Annual Goal Setting

Most companies, at least once per year, go through an annual goal planning process.  As part of this process, you are expected to have some number of company-focused goals as well as some number of personal goals.  Company goals are usually related to revenue, profit, sales, projects, or initiatives.  Your personal goals, however, have more freedom in what they target.

With the company goals, you'll want to start by analyzing how you can personally impact them.  This may take a little bit of creative thinking.  For example, if you are in the facilities organization and the corporate goal is related to profit, it may seem like you have no impact on the goal and it shouldn't apply to you.  However, there are aspects that you DO have control over that impact the bottom line.  If you are responsible for negotiating building leases, a cost savings there could lead to higher profits. 

Before you start writing goals, pick a goal framework.  There are several available, but by using a consistent framework, your goals will be clearer and have defined success criteria.  A few popular frameworks are OKR - Objectives and Key Results, SMART, and Backwards Goals.

• OKR - Objectives and Key Results is a popular framework where you take high level objectives (for example the corporate strategy) and provide measurable results that you can achieve that leads to that objective.  In my earlier example, renegotiating a building lease to reduce costs by at least 5% could be a key result that supports an objective focused on profitability.  A strength of the OKR framework is that goals (key results) are immediately traceable back to objectives.
• The Backwards Goals framework takes a long term objective and works backwards by consistently asking "if THIS is to be achieved, then THAT has to have happened by WHEN".  Personally, I find this framework to be better suited for more targeted objectives than larger corporate strategy.  If you have followed my earlier episodes covering the Individual Development Plan it follows a Backwards Goals approach toward defining your career path.
• SMART goals is another framework based on the attributes of the SMART acronym - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound - to provide all of the components that a good goal needs, ensuring that the path to success is understood by everyone.  The strength of the SMART framework is that it provides a path for refining goals ensuring that you reach buy-in by all impacted by the goal.  Additionally, SMART goals can be combined with OKR or Backwards Goals to ensure that your plan can lead to success.

Using the framework you select write your company focused goals using the defining statements where you have personal impact.  Be sure to include the appropriate success criteria to ensure that it is clear when the goal has been met.

When it comes to setting personal goals, you'll find this process easier if you have already gone through the process of creating an IDP.  You can take a tactical approach and set goals based on your Action Plan or you can set more strategic goals based on your Roadmap or you can set goals based on some combination of both tactical and strategic goals.

Whether you have an IDP or not, if you find that you are making slow progress on your career growth, I would put more emphasis on strategic personal goals.  If you only create tactical goals, a large part of your focus and a large part of the one-on-ones with your manager will be about short-term activities.  If your career growth has slowed, you want to have conversations with your manager are about how to progress on your roadmap and those bigger picture goals ensure that they keep that focus throughout the year.

If the pace of your advancement is sufficient, I would favor tactical goals.  You've already established a cadence you're happy with and by focusing on your Action Plan activities, you'll be able to maintain your existing pace.  For your annual goal setting, pick items from your Action Plan that build critical skills and items that lead to higher level tasks.

Even though the goals are personal in nature, try to tie them back to the corporate strategy somehow, too.  When there is a relationship between corporate goals and personal goals, your manager has a vested interest in helping you achieve them.  Additionally, review the timing of all of your goals in order to spread them out throughout the year.  If they all target the same timeframe, there won't be an urgency early and then, at end of the year, you could be overwhelmed when everything is due at once.

Once your goals have been documented, have a conversation with your leader about them.  Work with your leader to put a plan in place so that you have the proper work assignments to be able to meet the goals.  Use the outline in Episode 011 on How to Structure Your One-on-Ones to communicate the progress on your goals -- both corporate and personal.  If you follow the advice detailed in Episode 044 - Reporting Status, in addition to the progress reported in your one-on-one, you will be sending out regular emails relating the value you have provided and often, that value ties back to the corporate objectives.

Annual goal setting is not just something you trudge through just so you can mark some task complete.  It's an opportunity for you to relate the work you do back to your career aspirations. 

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