# Performance Appraisal Goals Examples: How to Choose Yours Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-appraisal-goals-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-appraisal-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 Performance appraisal goals examples across four types - performance, behavioral, development and stretch - plus how to choose goals worth being measured on. ## Key facts - Title: Performance Appraisal Goals Examples: How to Choose Yours - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Influence - Primary keyword: performance appraisal goals examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-appraisal-goals-examples/ ## What this page covers - Performance appraisal goals examples across four types - performance, behavioral, development and stretch - plus how to choose goals worth being measured on. - Practical guidance for performance appraisal goals examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation Your review is coming up, the form has a box for goals, and nothing obvious to put in it. Most performance appraisal goals fall into four kinds: performance goals (a measurable result), behavioral goals (how the work gets done), development goals (a capability you build), and stretch goals (deliberately ambitious ones). Most forms expect more than one kind. A usable goal names a specific change, a way to tell whether it happened, and a date — and it gets agreed with your manager rather than written alone. Performance appraisal goals examples are easy to find. Choosing which ones are worth being measured against for a whole period is the part almost nobody explains. ## The four kinds of performance appraisal goals Search this topic and you mostly get long banks of goal statements sorted by department, presented as one undifferentiated list. Underneath them sits a distinction the lists rarely surface: HR sources consistently separate four types of goal, and most forms quietly expect more than one. Knowing which type a box is asking for changes what belongs in it. ### Performance goals — the measurable result These are targets tied to something you produce inside the review period: volume, quality, speed, cost, or revenue. They are scored on a number at the end of the cycle, and the outcome gets rated, not the effort behind it. This is what most forms mean by default, and the type nearly every published example illustrates. It is also where the examples stop being useful for a lot of people. The ones that recur across sources like TechTarget and ClearCompany are things like increasing website traffic by 20% in six months, cutting support response time to 24 hours, lifting satisfaction ratings by 10% in a quarter, or saving 10% on operating costs by year end. Those are marketing, support, and management targets. If your role has no number attached to it, which describes a great many early-career jobs, nothing on the list transfers, and the usual outcomes are copying a metric that isn't really yours or retreating into something too vague to score. The way out is to stop hunting for a business metric and look for a countable thing inside your own work: how many of something you handle, how long your part of a process takes, how often something comes back for correction. It need not be a figure the company already tracks — only something you genuinely influence and can evidence in twelve months. ### Behavioral goals — how the work gets done Behavioral goals cover observable actions and competencies rather than output: what you do and how, not what it produces. Sources describing this category treat them as continuous rather than completed — no finish line, no natural total, and the evidence is repeated conduct rather than a number at the end. This is the type people early in their careers leave out most often, because it doesn't look like an achievement — yet it is frequently where a manager's real concerns about a junior colleague sit. Taking a position in team discussions instead of waiting to be asked. Flagging a slipping deadline when you see it rather than on the day. Since none of that produces a figure, build the measurement differently: agree in advance what your manager would need to have seen by the mid-point for the change to count. ### Development goals — the capability you build Development goals target a capability you don't have yet. Guidance from Deel and Factorial draws the line clearly: performance goals chase immediate, measurable output on short cycles, while development goals build capability over longer horizons and are judged on ability gained rather than results delivered. Applying output logic here produces two classic failures: the unscoreable version — "[improve my communication skills](/knowledge/communication/develop-communication-skills/)" — which gets marked however your manager happens to feel that week, and the fake number, a learning goal with a percentage bolted on to satisfy the form. A development goal works better in two parts: the activity and the demonstration. The activity is the concrete thing you do — recurring examples across these sources include completing a conflict-resolution course within the quarter, cross-training with another department, finishing training on a new system before it goes live, or volunteering to present to the team. The demonstration is where the new capability has to show up in real work, and it is the half people forget to write down. Picking the right one is harder than it sounds, because it means naming the capability that is genuinely weakest — and self-assessment on that question is unreliable in both directions. If you are about to be measured on a guess, it is worth [getting an outside read first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), so the goal you commit to is the one that actually needs the year. ### Stretch goals — deliberately out of reach A stretch goal is set above the level you are expected to reach, on purpose, to expand what you can do. HR guidance commonly repeats a convention of aiming for roughly 70% attainment, with full completion read as a sign the goal was set too low. That figure circulates as received practice rather than a documented benchmark, though — no primary study sits behind it in the sources that repeat it. Which makes it exactly the wrong thing to assume. Employees reasonably expect anything short of 100% to count against them, and in plenty of organizations it does. A stretch goal is only safe if your manager has agreed, before the period starts, both that it is a stretch and how partial completion will be scored. Without that conversation, it is just a target you are going to miss. ## What makes a performance appraisal goal usable Almost every source here