# Appraisal Goals: What to Write, and How to Get Them Agreed Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/appraisal-goals/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/appraisal-goals.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving working with your manager at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Appraisal goals are easy to word and hard to choose. Ten kinds of goal that hold up at review time - and how to get your manager to agree to them. ## Key facts - Title: Appraisal Goals: What to Write, and How to Get Them Agreed - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Influence - Primary keyword: appraisal goals - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/appraisal-goals/ ## What this page covers - Appraisal goals are easy to word and hard to choose. Ten kinds of goal that hold up at review time - and how to get your manager to agree to them. - Practical guidance for appraisal goals - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation The form lands in your inbox with a deadline and a box marked goals, and the difficulty is rarely the wording. Good appraisal goals are specific and measurable, achievable inside the review period, tied to something your team is already accountable for, and balanced between output and development. What makes them work is the choosing and the agreeing: commit to a few you can show real evidence for, and settle them with your manager rather than filling the box in alone. That second half is where most advice on this goes quiet. Search this topic and you get SMART, then a list of sentences to copy. ## Ten kinds of appraisal goals that hold up at review time SMART — [specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely](/knowledge/setting-goals/smart-goals-explained/) — is the near-universal format standard across every major source on this, from HR software vendors to the University of California's own guidance for its appraisal cycle. It is genuinely useful, and it is not enough. SMART tells you how to phrase a goal. It never tells you which goal is worth phrasing. These ten are the kinds that survive contact with an actual review. Most people need three or four of them, not all ten. ### 1. Output goals tied to a number your team already tracks The strongest goals name a deliverable or a figure that already exists in your team's reporting, so achievement is not a matter of opinion in twelve months' time. Sources describing performance goals tie them directly to organizational KPIs for exactly this reason. The contrast every guide reaches for is the same one: "increase sales" against "increase monthly sales by 10%." The second can be scored. The first will be argued about. If nobody currently measures the thing you want to be judged on, that is a problem to solve before the goal is written, not after. ### 2. Development goals that pair learning with a place to use it A course you attended is not a result. The pattern that works, and the one Lattice uses in its worked example, is to attach the learning to an application: complete a project management certification within six months, then lead one cross-functional project with it. The certificate is half the goal. Early in a career, development goals default to "attend training," which leaves nothing visible to point at next time. Naming where the skill will land turns a line on your record into something your manager watched happen. ### 3. Behavioral goals written as an action, not a trait Goals about how you work are the ones most likely to be written unmeasurably. The examples that hold up are specific about the observable action rather than the quality: summarize other people's ideas before responding in team meetings, rather than "improve active listening." That distinction is the whole trick. A named behavior in a named situation can be practiced, noticed, and recalled at review time. A trait can only be asserted, and assertions do not survive an evaluation conversation. ### 4. Collaboration goals that cross a team boundary Goals that take you outside your immediate group do two things at once. They give you work to point at, and they build visibility with people who are not your manager — which matters, because your manager's view of you is partly assembled from what other people say. A typical wording in the sources is contributing to two [cross-departmental projects](/knowledge/teamwork/cross-functional-collaboration/) in a quarter. Keep the number small and the projects real; a goal that depends entirely on other teams' timelines is a goal you cannot control. ### 5. Goals that fit inside the review period A goal attached to a [performance review](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-preparation/) has to be attainable before that review happens. As Mitratech puts it, lofty goals are worth setting, but tying them to an appraisal is not always fair to yourself — an eighteen-month ambition scored at twelve months reads as a miss, whatever progress you actually made. If the thing you want to do is genuinely bigger than the cycle, write the part that fits and keep the rest as context you mention in the conversation. ### 6. Goals drawn from your job description and last period's feedback UC Davis's guidance for employees writing their own [self-evaluation](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-evaluation-for-work/) opens with a step almost everybody skips: reread the job description, the previous period's goals, and the feedback you were given during the year, before drafting anything new. The dependency is deliberate. Goals written cold tend to either restate what you already do well or drift toward what interests you and away from what the role is accountable for. Twenty minutes of rereading changes what you propose. ### 7. Goals with an agreed definition of done The sources are consistent that output expectations should state what is delivered, how much, and to what standard. Agree that before the period starts, and the review becomes a comparison. Leave it vague, and the review becomes a negotiation you enter with no position. This is the least glamorous item on the list and probably the highest-value one: most disputed appraisals are not disagreements about effort, they are disagreements about what "done well" was supposed to mean. ### 8. Few goals, not a full page Goals compete for the same working hours. Write eight and most of them will end the year unevidenced, which is worse than not having written them, because an unmet goal on the record is a thing you have to