able (“by 10%”) or simply demonstrable (“approved ... by the
independent auditors”).
Sometimes, goals may reference criteria that already exist
and need not be repeated in the goal itself. Here’s an example:
“Prepare annual budgets in accordance with the guidelines pro-
vided by the Chief Financial Officer.” In this case, we don’t need to
list all the particulars contained in the guidelines. It’s enough to
refer to them more generally; this can save time.
There’s another way to specify the performance criteria. In
the examples above, we’ve focused on what we want (10%
reduction, approval by auditors, conformance to guidelines).
Sometimes it’s easier to specify an absence of what we don’t
want. For example, “Receive no more than three validated cus-
tomer complaints per year” or “Assemble 100 widgets per month
with no more than one widget requiring rework.”
Goals Without Criteria
The common wisdom about performance goals is that they
should allbe measurable and therefore all have measurement
criteria. There’s no doubt that performance goals that are clear
and specify measurement criteria are generally more useful than
those that don’t. Does that mean you can specify only goals that
have criteria? Also, is it OK to have fuzzy, opinion-based criteria?
There are some situations where it may make sense to set
performance goals without criteria orwith very fuzzy, subjective
criteria. Some contributions are simply not easily quantifiable or
even observable in the specifics without the task of setting goals
becoming more than it’s worth.
Consider the issue of contributions to a work team. It’s possi-
ble to write a number of specific goals for this domain. For exam-
16Perfect Phrases for Setting Performance Goals