runs on SMART — [specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound](/knowledge/setting-goals/smart-principles-examples/) — defined in nearly identical language from TechTarget to Mitratech, Trakstar, and Omni HR. Its dominance is practical rather than evidential: a form needs goals that can be scored at year end, and SMART is the shortest test for whether a sentence can be scored at all. That is what it is good for, and the limit is worth naming. SMART tells you whether your goal is writable, never whether it is the right goal. Two patterns in the published examples are worth avoiding outright. The first is the compliance-flavored goal. Indeed's list of work evaluation goals includes 98% attendance across three consecutive review cycles, arriving on time for every meeting and shift for six months, and completing all tasks on or ahead of schedule. Those read as remediation targets — the kind a manager sets for someone who has an attendance problem. Volunteering one about yourself puts a problem on the record that nobody had raised. The second is the borrowed metric: lifting a number out of a goal bank written for a different function. A goal you cannot influence is worse than a vague one, because at year end you are explaining a miss that was never yours to control. ## Agreeing your goals with your manager Nearly every source names alignment with team or company objectives as a criterion — it is the "relevant" in SMART, and it is explicit in the OKR-style guidance from Culture Amp and Leapsome. Almost none of them say how to find out what those objectives are. In practice there is one route, and it is [a conversation with your manager](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-align-expectations-with-your-manager/). Fifteen minutes before you fill anything in is usually enough. What is the team being measured on this period, and which parts of it does your work touch? Bring a rough draft rather than a blank page — people react to a proposal far more readily than they generate one. Settle two more things while you are there: what evidence will count at the end, and how a partly-completed goal will be read. Both are cheap to agree now and expensive to argue about in twelve months. One last thing. There is a whole body of [self-appraisal guidance](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-appraisal/), from Indeed, PerformYard and others, with a clearer structure than the goal banks offer: accomplishments backed by specific evidence, development areas named honestly, explicit alignment to team objectives, forward-looking goals for the next period. It is filed under "self-evaluation" rather than "goals," so people searching for goal examples often never reach it. ## The skills that make a review go your way Look back at what the hard parts actually were. Not one was about wording. They were about judging your own work honestly, knowing what your manager is under pressure to deliver, and being willing to open a conversation rather than fill in a box. Those are things people get better at, and they carry well beyond appraisal season. **Working with Your Manager** does most of the work here. The appraisal is the visible artifact of an expectation-alignment problem: agreeing goals that are challenging but achievable, making your results visible, and getting clear on where your own decisions end. Preparing properly, staying future-focused, and asking for what you want are what turn a review from a verdict you receive into a conversation you shape. None of that means treating your manager as an opponent — it works precisely because the relationship is a working partnership with a shared purpose. **Building Self-Awareness** stands behind choosing the goal in the first place. It is being able to tell what you are genuinely good at from what you are merely competent at, and hearing evaluative feedback as information about your work rather than a ruling on you. It also has an active half: asking for specific, future-focused advice instead of waiting for the annual summary. That is what produces a goal that fits, and no template list can do it for you. **Influence** — getting it and applying it — decides who holds the pen. Whoever drafts the goals shapes the evaluation, and volunteering to prepare is the ordinary, unglamorous move that puts you in that position. The preparation matters too: knowing what your manager is being judged on makes an ambitious goal easy for them to approve rather than something you have to defend. This is credibility and initiative, not politics. None of the three stops mattering when the form is submitted. They are three of the twelve work skills that surface in every review cycle you will ever have, and the free Job Skills Test shows [where all twelve stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) — which tells you what to build next, not only what to name this period. ## Where this leaves you Some of this may already describe how you work — noticing what your manager is under pressure to deliver, or hesitating over a goal because it didn't feel like yours to promise. Those instincts are the raw material, and every one of these skills is a behavior rather than a fixed feature of who you are. You can get better at all of them without becoming a different person at work. They also compound. The further into a career you go, the more of your standing rests on conversations like this one going well, and the less anyone hands you a template for them. Worth noticing, too: you came looking for examples and read through to how to agree them. Most people copy the first list they find and close the tab. What is left is finding out which of these skills already work for you. ## See where your work skills stand The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the twelve work skills covered here — the three above among them — and it takes about 7 minutes. You answer a short set of questions and get a read on where each of your skills stands: which are strong, which are holding you back, and which would make the biggest difference to your next review conversation. Take it before you fill in the form. It is a better starting point than any goal bank. ## 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? Performance appraisal goals examples across four types - performance, behavioral, development and stretch - plus how to choose goals worth being measured on. ### 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/performance-appraisal-goals-examples/ Preferred summary: "Performance appraisal goals examples across four types - performance, behavioral, development and stretch - plus how to choose goals worth being measured on." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.