# Performance Goals for Administrative Assistants - and How to Build Your Own List Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-goals-list-of-goals-for-administrative-assistant/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-goals-list-of-goals-for-administrative-assistant.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 performance goals lists for administrative assistants are generic. Here are the ones worth borrowing, plus eight steps to build a list that fits your job. ## Key facts - Title: Performance Goals for Administrative Assistants - and How to Build Your Own List - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Time Management, Influence - Primary keyword: performance goals list of goals for administrative assistant - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-goals-list-of-goals-for-administrative-assistant/ ## What this page covers - Most performance goals lists for administrative assistants are generic. Here are the ones worth borrowing, plus eight steps to build a list that fits your job. - Practical guidance for performance goals list of goals for administrative assistant - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation A performance goals list for an administrative assistant works best when it covers four kinds of goal: efficiency goals with a clock on them, such as email response time; quality goals, such as error rates in the documents you produce; service goals, such as how satisfied the people you support say they are; and development goals, such as a certification or an automated workflow. Choose two or three, not ten, and agree them with your manager before the cycle starts. Finding examples is not the hard part. The hard part is working out which of them describe your actual job, in a role where most of the output is other people's convenience and very little of it leaves a number behind. ## What makes a performance goal work in an administrative role Start with the thing the templates rarely say out loud. Guidance published by Connect, an executive assistant recruiter, warns managers not to evaluate an assistant against the criteria they would use for a sales role or a project manager: an assistant's success is enabling other people to be effective, not hitting individual targets of their own. A good administrative goal measures friction you removed from someone else's work — the meeting that did not have to be rescheduled, the document that came back clean, the request that did not need three follow-ups. The mechanics are conventional. Indeed's guide to administrative assistant performance goals describes them as objectives tied to administrative tasks that improve the efficiency of company processes, written in SMART form — specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound — and set so they are both realistic and challenging rather than trivially easy. Its own illustration: if the office is cutting spending, your goal is to cut those costs by a stated percentage. The most reusable example anywhere on this topic is an email one. Business Management Daily's SMART goals for assistants include reducing internal email response time from four hours to two within 60 days by putting an email organization system in place; other published lists set the benchmark as a response inside two hours for 95% of messages. Look at the shape rather than the number: a current figure, a target figure, a deadline, and the method you will use to close the gap. Almost any part of an administrative job that touches a clock can be written that way. What the lists cannot do is tell you which goals belong to you. A borrowed goal fails the moment your manager reads it, either because it measures something nobody in your office cares about or because it commits you to a year of effort on a habit you already have. That second one is worth ruling out early: an honest read of [what you already do well](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) tells you which parts of the job need a goal at all — and the parts that do turn out to be learnable rather than fixed. ## How to build your performance goals list as an administrative assistant ### 1. Read the review form before you write a single goal Ask HR or your manager for the form your review will actually use, and reread the comments from the last cycle. Everything downstream depends on it: the form tells you which competencies your employer already measures, and therefore which of your goals will land somewhere visible. Do it as soon as the goal-setting window opens. ### 2. Spend two weeks noticing where the work snags You cannot set a target without a baseline, and support work does not generate its own data. For two weeks, keep a rough log: emails that sat longer than they should have, meetings moved at short notice, documents returned with corrections, requests you accepted without ever pinning down the deadline. That log is where every number in your final list will come from. ### 3. Ask what "good" looks like, from both directions Have one short conversation with your manager, and if you support several people, ask two of them as well. Advice written for managers is consistent on this point: they are told to ask their assistant what they want to achieve and help shape it into measurable objectives, rather than handing goals down from above. So the conversation is expected, and arriving with a draft you want reactions to is entirely normal. It also surfaces mismatches early — the task you have been polishing that nobody values, and the one causing quiet irritation that has never been raised with you. ### 4. Turn each snag into a baseline, a target, and a date Now convert. Take one item from your log and write down where it stands today, where it should be, by when, and what you will change to get there. Business Management Daily's calendar example does all four in a sentence: introduce a confirmation step 24 hours before every executive meeting, and cut rescheduling and no-shows by 30% over two months. The SMART examples collected by Develop Good Habits work the same way on documents — settle on one consistent format for minutes so people can find things, circulate notes within 24 hours, and reduce technical errors in the materials you produce by 7%. Goals in that form usually originate in a real complaint, which is what makes them credible in a review. ### 5. Balance the list across the four types Two or three goals is the working number, and they should not all be the same kind of goal. The recurring examples across the published lists fall into four groups: - **Efficiency:** internal email answered within two hours for 95% of messages; a 24-hour confirmation step that cuts meeting reschedules by 30%. - **Quality:** one standard minutes format, circulated within 24 hours; a 7% reduction in technical errors in the