It’s new year, new you time for strategy and planning for managers. With strategy and planning, comes goal setting.
Goal Setting
Goal setting can be tricky, especially when you are a manager of a team. Are they your goals? Are they their goals? The right answer is that it’s their goals, guided with your input to align their work to the company objectives and to also help them in their career development.
For your ICs, this is the time of the year to declare some big swings they’re going to take to step forward in their career. They should have 3-5 goals that they’re going to accomplish this year. Your job is to make sure those make sense in terms of the work, their career strategy, and what you think the company and your industry will need over the next 1-3 years.
They should have 1-2 goals about how they’re going to develop their career. If they’re a software developer, it could be:
- Learn language X and use it in a hackathon project.
- Learn to use AI and develop a feature with it.
Goals should be specific enough that they’re accomplishable, but not so specific that if they pivot it means that the goal fails. I’ve seen people walk in with goals they want to do that aren’t relevant to their delivery or career at the firm. Those are fine for personal goals outside of work, but for work goals, you need to help them understand how to tie it into their job and delivery.
Have them submit a set of goals that you can review as a draft before they’re finalized in your HR system. Treating this as a writing workshop makes it less intimidating and reinforces that you’re not building a “gotcha” culture.
Objectives and Key Results
I’ve seen more OKR trainings than I care to admit. Every single one teaches the same thing:
- Objectives should be ambitious
- Key Results should be measurable.
Cool. So why do most OKRs end up as shelf-ware by midyear?
Because they’re written by executives for executives, and nobody bothers to translate them for the people actually doing the work.
Here’s what happens: Your CEO announces the company OKRs at the all-hands. Your VP cascades them down. Your director interprets them for your area. And by the time they hit your team, they’re three levels of telephone game away from anything your people can actually influence.
The result is your team stares at objectives like “Accelerate digital transformation” and has no idea what to do on Monday morning. The fix isn’t better OKRs. It’s better translation.
The Translation Test:
Take any company objective and ask your most junior team member: “What would you do differently tomorrow based on this?” If they can’t answer in one sentence, then we’re back to playing the telephone game via email.
Great managers are translators. They take abstract corporate-speak and turn it into concrete work.
- Company goal: “Improve customer experience.”
- Bad translation: “Let’s all focus on customer experience this quarter.”
- Good translation: “We’re going to reduce ticket response time from 4 hours to 2 hours. Here’s how we’ll do it.”
The goal for OKRs isn’t for your team to understand the company strategy. The goal is for them to see exactly how their work connects to it.
Thursday’s edition: The Goal Translation Framework—a step-by-step process for turning executive objectives into team-level action, with real examples.
See you next week!
-Frank
