# Evaluation Goals Examples: Four Types and the Evidence Each Needs Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/evaluation-goals-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/evaluation-goals-examples.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 Evaluation goals examples across four types-results, process, behavioral, and development-plus what evidence each one needs to hold up at review time. ## Key facts - Title: Evaluation Goals Examples: Four Types and the Evidence Each Needs - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Setting Goals, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: evaluation goals examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/evaluation-goals-examples/ ## What this page covers - Evaluation goals examples across four types-results, process, behavioral, and development-plus what evidence each one needs to hold up at review time. - Practical guidance for evaluation goals examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation Evaluation goals are the objectives you and your manager agree you'll be assessed against for the coming period. The evaluation goals examples worth adapting fall into four types—results, process, behavioral, and development—and each is written so that at review time you can both tell, from the same evidence, whether you reached it. If the form is open and there's a deadline on it, the lists of forty-five or two hundred and fifty ready-made goals are easy enough to find. The harder question is which of them you could still prove twelve months from now. That depends far less on the wording than on which type of goal you picked. ## What separates a goal that gets scored from one that doesn't Nearly every guide routes you through SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound—and the acronym survives for a good reason: those letters exist so that a review has something to score. But SMART tells you how to word a goal. It doesn't tell you what kind of goal you're writing, and that is the decision that determines whether the wording can be honored at all. Two distinctions do most of the sorting. The first comes from UC Berkeley's HR guidance, which splits performance expectations into results—the goods and services you produce, measured against objectives or standards—and actions and behaviors, meaning the methods you use and the values you demonstrate while producing them. The second cuts across it: performance goals target measurable, short-term output tied to business outcomes, while development goals build a skill or capability over a longer horizon. Between them, those two lines account for almost everything that appears on an evaluation form, and they sort the usable examples into four types—each proved a different way. ## Evaluation goals examples, grouped by what proves them ### Results goals These name a number you're accountable for and a date by which it has to move. They dominate the example lists because they are the easiest to write and the easiest to score: increase website traffic by 20% over six months; raise lead generation from ten a week to fifteen within the quarter; cut customer support response time to 24 hours by year end; lift personal sales by 5% this quarter. What distinguishes a results goal is that its evidence exists independently of you—the number is already being collected somewhere, and at review time you point at it rather than argue for it. That is also the limitation nobody mentions. If your role doesn't carry a metric of its own, and plenty of early-career roles don't, every one of those examples is unusable as written. Copying one anyway hands your manager a target neither of you can verify. Where you genuinely own a number, use it. Where you don't, the honest version of a results goal is a named deliverable and a date, not a borrowed percentage. ### Process and efficiency goals These improve how the work runs rather than how much of it you produce: removing a step, cutting rework, shortening a cycle. A frequently cited example is reducing project completion time by 15% by the end of the quarter through time-saving tools and team training. The distinguishing feature is that the unit of improvement is the workflow rather than your personal output, which means the gain outlasts the review period and usually helps people other than you. There's a practical reason to want one of these on your form. A process goal is the type your manager can approve without doing arithmetic about your workload—you aren't promising to do more, you're promising that the same work will cost less. That framing tends to survive the conversation in which an ambitious results target quietly gets negotiated down. ### Behavioral goals This is the second half of Berkeley's split: the methods and means, and the behaviors shown along the way. The recurring examples are mentoring a junior colleague, contributing actively in weekly team meetings, and practicing active listening in customer conversations. They cover the part of your performance your manager is already forming opinions about, whether or not anything is written down. They are also the hardest type to prove, and this is where most forms quietly fail. "Improve communication" is not a goal—there is nothing in it a review can score, so at the end of the period it gets settled by impression, which is to say by whoever remembers what. The fix is to convert the behavior into something observable and give it a frequency: not better communication, but one presentation to the team each month; not stronger collaboration, but summarizing the agreed actions at the close of every project meeting. A behavior with a witness and a rhythm becomes evidence. A behavior without them becomes an argument you have to win. ### Development goals Development goals build a capability for the period after this one—a certification, a tool you'll need before your team adopts it, a skill you don't have yet. Unlike the other three, they aren't measured by what got produced but by what you can now do, and their horizon is deliberately longer than the review cycle. They are also the type most often left off the form entirely. Write two results goals and nothing else and you've traded away the only part of the evaluation that is about