# Examples of Leadership Goals for Performance Review (And How to Pick One) Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/examples-of-leadership-goals-for-performance-review/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/examples-of-leadership-goals-for-performance-review.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 Five categories of leadership goals for a performance review, with examples you can adapt, how to phrase them so they get scored, and how to agree them. ## Key facts - Title: Examples of Leadership Goals for Performance Review (And How to Pick One) - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Influence, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: examples of leadership goals for performance review - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/examples-of-leadership-goals-for-performance-review/ ## What this page covers - Five categories of leadership goals for a performance review, with examples you can adapt, how to phrase them so they get scored, and how to agree them. - Practical guidance for examples of leadership goals for performance review - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation The goals box on your review form is blank, and the form is due back this week. Here is the short version: a leadership goal that survives a performance review names one behavior you will change, attaches it to a result somebody other than you can observe, and puts a date on it — coaching a colleague through a handover by the end of the quarter, say, rather than "be more of a leader." Nearly every example you will find online is a variation on one of five categories. The harder question is which of them is credible for you, and that turns on something the example lists never ask about. ## Five categories of leadership goals for a performance review Search this topic and you get goal banks — Peoplebox, PerformYard, Engagedly, Deel — hundreds of pre-written statements in SMART format, sorted by nothing in particular. Underneath the volume, the same development areas keep recurring. The coaching firm TandemCoach's breakdown of leadership development areas names eight: strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, communication, adaptability, delegation and empowerment, decision-making, conflict resolution, and self-development. For the narrow purpose of filling in a review form, those collapse into five categories — and each one behaves differently when somebody tries to score it. ### Communication and influence goals These are goals about how your ideas land: listening properly, pitching the level of detail to the audience, getting a decision out of a room where [you hold no authority](/knowledge/influence/influence-without-authority/). TandemCoach puts active listening, adjusting detail to the audience, and presenting to senior stakeholders in this area. It is the only one of the five whose progress is visible to people outside your immediate team, which is why managers tend to score it readily — they hear about it secondhand, from someone with no stake in your review. A workable version: present the project update to the wider department twice this quarter, and ask two attendees afterward what was unclear. ### People-development goals This category is about growing other people — regular one-on-ones, [feedback somebody can act on](/knowledge/self-awareness/developmental-feedback/), mentoring a newer colleague. The single most repeated example across the goal banks is some form of monthly [one-on-one meetings](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/one-on-one-meeting-agenda/) with each team member to provide feedback and support. It recurs because it is the easiest leadership behavior to make visible and count. It also quietly assumes you have direct reports. If you don't, the instinct still works; you just point it sideways instead of downward. Own the onboarding of the next joiner. Run a standing half-hour with the intern nobody has time for. Both leave the same trail as the version with a team. ### Delegation and ownership goals Delegation sounds like shedding work and isn't. TandemCoach frames it as a matching problem: identify which tasks can be handed over, understand each person's strengths and development needs, then match the task to the person. This category is measured by what you stop doing rather than by what you add, which makes it the hardest of the five to evidence — "I did less of this" leaves no record anywhere. Without formal authority you can still practice the judgment: propose who should own which piece at the start of a shared project, then stay out of it. If you choose this category, settle with your manager in advance what will count as proof. ### Team-outcome and accountability goals Here the goal is tied to something the team delivers — a deadline held, a handover that stops breaking, a review cycle shortened — and to holding people, yourself first, to what was committed. This is the only category expressed as a business number rather than a behavior, which is why it ladders straight into your manager's own objectives and why it usually scores well. It is also where the goal banks mislead most. Figures like a 15% turnover reduction in six months, or an 80% skill-application rate thirty days after training, are illustrative filler inside sample goals, not benchmarks anybody measured. Borrow the shape; supply the number from your own work. ### Self-development and blind-spot goals The last category is the one people skip, and it has the best return. TandemCoach's position is that the fastest growth comes from blind spots — the areas where a leader's self-rating diverges most from 360-degree feedback — and that lasting change needs assessment data and accountability rather than a checklist. That is a direct argument against lifting a goal off a list. A goal aimed at a gap you picked because it sounded impressive is a goal you will quietly stop mentioning by March; one aimed at something three different colleagues have now raised tends to hold. If you have no feedback to work from and a form due Friday, an outside read on [which gaps show up first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) beats guessing — and whatever it surfaces is a starting point rather than a verdict, because these are skills you can build. ## How to phrase a goal your manager can actually score Every ranking source on this keyword standardizes on SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound — and on pairing an outcome with a target metric and a deadline that ladders up to a wider business objective. That is sound advice and it is half the job. SMART tells you how to phrase a goal; it never tells you which one is worth choosing. Once you have chosen, three things separate a goal that gets marked met from one that gets marked "in progress." **Cut the competency filler.