# What a SMART Goal Description Is - and How to Write One Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/smart-goal-description/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/smart-goal-description.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving setting goals at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer A SMART goal description states what you will do, how it is measured, and by when. What each part means, the five goal types, and how to write yours well. ## Key facts - Title: What a SMART Goal Description Is - and How to Write One - Category: Setting Goals - Primary skill: Setting Goals - Related skills: Working with Your Manager, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: smart goal description - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/smart-goal-description/ ## What this page covers - A SMART goal description states what you will do, how it is measured, and by when. What each part means, the five goal types, and how to write yours well. - Practical guidance for smart goal description - How this topic connects to Setting Goals ## Detailed explanation If you have a goal field open in front of you — on a performance review, a development plan, or a form your manager forwarded last week — you need to know what belongs in it. A SMART goal description is a short written statement of an objective that meets five criteria: it is Specific about what will be done, Measurable so progress can be checked, Achievable with the resources you actually have, Relevant to the work around you, and Time-bound with a real deadline. That part takes a minute to learn. Deciding what to put in the field is the part that takes longer. Almost every guide to this topic assumes you already know what you want to achieve and just need help wording it. The assumption runs backwards: most people meet this format because a form arrived, and the field is hard precisely because [the goal is still undecided](/knowledge/setting-goals/how-to-set-career-goals/). So this covers both halves — what each part means, and what kind of goal you are describing, since the second question decides whether the first one holds up. ## The five parts of a SMART goal description Each criterion answers a different question about the same sentence. **Specific** — name the thing you will do, not the area you will work in. "Improve report quality" names an area. "Check monthly reports against the source data before submitting, so corrections stop coming back from finance" names a thing. If a colleague could not repeat your goal back accurately, it is not specific yet. **Measurable** — someone reading the description later should be able to tell whether it happened. That usually means a number, but not always. For a development goal, the measure is often a completed activity rather than a moved metric. **Achievable** — within reach given the time, authority, and resources you have. This is the criterion people most often fake, by adding a percentage to an unrealistic target. The section on goal types below explains why that fails. **Relevant** — here the sources genuinely disagree. Mindtools, TechTarget, and the Wikipedia entry on the SMART criteria variously gloss it as relevant to the organization's objectives, relevant to your own direction, or — in older renderings — "Realistic," which just duplicates Achievable. For a form, the first reading is the practical one. The second is what makes the goal worth doing at all, and a description that satisfies only the first tends to get approved and then quietly abandoned. **Time-bound** — a date. "Ongoing" is not a date, and neither is "ASAP." ## Where the format came from, and the letter that got dropped The acronym traces to one paper: George T. Doran's "There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives," published in *Management Review* in November 1981. Doran was a consultant and former director of corporate planning at Washington Water Power Company, and he wrote it for managers drafting organizational objectives — not for individuals thinking about their own careers. That explains the format's institutional feel: it was built for goals that get assigned, which is exactly how most people meet it. The version most sites present as canonical is also not the original. Doran's five letters were Specific, Measurable, **Assignable**, Realistic, and Time-related. "Assignable" — who is responsible for doing this — disappeared somewhere along the way, and it is arguably the letter that matters most here. In a shared plan, a goal nobody owns is a goal nobody does, so if your description sits alongside other people's, make it obvious the work is yours. One honest caveat: plenty of pages assert that SMART goals raise productivity or engagement, and almost none cite anything. The five criteria are a formatting discipline — a way to write a goal down clearly, not proof that the goal is a good one. ## Five types of goals a SMART goal description can cover This is the distinction the top-ranking pages skip, and the one that determines whether your description survives contact with reality. Workplace goals fall into recognizable types differing most in one respect: how much of the outcome is under your control. Control rises steadily across the first three. ### Outcome goals An outcome goal describes the end result you want — a target hit, a client won, a promotion reached. Review forms like these because the target is unambiguous and easy to score at the end of the year. The problem is control. Outcomes depend on decisions, budgets, and people outside you, so an outcome goal can be perfectly specific, measurable, and time-bound while still failing the Achievable test. Adding a number to something you cannot personally move does not make it achievable — it just makes the shortfall easier to quantify. ### Performance goals A performance goal describes a standard you hold yourself to, usually measured against your own previous performance rather than against someone else's result. Response times, error rates, throughput on work you personally handle. The distinguishing feature is the yardstick: it is your own prior number. That keeps the measurement honest without making the goal hostage to other people's decisions, which is why performance goals tend to be the most defensible thing to write into a review form. ### Process goals A process goal describes a recurring behavior — something you do weekly, daily, or on every project, regardless of what it produces in a given month. Reviewing your own work before submitting it. Preparing an agenda before every one-on-one. These carry the highest control of the three, because execution is entirely within your power. They are also the natural home for [milestones](/knowledge/confidence/break-goals-into-smaller-steps/), which HR sources such as PerformYard and ClearCompany note tend to improve completion when the