example, take a look at this goal statement:
Complete monthly financial statements containing final
revenue and cost figures, broken down by capital expen-
ditures and salary categories, accurate and not needing
revision after submission, and received by the manager
by month end, and to the satisfaction of the manager.
It’s specific, right? It can be measured. But can you imagine
writing dozens of these for each employee? It’s a problem. Most
managers try to attain some level of balance, so that the goals set
are detailed enough to ensure that employee and manager
share a common understanding of the meaning of the goals but
not so detailed that the goals take hours and hours to craft.
You need to be aware of another “gotcha” with respect to
writing specific and measurable goals. As you write more specif-
ic and measurable goals, you may find that the goals are less and
less important to the employee’s actual contributions to the
organization. In the pursuit of the easily measurable, it’s possible
to end up with a set of goals that are so picky and niggling that
they are really useless. That’s because it’s easy to measure trivial
and unimportant things in objective, observable ways, but it’s
hard to measure important things.
Where does that leave us? We still want to phrase goals so
they are as measurable and specific as possible, but we have to
balance that desire with practical workplace issues, as we’ve
described above.This balancing act becomes a lot less important
if you take the position that one function of setting performance
goals is to develop a common understanding between manager
and employee. If the dialogue and communication between the
parties is effective, then the goals need not be quite as specific as
would otherwise be the case.That’s one reason why it’s so impor-
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Perfect Phrases for Setting Performance Goals