materials you produce. - **Service:** a 90% stakeholder satisfaction rating within 45 days, which shifts the measure from work completed to work that met expectations. - **Development and ownership:** an advanced Excel certification plus three new spreadsheet automations by year end, for a 25% gain in data-management efficiency; identifying administrative workflows that AI-enabled software can partly automate, and documenting the time saved; or reaching an 85% utilization rate on delegatable tasks within 90 days — the goal that moves you from doing administrative work to running it. Guidance for managers suggests co-creating two or three development goals in particular, each with specific actions, timelines and success measures. Those change what your job is, rather than how fast it runs. ### 6. Agree the list with your manager, and settle what you can decide alone Take the draft to your manager and expect it to change. Ohio University's performance planning guidance tells employees to review goals with their supervisor and modify them as needed, discussing priorities, expectations and how the goals are worded. The wording matters, because a vague goal will be read generously by you and strictly by whoever assesses it. Use the same conversation to agree something the lists never mention: what you are free to decide on your own in service of each goal. A goal to cut meeting churn is unachievable if you cannot decline a booking without asking first. ### 7. Set up the tracking on the day you agree the goals Not in month eleven. Indeed's guidance suggests a simple spreadsheet holding each goal, the steps to reach it, the completion date and the result you are aiming for; keep your own progress notes and any feedback you receive in it as the period runs. Support work is forgotten quickly, including by the person who did it, and a review conversation without evidence turns into a conversation about impressions. ### 8. Check in at the midpoint and renegotiate what has gone stale Many employers now run quarterly or monthly check-ins alongside the annual review so that goals stay current, and where goals live in a performance platform, managers refer back to your updates at review time. Use one of those check-ins to say what has changed. A goal that stopped being relevant in March should be renegotiated in June, not quietly defended in December. ## The skills behind a goals list that holds up Read back through those eight steps and notice how few of them are really about goals. Most are conversations, judgment calls about what deserves your attention, and small decisions about how visible your work is. **Working with Your Manager** carries most of the weight here. It covers the partnership side of this: aligning expectations rather than guessing at them, agreeing how much you are authorized to decide, setting goals that are challenging but still achievable, and making results visible to someone who cannot see most of what you do. It also covers the review itself — preparing properly, influencing your own evaluation instead of receiving it, keeping the discussion future-focused, and asking for what you actually want. **Time Management** is the substance of most administrative goals, whatever they end up being called. The part that moves the numbers is the intake: before accepting a task, pinning down who is asking, what exactly is wanted, when it is genuinely due rather than "ASAP", and what would count as done. Add the ordinary discipline of prioritizing by importance rather than volume, handling small items in batches, and — once you have the credibility for it — saying no clearly and with a reason. **Influence** is what turns a competent assistant into the person who runs a process rather than services it. It is built by delivering consistently and becoming known for something specific, and by taking initiative: volunteering to organize the thing nobody has organized, understanding what the people whose work you unblock actually need, and following through until something is genuinely in place. That is what the delegation and automation goals above are really measuring. Only one or two of these can realistically become a development goal this cycle. Between them and the nine others in the same set, it takes a few minutes to [score yourself on all twelve](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), free, which gives you something more defensible than a hunch to bring into the conversation with your manager. None of the twelve is fixed; they respond to practice, which is exactly what makes them reasonable things to put a date against. ## You have more control over this list than it looks Some of this may already be how you work. An assistant who notices that meetings keep moving before anyone else complains about it has already done the observation step; what tends to be missing is writing it down somewhere a manager can see it. That is a habit rather than a disposition. Nobody starts out knowing how to turn "I keep the office running" into a number and a date, and you can learn it across a couple of review cycles without becoming a different kind of colleague. It also matters more as you go. The further a support career runs, the more progression depends on evidence rather than goodwill, and the people who can show what they changed are the ones handed the wider brief. Thinking about your goals now, before the form lands, is already the part most people skip. ## Start by seeing which skills to build first Which leaves one decision: where to put the development effort. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your own work skills. It takes about 7 minutes, shows your results the moment you finish, and gives you a read on all twelve of the skills this article has been circling — working with your manager, managing your own time, and building the standing that gets administrative work noticed among them. Treat it as step zero. Take it before your next goal-setting conversation, see which two or three would make the biggest difference to how your job actually runs, and let that shape your list instead of a template written for someone else's office. ## 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 performance goals lists for administrative assistants are generic. Here are the ones worth borrowing, plus eight steps to build a list that fits your job. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Time Management, 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/time-management.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-goals-list-of-goals-for-administrative-assistant/ Preferred summary: "Most performance goals lists for administrative assistants are generic. Here are the ones worth borrowing, plus eight steps to build a list that fits your job." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.