you’re making together. The IC is taking on these responsibilities, but as a manager you are invested as well.

Beyond SMART, the partnership of taking care of what you care about requires three other factors:

• Clarity: Do we have clear expectations about our IC/Manager partnership? What do we both care about achieving? How are we updating those expectations if they change?
• Risks: How much risk are we willing to take? The amount of risk we’re willing to take on as partners is based on establishing mutual trust and commitment.
• Support: Do we have clear boundaries or agreements about how to request or provide support?

Clarity:

What do we care about? Really? As a manager you have access to much more context and background about the business. You’re probably aware of more of the company’s future plans much sooner than your IC. Ultimately, you’re the one evaluating your team members and you are a gatekeeper of their professional advancement (or at least a huge contributor).

We miss out on creating impactful goals when we don’t clarify a mutual care between manager and IC. If we don’t have a shared understanding, we end up with goals dictated by the manager without buy-in from the IC. The IC never fully owns those goals as their own. Or an IC may be creating goals and putting heart and soul into the wrong efforts.

Satisfying goals are set when there is a shared clarity.

Managers can:

• Make sure you have time to discuss business goals that drive the work forward. As a manager it’s easy to get too busy to share the information and planning you’re exposed to — but providing clarity and keeping the team updated is a big chunk of your job.
• Establish the purpose/role of your team within those business goals. Partnering with your team to ensure they understand the business needs, client needs and team objectives that you’re taking care of.
• Consistently share information, assessments, and feedback informally.
• Set and share clear expectations for IC’s at each level, or review them if they exist.
• Get to know your team members on a deeper level to understand their professional aspirations beyond the role they have now.

Risks:

What’s our risk tolerance? Perhaps your company nods towards “big goals” and taking big risks. When ICs think they will be penalized for missing the mark, they may default to something manageable. Better to think of goals that are comfortable and than goals that encourage growth but may feel too ambitious.

Or perhaps an IC’s ambition overshadows their experience when it comes to understanding what risks have smart business returns and which risks are wasteful or self-promoting. The manager may not have the skills to successfully navigate the ambition and risk of an IC.

There’s a lot lost when we take an overly conservative path because risk also serves up situations where we learn, grow, win, expand and discover. So we need to set ourselves up to take on ambitious goals through being strong partners. When our partnerships have more clarity and support, we can increase our risk tolerance.

Goals need to have appropriate risk to help us stretch. And stretching can also be applied to soft skills around communication, ownership or speaking up more frequently.

Looking back on my meeting with my manager, maybe the metric goals were set but there was still plenty of room for improvement in my soft skills around leadership that would have felt quite risky for me as an IC.

Managers can:

• Provide guidance and encouragement to find the right risk level for your ICs
• Devise creative goals to push ICs into developing soft skills
• Be honest about your own risk tolerance. Is that tolerance helping you or stunting your team?
• Talk with your ICs:
• What’s an appropriate risk for you to take? Where do you want to grow?
• What/who will benefit if you succeed?
• How will we assess costs, resources, fallback plans around the risk?

Support:

As a manager, you’re probably overextended. And you might be worried that setting and managing goals that are more ambitious is also going to take more of your time. This is the third part of partnership — agreeing on what kind of support is needed and available.

After all, your team member may want less of your support and more independence. If that’s the case, are there other guardrails or agreements you’d like to have in place like a cadence of updates, reports, or request to flag issues early. What are the expectations of support you can establish together? This may mean establishing a new way of working together than in the past. Less frequent 1:1s, more honest conversations, or communication channels can change depending on requests of both partners.

Establish the right support with each IC.

Managers can:

• Clarify how you want to be updated
• Understand the support can you realistically provide
• Establish or update the channels that work best. Do you prefer less frequent and more thoughtful email or more frequent text chats in real-time?
• Find resources can you offer beside your time or your direct help. A class? A coach? Peer mentorship?
• Be aware of blindspots each IC may have that may need attention so they can more confidently and effectively work towards their goals

Conclusion:

My career went into high-gear once I was partnered with a leadership team that was taking these conversations into account. I’d leave goal setting meetings with enthusiasm and I’d look back on each half with pride. I knew what was expected. My manager was onboard with the right risks that pushed me forward. And I understood how we’d work together so that even as I was moving forward independently, I was keeping my managers and stakeholders apprised.

When having you next goal setting conversations, consider building the right context.

1. Clarify what you expect in a management relationship
2. Define how much risk you want to tackle each year
3. Establish support needed along the way

Instead of looking at an IC and as an “individual contributor” with isolated goals, remember they’re a partner in accomplishing what you’d like to achieve. You’ll be stronger working as a team. When we are setting goals, think beyond metrics and drive stronger partnerships based on shared risk, required support and continuous clarity will open up more opportunities and help you build the next generation of leaders for your company.

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As a coach, Courtney Kaplan partners with leaders to support them in building strong teams with clear vision and communication.

Courtney founded the Design Operations team at Facebook and spent 6 years building the discipline into an impactful team key to creating design operations excellence. Before Facebook, Courtney was Principal of Program Planning and Principal of Client Development at Hot Studio working to build a team that could scope, manage and deliver complex digital engagements.