What Are Some Good Performance Goals to Set for Managers?

An essential part of a productive office is setting realistic and attainable performance goals for managers. How a team performs can be significantly affected by the performance of managerial professionals, who serve as a bridge between frontline employees and senior management.

The key to creating effective performance goals is to aim high while ensuring they are achievable. This can also be very motivating for the teams working under the managers, as it can positively impact their leadership and overall office morale.

What are some realistic performance goals you can set for managers that help to encourage continuing growth? Let's look at some examples of good goals that benefit your team of managers, the teams they work with, and the organization as a whole.

Communication Performance Goals

Communication is vital in any workplace. When your organization implements effective communication strategies, it can boost employee engagement, morale, satisfaction, productivity, and conflict-resolution skills. Beyond that, it helps promote trust and team member loyalty and can fuel innovation in the workplace.

For managers, building good communication skills can have short- and long-term benefits that profoundly impact the health and growth of your organization. When a manager communicates effectively with their team and senior management, there are fewer misunderstandings and a more efficient workflow.

Here are some examples of communication goals that you might consider setting for managers depending on the current needs of your company:

• Engage in regular, honest, and open communication to build trust.
• Cultivate a culture of information sharing and openness.
• Offer praise and recognition when employees do a good job, and provide concise, constructive feedback when issues arise.
• Build an inclusive work environment that encourages employees to share their perspectives and suggestions.
• Increase self-awareness of one's communication style and learn to become more flexible in applying different communication styles to different situations.

Conflict Resolution Goals

Conflict is inevitable in any workplace, and managing and resolving it are essential parts of a managerial role. By some estimates, managers spend a quarter of their time at work resolving workplace conflicts. When conflict is allowed to run rampant in an organization without being addressed, it can lead to increased absenteeism, lower morale, and decreased productivity.

Many factors can lead to conflict in the workplace, including everything from compensation issues and performance discrepancies to jealousy and competitive tensions.

Learning to resolve workplace conflicts effectively and efficiently can help keep the culture happy and healthy while also ensuring that less productivity is lost than necessary.

Here are some goals you might consider setting for managers in the realm of conflict resolution:

• Nip conflicts in the bud: Set up a meeting with involved parties right away when you notice a conflict developing rather than waiting for the problem to become much larger.
• Deliberately work on developing a conflict resolution strategy that involves helping employees break down the issues into parts and identifying where they do agree.
• Avoiding taking sides and remaining objective and professional.
• Teaching employees conflict resolution skills so they can better deal with disagreements without needing to involve management.
• Organizing and initiating team-building and social activities to increase team bonding and reduce conflicts.

Hiring and Retention Performance Goals

If you are setting goals for your hiring manager or your managerial team is responsible for hiring new team members in your organization, it's also a good idea to set performance goals related to both hiring and retention.

Successful hiring involves constantly being on the lookout for new talent, setting up foolproof systems for recruitment and onboarding, using the right channels to search for potential candidates, and much more.

At the same time, retaining high-quality employees requires a network of managerial skills and responsibilities, including fostering a positive, supportive workplace culture, earning employees' trust, providing appropriate training and development opportunities, and much more.

Some good examples of hiring and retention performance goals for your managers include:

• Finding ways to reduce turnover in the department and implementing that strategy.
• Developing profiles for ideal candidates when hiring for a position.
• Ensuring compliance with all legal aspects of hiring, including never taking notes or making decisions based on a person's identity in a protected class.
• Aiming to promote internally when possible.
• Track and analyze data regarding the reasons for employee turnover.
• Create an interview system that includes a well-rounded set of questions for potential applicants and a process for making hiring decisions.

Creativity Goals

If you ask your managers to adopt a transactional leadership style in the workplace, setting creativity goals might not be your first priority. However, if you encourage a transformational leadership style or otherwise believe in the merits of creativity and innovation in the workplace, setting performance goals related to them can be worthwhile.

When you want your organization to succeed, grow, and thrive, it can be tempting to always be focusing on productivity, volume, and numbers. However, there is a tremendous opportunity for innovation when managers and their employees are allowed the freedom to experiment with projects and ideas that are a bit off the beaten track.

In fact, Google's parent company, Alphabet, encourages its employees to spend 20% of their time on projects that could reveal big opportunities in the long run, even if they might not turn an immediate profit.

Even if you don't feel you can dedicate this much of your company's time to creativity and innovation, there is typically ample room for growth in setting and meeting creativity goals in the workplace. Here are some examples:

• Holding a specific number of workshops, sessions, and activities per quarter aimed at boosting creativity and brainstorming innovative ideas.
• Cultivating an environment where reasonable risks are encouraged.
• Encouraging collaboration between individuals and teams.
• Consistently brainstorming new and innovative ways to decrease costs, increase revenue, and save time.
• Holding sessions where creative ideas are turned into potentially workable solutions that could benefit the business.
• Identifying areas for improvement and allowing space to consider innovative ideas as solutions.
• Specifically encouraging employees to build their creative and problem-solving skills through workshops, lessons, and activities.
• Rewarding employees who have creative ideas, even when they aren't workable, promotes innovation and creativity in the workplace.

