Are Meeting Your Goals Enough for Success?

There is a lot of discussion around using goals as employee’s appraisal score in place of competencies or in some cases in addition to those scores. It’s about time! Goals should be the standard that employees are measured on. This allows the appraisal to be objective versus subjective. You either met the goal or you didn’t. But is that enough?

What if someone met a goal but it was ugly getting there. An employee meets his/her goal of completing a major project on time and within budget. That in of itself would suggest a ‘Successfully met the goal’ score on the appraisal form. But the other team members have reported that they would not like to do another project with that person. You have reports of heavy handiness (not good for teamwork), lack of accountability and not much support given to team members. In fact one person quit because of the project manager. In other words, the project was completed on time and on budget in spite of the project manager.

Teamwork and accountability are two of the standards that are very important to your organization. Do you lower the score on the appraisal? Technically they met the goal, but feel very short on the standards.

Now that many of you have taken subjectivity out of the appraisals, we need to incorporate the standards into each goal. We need to be explicit when designing the goals with our employees that we describe the expectations of how our organizational behaviors fit into each goal.

This should keep us honest and objective on how we are reaching the goals. It will also allow us to help our employees become great employees while reaching our goals.  What do you think?

Most organizations how have standards that are set for employees. If you don’t have standards or a code of conduct you can find examples all over the Internet.