# Leadership Goals for a Performance Review That Your Manager Will Back Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/leadership-goals-for-performance-review/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/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 Most leadership goals for a performance review assume you manage a team. Here's how to pick one you can actually run, prove, and get your manager to back. ## Key facts - Title: Leadership Goals for a Performance Review That Your Manager Will Back - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Influence, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: leadership goals for performance review - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/leadership-goals-for-performance-review/ ## What this page covers - Most leadership goals for a performance review assume you manage a team. Here's how to pick one you can actually run, prove, and get your manager to back. - Practical guidance for leadership goals for performance review - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation The leadership section of a review form is one of the harder boxes to fill in, especially if you don't manage anyone. A good leadership goal for a performance review names one specific behavior you will practice, states how your manager will see evidence of it, and sets a date — for example, running your team's retrospectives for the next two quarters. It has to be something you can do from where you actually sit, and something your manager has agreed to let you do. That second half is where most goals quietly fail. ## The examples you'll find are written for someone else Search this topic and you get numbered lists from performance-management platforms — Deel, Leapsome, PerformYard, Engagedly, Culture Amp, Quantum Workplace. They are tidy and well structured. They are also, for most readers, unusable. The examples that recur across them read like this: increase employee engagement scores by 20% by the end of next quarter; grow cross-department project completion rates by 50% annually; develop 30% of mid-level managers through structured quarterly workshops. Every one of those needs a team, an engagement survey, or a training budget. There is a plain reason for the mismatch. That content is published by HR software vendors whose customers are managers and HR leaders, so the examples assume a reader who already has the instrumentation. Most people typing this query are filling in their own form, often with no direct reports at all. The underlying categories are narrower than the lists make them look. Across the top sources the same six keep appearing: giving constructive feedback, communication, relationship management (usually labeled emotional intelligence), delegation, conflict resolution, and mentoring. Four of those six need no headcount whatsoever. Feedback, communication, relationship-building and mentoring are all available to you at peer level, today. Delegation and conflict resolution, as those articles frame them, mostly are not. That split is the filter to apply before you copy anything. ## Leadership goals for a performance review you can actually prove The useful examples do exist in those lists — they are just buried under the managerial ones. Borderless AI's set, for instance, includes recording short video updates instead of long emails with a target of cutting follow-up clarifying questions by 30%; booking 15-minute conversations with colleagues from three different departments to understand what they're dealing with; and taking end-to-end ownership of planning and running the annual team offsite. None of those three requires authority over anyone, and each leaves a visible trail: a video that exists, three meetings in a calendar, an event that happened. That trail is the whole point, because of how the form gets used later. Every source agrees that a review goal has to be [SMART](/knowledge/setting-goals/goal-setting-smart-goals/) — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound — and it's easy to read that as bureaucratic decoration. It isn't. The goal you write now is the text someone reads next cycle when deciding what to credit you for. "Improve my leadership skills" gives that reader nothing to work with. "Run the sprint retrospective every second week from March and bring a written summary of the actions to our [one-on-one](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/one-on-one-discussion/)" gives them something they can confirm. One more constraint worth knowing before you choose. Published leadership review criteria — Texas Southern University's, for example — weight achievement of objectives *beyond* core responsibilities, collaboration across teams and functions, and observable leadership behaviors. "Beyond core responsibilities" is doing real work in that sentence. A goal that restates your existing job in leadership vocabulary won't be read as a leadership goal. It has to sit slightly outside your job description to count as one. ## Get the goal sponsored before you submit it This is the step that separates your situation from a manager's, and no article written for managers will mention it. A manager setting a goal for a report already holds the authority to make it happen. You don't. If your goal is to lead the offsite, someone has to let you. If it's to mentor the new hire, someone has to assign you the new hire. So the goal has to be raised in conversation before it goes in the box. Bring the two or three you're considering to a one-on-one, say which one you think is most useful to the team, and ask directly whether you'd have the room to run it. A goal your manager helped shape is one they have an interest in seeing you complete. A goal you wrote alone and submitted is a sentence in a document that nobody sponsors. Finding that out in March costs you a conversation. Finding it out at the next review costs you a year. This is also the moment to settle how much decision-making authority the goal carries. "Coordinate the offsite" and "decide the offsite agenda" are different commitments, and the difference will matter when the two of you assess how it went. ## Choose the goal from feedback, not from a list A manager writing goals for their reports works from performance data they already hold. You are mostly guessing at how you're seen — which is why picking one from a list is tempting. It fills the box without requiring you to know anything. The better input is available, though most people skip it: ask for specific, future-focused feedback before the form appears. Not "how am I doing," which produces reassurance, but something closer to "if I wanted to take on more responsibility here in the next year, what's the one thing you'd want to see me handle differently?" That question tends to produce a real answer, and a real answer