Volume and Productivity Performance Goals

Of course, an essential aspect of your managerial team's role is ensuring that the employees they manage meet or exceed the goals set for productivity and volume. At the end of the day, the work of employees in any organization determines that organization's success.

Performance goals in this category can incorporate profitability, efficiency, employee well-being, employee engagement, workplace morale, customer satisfaction, and more. These goals should be tailored to each manager's department to ensure they align with the business's broader purposes.

What are some goals you can set for managers that will be beneficial to both front-line employees and senior management?

• Clearly communicating the metrics through which employee performance is judged and measured.
• Tracking and analyzing the way that employee time is spent.
• Increase sales, positive customer reviews, or total revenue within a specific time frame.
• Encouraging employee development by implementing training and educational programs.
• Measuring and tracking employee well-being, engagement, and morale in relation to productivity numbers.
• Provide timely feedback to employees regarding objective job performance standards.

Leadership Performance Goals

The best managers are constantly honing their leadership skills, so even the most senior managers can benefit from leadership performance goals. Once managers understand their preferred leadership style, they are even better equipped to motivate and encourage employees to do their best work in the office.

There are countless leadership goals you can set for managers to help them continue to improve their ability to draw out the best performance from employees and create a supportive and productive work environment, including:

• Focusing on open and honest communication to build trust with the team.
• Using stretch goals to boost both motivation and performance.
• Rewarding and celebrating successes while using mistakes as learning opportunities.
• Effectively and clearly communicating goals and measures to team members.
• Engaging in leadership development courses to further improve leadership skills.
• Creating a supportive work environment that allows employees to do their best work.
• Building an environment that encourages employees to learn and develop.

Teamwork Goals

One of the challenges of being a manager is bringing a diverse group of people with different backgrounds, beliefs, skill sets, and personalities together to work toward a common goal. This is no easy task, but when it is accomplished, your organization can save time and give each team member more energy to focus on their part of a given project.

Cultivating a culture of teamwork helps create group cohesion, where individuals are much more likely to apply their efforts for the benefit of the company, and is therefore essential to business success. On top of that, it can create more learning opportunities within teams, allow managers to intervene less often, foster stronger working relationships, promote healthy competition, and improve efficiency, among other benefits.

Some teamwork goals you might set for managers include:

• Developing and implementing a set of team-building activities each quarter, along with regular initiatives to boost teamwork.
• Working to create a cohesive team between themselves and other managers to help the organization function as a holistic unit working towards the same central goal.
• Delegating a specific number of group projects each month or quarter to ensure that the department benefits from the power of teamwork.
• Organizing and scheduling social activities for teams to ensure they have ample time to get to know each other and bond as a team.

FAQ About Performance Goals

When managers have clear goals, they know exactly what to focus on when leading their team. That also helps them set goals for their employees, which can boost your business's bottom line.

Let's look at some other frequently asked questions about performance goals for managers.

Are Performance Goals and Development Goals the Same Thing?

Development goals are set by employees based on what they want to accomplish in their careers. On the other hand, performance goals are set by employers for their employees.

For instance, an employee might set a development goal to learn a new skill or delve deeper into a topic they are already somewhat knowledgeable about.

Are Performance Goals and Learning Goals the Same Thing?

Typically, experienced employees have performance goals set by their supervisor, while learning goals are set for inexperienced or new employees.

For example, a brand-new hire might be tasked with achieving specific learning goals related to software or skills before they can help meet their managers' performance goals.

How Can Performance Goals Be Measured?

When a performance goal is set for an employee, whether they are a front-line worker or a manager, the best way to measure them is by gathering data that helps quantify whether the goal is being met. For some performance goals, determining the appropriate metrics is simple.

For example, if you are striving to achieve a performance goal of selling a certain number of units within the month, it is relatively simple to measure. Less quantifiable goals, such as creating a supportive culture or communicating honestly with employees, might rely on tools like surveys to gather the necessary data.

Take Your Managerial Team to the Next Level

At HRDQ, we offer a wide selection of tools, assessments, and workshops you can use to help your managerial team be as successful as possible in their roles.

If you're interested in helping your managers understand how to set productive performance goals, check out Remarkable Performance Development. This workshop helps apply a more productive mindset to typical "performance management,"  identify and set performance goals, enhance productivity, and hold employees accountable.

Do you have any questions about anything we mentioned in this article or anything similar? If so, please don't hesitate to leave us a comment; we'll get back to you within a day or two! We make it a point to reply to every comment and question we receive, and we'd be more than happy to answer any of your questions.