From the course: Foundations of Performance Management

Choose the right mix of goals and KPIs

From the course: Foundations of Performance Management

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Choose the right mix of goals and KPIs

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- Without any clearly agreed goals, your team would struggle to know what they're needing to focus on and achieve. That would be like having a fleet of ships that are aimlessly sailing across an ocean without any idea of which ports they're heading for. Without clear goals your staff might feel they're wasting their time and energy and become frustrated and disillusioned with their work and even with you as their boss. You can prevent this from happening very easily by setting clear directions and goals for each member of your team. To do this well, you need to understand four key things. Recognize that each of your staff might require different goals with the ideal form of any goal depending on the unique context and needs of each of their job roles, tasks and challenges. Also, always try to get buy-in and agreements on goals. No matter whether your goals are referred to as key performance indicators, KPIs, targets, or milestones, they need to be clearly stated, understood, and agreed upon by everybody who will be involved in achieving them. To get this buy-in you need to be ready to listen, communicate, negotiate and compromise with all relevant parties. This may include with your boss who might be imposing some targets on you and your team, which are totally out of reach and you may need to push back and negotiate more acceptable goals and targets. Plus, cascade goals down to your team. You need to carefully take any company-wide goals and agree which of these involve you and your team. You must then create and agree any necessary team-wide or individual team member goals which are aligned with these company-wide ones. And finally, make the goals challenging. It's a really good idea to make the goals for each of your team members slightly larger than they need to be so that the sum of these individual targets exceeds the overall team or departmental target. As a result, the chances of you and your team exceeding the overall targets are increased because even if some of your team falls short in achieving their own individual targets, hopefully your team's targets will still be exceeded. Take a look at your team goals now and ask yourself, are they aligned to the company's needs and overall goals and has your team bought into achieving them? If so, then well done. You're on the right track.

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