narrows your goal to one that will actually be recognized when you deliver it. If the feedback you get back is thin — and it often is — a structured self-assessment gives you a second, independent read to set against it. It's worth taking twenty minutes to [see where your gaps are](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you commit yourself to a development target you'll be measured against for the next twelve months. ## Write the evidence down while it's happening Managerial leadership is visible almost by default; it happens in meetings the organization is already watching. Peer-level leadership isn't. You unblock a cross-team dependency, you talk a frustrated colleague through a problem, you rewrite the handover doc nobody owned — and none of it appears anywhere. The [self-evaluation guidance](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/employee-self-evaluation-examples/) on this is unanimous, and the failure mode it names is vagueness. "I am a strong collaborator" tells a reviewer nothing. The recommended fix is STAR — situation, task, action, result — and the illustrative contrast the sources use is worth repeating: instead of claiming collaboration, name the three cross-functional projects, the peer feedback received, the written note from the product lead after the Q2 launch. You can only write at that level of specificity if you captured it at the time. Keep a running note, one line per instance, dated. It takes seconds and it is the difference between a goal you completed and a goal you can show you completed. ## If this is your first review since being promoted One group has a different problem. If you moved from individual contributor to manager during this review period, the transition itself is widely treated as the highest-risk moment in a career — not because the work is harder, but because it demands a different set of capabilities than the technical excellence that earned the promotion. The instinct is to keep proving yourself at the thing you were already good at. For you, the leadership goal should target the handover rather than the output: which piece of technical work you will fully transfer to someone else and by when, or which recurring decision you will stop making yourself. That reads as a smaller goal than "increase team productivity." It is a much harder one, and it's the one that determines whether the promotion works. For everyone else, senior individual contributors are a recognized leadership track in their own right: Korn Ferry's work on developing individual contributors into emerging leaders describes progression through [influence and thought leadership](/knowledge/influence/leading-without-authority/) rather than headcount. Your goals should be denominated in that currency — credibility, initiative, contribution across team boundaries — not in metrics you have no way to move. ## The skills behind a goal that holds up Read back over what a workable goal actually requires and it stops being a writing task. Choosing the right one, getting it authorized, and being able to show what came of it are three different capabilities, and none of them is about wording. **Working with Your Manager** is the one doing most of the work here. The review isn't paperwork imposed on you; it's the one scheduled point in the year where you can shape what you're measured against, agree how much authority you're operating with, and ask for what you want in a way that's future-focused rather than defensive. Treating that conversation as a partnership with a shared purpose — rather than a verdict handed down — is what turns a submitted goal into a supported one. **Influence** is what leadership means when you have no one reporting to you. It's built by delivering consistently enough that people trust your name on something, by taking responsibility for problems slightly outside your remit, and by being the one who volunteers to prepare, organize, or write the thing nobody has picked up. Those are goals you can commit to in a review form without a title, and they're the ones that make a title plausible later. **Building Self-Awareness** is the input the form assumes you already have. Knowing what you're genuinely good at — not merely competent at — and having asked for specific advice before you write anything is what keeps you from picking a goal that fits someone else. It also explains why a middling rating can land so hard: exaggerated beliefs about achievement or control turn a piece of feedback into a verdict, and noticing that pattern is what lets you use the feedback instead of absorbing it. None of these three is something you either have or don't — they're behaviors, and they're learnable, which is also why they belong in a development goal at all. The **free Job Skills Test** measures the full set of twelve that this framework works with, these three among them. If you're weighing up which one to name in the form, it shows you [where all twelve stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than leaving you to guess. Some of this may already describe how you work — the colleague who ends up organizing things, or the one people check with before deciding. Those instincts are the raw material of a leadership goal; the review just asks you to name one and make it visible. Nothing about that requires becoming a different person at work, and the gaps you find are gaps in what you've had the chance to learn so far, not fixed limits. They also tend to matter more as your responsibilities grow, because the further along you get, the less of the job is the work itself. By reading this far rather than pasting in the first example you found, you've already done the part most people skip. ## Before your next one-on-one The remaining step is to find out which skill is worth putting in the box. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills. It takes 7 minutes, covers all twelve skills in this framework, and gives you a profile showing where you currently stand on each — including the ones behind the goal you're about to write. Do it before your next one-on-one, take the two or three lowest results into that conversation, and let your manager help you choose which one becomes the goal. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, 7 minutes, all twelve skills.* ## 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? Most leadership goals for a performance review assume you manage a team. Here's how to pick one you can actually run, prove, and get your manager to back. ### 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/leadership-goals-for-performance-review/ Preferred summary: "Most leadership goals for a performance review assume you manage a team. Here's how to pick one you can actually run, prove, and get your manager to back." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.