** [Self-evaluation guidance](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-evaluation-performance-review/) from Culture Amp and others is blunt about this: phrases like "hard worker," "team player," and "went above and beyond" appear in thousands of reviews and carry no information. The prescribed replacement is an outcome verb (reduced, delivered, implemented), a quantifier (by X%, from X to Y), and the name of the actual project. The rewrite that circulates in these guides turns "I contributed to the team's success" into "I led the Q3 onboarding redesign, cutting new-hire ramp time from six weeks to four for eight hires." The same edit works forward, on a goal you are about to set, not only backward on work you already did. **Write it so the evidence will exist.** Review guidance advises pulling your goals from the start of the period and working through them one at a time, with notes kept against each. The implication is easy to miss: a goal whose proof will not exist anywhere by next review is a goal you will be marked down on regardless of what you actually did. Before you commit to the wording, ask where the record is going to live — a recurring meeting in a calendar, a document with your name on it, a number somebody else already tracks. **Keep the count low.** Two leadership goals you can evidence are worth more than five you can only describe. ## Agreeing it: the step the goal banks skip Sources across this search — Quantum Workplace and Slack among them — agree that leadership goals work best when they are set collaboratively with your manager and revisited through the cycle rather than written once and filed. None of them shows that conversation happening. It is worth having, and it is short. Bring two candidate goals rather than one, so the discussion is about choosing rather than approving. Ask directly what evidence they would want to see at the next review; their answer is the real scoring rubric, and it is rarely identical to the wording on the form. Ask what you are allowed to decide on your own inside that goal, because a delegation or ownership goal you have no authority to execute is set up to fail from the first week. Then agree a point mid-period to look at it again. A goal reopened in month three can be corrected. A goal reopened in month eleven can only be explained. ## What makes a leadership goal hold once the form is filed The mechanics above are the easy part. Whether the goal is still alive in six months has less to do with the wording than with a few things running quietly in the background of the job. **Working with Your Manager** carries most of the load here, because this goal is not yours alone — it is agreed with someone, and it is scored by them. Preparing properly for the review, keeping the conversation pointed forward instead of defending the last twelve months, asking plainly for what you want, and settling in advance how much you are allowed to decide on your own: that is what turns a line on a form into a shared definition of done. Making your results visible as you go belongs to the same skill, not to some separate act of self-promotion. **Influence** is what "leadership" means when nobody reports to you. It gets built rather than granted — delivering what you said you would, becoming the person known for one specific thing, picking up the part of the problem that sits outside your job description, volunteering to write the plan or run the session, then following it through until something is actually implemented. Those are observable behaviors, which is exactly what makes them scoreable, and none of them requires a title. **Building Self-Awareness** decides whether you chose the right goal in the first place. Taking developmental feedback properly — understanding it first, adding your own view, then reflecting on it — and asking for specific, forward-looking advice is how you learn which gap your colleagues actually see. Working from your genuine strengths then keeps the goal somewhere progress is likely, rather than somewhere you will stall out and stop bringing it up. These three sit inside a set of twelve work skills that the free Job Skills Test measures, and a review cycle is a narrow instrument for any of them: it tells you how one manager rated one period against one form. Seeing [where your twelve stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) gives you the other reading — and every gap it shows is one you can close. Some of this may already describe how you work: the person who ends up writing the plan, or the one colleagues check with before they commit to something. Those instincts are the raw material for a review goal that isn't fiction. The parts that don't describe you yet are not a verdict on the kind of professional you are — they are behaviors, and behaviors move. You choose which one you push on next, and you can do it without turning into someone else at work. What does shift is the weight: the further into a career you go, the more of the job is other people and the less of it can be carried by doing your own tasks well, which is exactly why it pays to know where you stand while a gap is still cheap to close. You are already past the part most people skip — you reached a blank goals box and went looking for how it should be done instead of typing the first plausible phrase. ## Choose the goal from evidence, not from a list The only thing left is working out which of these belongs on your form. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the twelve work skills this comes down to — communication, influence, working with your manager, and nine others — and it runs about seven minutes. You finish with a profile showing where each one stands for you now and which of them would make the biggest difference from here. Take that into the review conversation and you are choosing a goal from evidence about yourself, rather than from somebody's list of examples. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, about seven minutes, and your results appear as soon as 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? Five categories of leadership goals for a performance review, with examples you can adapt, how to phrase them so they get scored, and how to agree them. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Influence, 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/influence.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/examples-of-leadership-goals-for-performance-review/ Preferred summary: "Five categories of leadership goals for a performance review, with examples you can adapt, how to phrase them so they get scored, and how to agree them." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.