explain. The available guidance supplies dozens of example wordings and says remarkably little about how many to actually commit to. Three or four, spread across output and development, is a load a normal year can carry. ### 9. Goals aligned to something your manager is accountable for The underlying method here has a name — Management by Objectives, where goals are set collaboratively, aligned to organizational objectives, and performance is then evaluated against them. That alignment is not corporate decoration. It is the mechanism by which your proposed goal gets accepted at all, because your manager is being appraised too, on something. A goal that visibly helps with what they are carrying is a goal they will argue for. A goal that only serves you is one you will be talked out of. ### 10. Goals you can evidence as you go Reviews ask what you did and what actions you took. That record is far easier to keep during the year than to reconstruct in the week before the meeting, when you will remember the last two months and almost nothing from the first six. A running note — the deliverable, the date, who saw it — costs a few minutes a month. It also changes the conversation's balance: you arrive with specifics, rather than hoping your manager kept better records of your year than you did. ## Getting them agreed, not just written Every serious source frames appraisal goal-setting as collaborative — employees are supposed to participate in choosing what they will be measured on, and managers are supposed to bring them into it. That is stated as best practice, which is a polite way of saying it often doesn't happen. Usually you get a form and a date. So bring a draft. Arriving with three proposed goals, each with a rough definition of done, changes what the meeting is: you are editing your goals together instead of receiving them. Ask directly which of them your manager would actually value most, and be willing to trade one out. And if you are unsure which development goal is worth the slot, it helps to have an outside read before you commit twelve months to one — [checking your skill gaps](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is a cheaper way to find that out than discovering it at the next review. ## What makes this easier to handle Notice what the ten items above actually asked of you. Almost none of it was writing. It was rereading feedback, judging your own strengths honestly, working out what your manager is under pressure to deliver, and making a case for a goal in a conversation. The wording was the small part. **Working with Your Manager** is the one doing the most work here. Appraisal goals are where you and your manager align expectations for a whole year — which means agreeing goals that are challenging but achievable, being clear about what you are authorized to decide on your own, and making sure your results are visible rather than assumed. Treating it as a partnership with a shared purpose, rather than a form to submit upward, is what makes it possible to prepare for a review, shape your own evaluation, and ask for what you want next. **Building Self-Awareness** supplies what you need before you can choose. Knowing what you are genuinely good at — not merely competent at — is what stops your goals from being generic enough to belong to anyone in your role. So is asking for feedback deliberately and specifically, early enough that it can still shape what you propose. And when the evaluation itself arrives, taking it in properly before you respond to it is a skill in its own right: understand it first, add your own view, then reflect. **Influence** is what turns a proposed goal into an agreed one. Preparing means understanding what is in it for the other person and how the decision actually gets made; pitching means keeping it simple and being honest about the drawbacks as well as the upside; persisting means following up through the year so the goal becomes a delivered result rather than a sentence on a form. None of that is politics — it is the ordinary work of getting a reasonable idea accepted when you have no authority to impose it. Those three sit inside a set of twelve work skills that keep resurfacing across almost any job, and none of them are fixed traits — they are behaviors you can build. The [free Job Skills Test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) measures all twelve, which is a fast way to see which of them is currently costing you most. ## Where this goes next Some of this will already be familiar. If you have ever left a review thinking the conversation went differently than it should have, you have already noticed the gap between doing good work and having it counted — and noticing it is most of the way to closing it. These are learnable skills, not a personality you would have to acquire; you can get considerably better at agreeing goals and still be exactly the same person in the meeting. It is also worth saying that this compounds. Appraisal goals matter more as your responsibilities grow, because the gap between what you did and what got recorded gets wider the more you are trusted with. The good news is that the fix is ordinary and available. You came here looking for wording and read all the way to the part about who has to agree to it — which is a better instinct than most people bring to their appraisal. ## See where your skills stand before the conversation The only thing left is to find out which of these you are already good at and which one is quietly holding you back. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills — it takes about 7 minutes, and it shows you where you stand across all twelve of the skills that shape how a career actually goes, including the ones behind agreeing and delivering appraisal goals. Use it as input for the goal you propose this cycle. **Get my skills profile** Free, takes 7 minutes, and your results appear on screen the moment you finish. ## 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? Appraisal goals are easy to word and hard to choose. Ten kinds of goal that hold up at review time - and how to get your manager to agree to them. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Influence. ### 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/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/appraisal-goals/ Preferred summary: "Appraisal goals are easy to word and hard to choose. Ten kinds of goal that hold up at review time - and how to get your manager to agree to them." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.