you rather than about the output—and it happens to be the part your manager has the most discretion to support with time or budget. Guidance from Indeed and Culture Amp puts the same point earlier in the sequence: goal-setting should start from a read on your own strengths and weaknesses, with input from your manager or colleagues, because that self-knowledge is what makes a development goal targeted instead of generic. Most people skip it and reach for "improve communication skills" without any evidence that communication is the actual gap. ## Two things that decide whether any of them hold up Whichever examples you adapt, the wording is the smaller half of the job. The first thing that decides it is that the goal is agreed, not submitted. A goal you write alone and file is a prediction about what your manager values; a goal you set with them is a shared standard. The difference shows up at review time either as a surprise or as no surprise at all. Bring drafts to a one-on-one rather than final text to a form, and settle two questions out loud: what evidence will count as having met this, and is the target stretching without being out of reach. The second is that you'll have to write about these goals again. The self-evaluation guidance from Lattice, Culture Amp, and PerformYard all describes the same year-end pass—take the period's goals one at a time, say whether you hit each, and for each one state what specifically resulted or what blocked it. That is this same document read backwards. Every goal you set now is a question you will be asked to answer later, which is the strongest practical argument for writing few of them and writing ones you can evidence. If a development goal is going to be one of them, being able to say why you chose that particular one, rather than that it sounded reasonable, starts with [an honest baseline on paper](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). ## The skills behind a goal that holds up Read back across the four types and the gap between a strong goal and a weak one keeps landing in the same few places: how accurately you read your manager, how accurately you read yourself, and whether the goal is one you actually want. None of those is a formatting problem, and none of them is fixed. **Working with Your Manager** is what turns a drafted goal into an agreed one. This framework treats goal-setting as part of aligning expectations—targets that are challenging but achievable, an explicit understanding of how much you get to decide on your own, and results made visible during the period rather than reconstructed from memory the week before. The same skill covers the review itself: preparing for it properly, keeping it future-focused, and asking for what you want, so the evaluation is something you help shape rather than something delivered to you. **Setting Goals** here means something different from wording objectives. It's about where the goals come from. The ones that survive an entire cycle sit in work you're genuinely good at and match what you want out of the job, rather than being the most impressive line available from a list of two hundred. The preference for shorter horizons fits an evaluation cycle almost exactly—six to eighteen months is long enough to commit to and short enough that what you learn on the way can reshape the next set. **Building Self-Awareness** is what aims a development goal at your real gap instead of a plausible-sounding one. It runs on two things: a clear view of what you're actually good at, as distinct from merely competent at, and feedback you deliberately went and asked for—specific, and about what to do next rather than what already went wrong. Ask first, and the development goal stops being a guess. Every one of these is learnable, which is precisely why a gap belongs on a goal form rather than in the too-hard pile. If you want to know which of them is currently weakest, the free Job Skills Test scores you across twelve work skills, these three among them, and shows [where practice would pay off](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) fastest. ## Where this leaves you Some of this probably describes how you already approach a review—maybe you draft goals before the form opens, or you notice when a target sounds good but has nothing behind it. Those instincts are what the four types formalize rather than replace. What grows with practice isn't who you are at work; it's how precisely you can name what you're aiming at and what you'd accept as proof of it. That keeps compounding: the goals get bigger as your responsibilities do, the evaluations start carrying more weight, and setting the right ones becomes a larger part of how you're read—which is the argument for getting a clear picture now rather than two cycles from now. You've already done the part most people skip, by thinking about the goals before the deadline forced you to. What's left is a short step. ## Find out which skills are worth a goal The remaining question is which skills would make the biggest difference to your next set of goals. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: you answer a short set of questions about how you handle ordinary situations at work, and in about seven minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve—the three above included—and which ones are most worth turning into a development goal this cycle. That gives you something you can defend when your manager asks why that goal and not another one: a read on yourself, rather than a line borrowed from a list. ## 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? Evaluation goals examples across four types-results, process, behavioral, and development-plus what evidence each one needs to hold up at review time. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Setting Goals, 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/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals.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/working-with-your-manager/evaluation-goals-examples/ Preferred summary: "Evaluation goals examples across four types-results, process, behavioral, and development-plus what evidence each one needs to hold up at review time." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.