ance. Forms don’t perform. Neither do they improve perform-
ance. People do. Focus on identifying whether employees have
met their goals. If not, discuss the reasons and ways to ensure
they will meet them in the future.
Eliminate Blame
Performance appraisal meetings can focus on the past and on
blame or they can focus on the present and future, on solving
problems and creating success. It’s up to you. Keep in mind that,
while employees need to be held accountable for performance,
you can’t change the past and you won’t improve performance
by spending your time blaming the employee. The appraisal
process is a problem-solving process. Use the past to inform your
decisions about engineering success in the future. Focus on
diagnosis and fixing things, not blaming, embarrassing, or humil-
iating employees.
Conclusion
By now you should have a good understanding of what perform-
ance goals are for, what they look like, and how to use them to
guide and improve the performance of employees and the com-
pany in general. If you “keep your eyes on the prize,” the positive
benefits of having and using performance goals properly, you
should be able to harness the power of goal setting to make your
own life easier while improving your managerial contributions to
the organization.
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Perfect Phrases for Setting Performance Goals