description carries them alongside the final target rather than the end state alone. ### Development and learning goals A development goal describes a capability you intend to build: a course completed, a skill practiced on real work, feedback sought and acted on. For anyone in their first few years of work, this is usually the type the review form is actually asking for. It behaves differently from the other four, and this is where copied templates fall apart. A development goal is an input, not an output: its measurable element is normally a completed activity or a specific piece of evidence rather than a moved number, so dropping a sales-style metric template in here produces something nobody can assess. The other difficulty is naming the capability. It is hard to write "I will get better at X" with no read on which X would make the most difference, which is why it is worth checking [where your skills stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you commit a development goal to paper — the description writes itself once you have something real to point at. ### Delivery and quality goals A quality goal describes the standard of the work you produce — accuracy, timeliness, adherence to an agreed process — rather than its volume or its downstream effect. It sits closest to your defined job, so the Relevant criterion takes care of itself. Specificity is the hard part. "Improve quality" is this category's signature failure; these goals only work when you name the defect you are removing and how anyone would notice it had gone. ## How to check your SMART goal description before you submit it Three checks catch most of the problems. **Is it yours, or is it a template's?** The same examples recur nearly word for word across the HR sites ranking for this topic — increase website traffic by 20% in six months, cut support response time to 24 hours by year end, lift satisfaction scores by 10% next quarter. Their uniformity is the tell: these are company dashboard metrics, not one early-career person's scope of control. If you cannot say what you would personally do on Monday to move the number, the goal is not yours yet. **Is the stretch calibrated?** Practitioner consensus across HR sources — assertion rather than research — puts the useful goal high enough to require real effort but low enough to stay attainable. If you are certain you will hit it, it is not a goal; if you privately think it impossible, you will disengage by March. **Has the other party seen it?** A workplace goal description is almost never written alone — it goes into a document [your manager signs off](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/goals-for-performance-review/) on, which makes it a negotiation rather than a composition exercise. Bringing a draft to [a one-on-one](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/one-on-one-with-manager/) gets a very different result than waiting to be handed a target. ## The skills that make this easier to get right Notice what those three checks have in common: none of them are about wording. Choosing what to aim at, agreeing it with the person who approves it, and knowing what you can realistically pull off are the parts that take practice — and they keep applying long after this particular form is filed. **Setting Goals** works in the opposite direction from most advice on this topic. Rather than fitting your experience to a target you picked in advance, you let the target emerge from what the work has already taught you — which tasks you do well, which ones drain you, what you actually want from a job. It also argues for a shorter horizon than review forms invite: six to eighteen months of deliberate direction beats a five-year plan that closes off options you have not met yet. **Working with Your Manager** covers the half of this that happens in conversation. Goals that are challenging but achievable get set jointly, not assigned — and so does the question of how much decision-making authority you have, which quietly determines whether your goal was ever achievable. Making your results visible along the way belongs to the same skill. **Building Self-Awareness** supplies the input the other two need. Achievable and Relevant are unanswerable without an honest read on what you are genuinely good at, as opposed to merely competent at. And because development goals usually originate in feedback, knowing how to ask for specific, forward-looking advice — and how to take it without flinching — gives you material to write from instead of a guess. These three are behaviors, not fixed equipment, and behaviors respond to practice. That is true of the whole set of **twelve work skills** this site is built around; the free Job Skills Test runs through all of them, so instead of guessing which gap to name in your development goal, you can see [which one would matter most](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) for you right now. ## Where this goes next Some of this may already match how you work — you might keep informal track of what you are getting better at, or push back when a target lands that you cannot influence. Those instincts are the raw material, and the goals you write get sharper as the skills underneath them come into focus. None of it requires becoming a different sort of person at work. It also gets more consequential over time. The goals you describe early on are mostly about your own output; later ones commit other people's time, which makes the reasoning behind them worth more, not less. You came here for a description and read through what sits behind one — more than the form asked of you. The useful next move is finding out which skills are worth putting in it. ## See where your skills stand The last piece is the one the form cannot give you: a clear view of what you are working with. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills that scores you across all twelve, showing which ones you already rely on and which would repay attention first. That is exactly the input a development goal needs — and a better starting point than picking whichever skill sounds respectable in a review. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** Free, about 7 minutes, and no preparation needed. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? A SMART goal description states what you will do, how it is measured, and by when. What each part means, the five goal types, and how to write yours well. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Setting Goals. It also relates to Working with Your Manager, Building Self-Awareness. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/smart-goal-description/ Preferred summary: "A SMART goal description states what you will do, how it is measured, and by when. What each part means, the five goal types, and how to write yours well." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.