# Performance Review Goals Examples - and How to Set Yours Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-goals-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-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 Real performance review goals examples across delivery, development and behavior - plus the eight steps that get your goals agreed, resourced and remembered. ## Key facts - Title: Performance Review Goals Examples - and How to Set Yours - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Influence - Primary keyword: performance review goals examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-review-goals-examples/ ## What this page covers - Real performance review goals examples across delivery, development and behavior - plus the eight steps that get your goals agreed, resourced and remembered. - Practical guidance for performance review goals examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation The form is open, the box is headed "goals for the coming period," and nothing you type sounds like something you would actually commit to. Most people solve this by borrowing someone else's wording, which is why performance review goals examples get searched for in the first place. It works better to borrow the shape. A good goal names one specific outcome, a way to measure it, and a date. Cutting revision rounds on your work by 15% by mid-year is a goal. Completing your CRM training before the quarter closes is a goal. Three or four of them, mixing delivery and development, is a normal set. The wording is the easy part. The harder part is choosing goals your manager will agree to, resource, and still remember six months from now — and that starts well before you open the form. ## The eight steps that produce good performance review goals The order matters more than it looks. Each step supplies the raw material for the next, and the steps most people skip are the first three — which is why the goals that come out of the form so often feel borrowed. ### 1. Collect the year's evidence before you write anything Start two or three weeks out, with what happened rather than what should happen next. Pull together the projects you delivered, the numbers attached to them, the dates, and anything you were thanked for in writing. This is not the review yet; it is the material every later step draws on. A goal invented from a blank page describes an imaginary version of your job — a goal written on top of a real record describes the one you will actually be measured in. ### 2. Read the feedback you already have for the real gap Now go back through the developmental feedback you have received: the corrections, the "one thing I'd suggest" comments, the note in the margin of a draft. You are looking for a pattern that shows up more than once, because that is the gap worth naming as a goal. Indeed's guidance on self-review goals is direct about this — your strengths, weaknesses and the feedback you already have are the foundation for goals worth setting at all. Guessing at a weakness produces a goal you will quietly abandon. If you come up short here, and plenty of people do because early-career roles often get very little feedback, a structured assessment can stand in for the [feedback you never got](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-ask-for-feedback/). A quick read of [where your work skills stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) gives you something to react to instead of a blank page, and writing a development goal against a specific pattern is far easier than writing one against a vague sense that you could do better. ### 3. Check what your team and the company are being measured on Before you draft anything, find the departmental and organizational objectives for the coming period. Indeed's guidance recommends reviewing your company's goals for the next several months or year alongside your department's, so your own objectives ladder up to something the organization already cares about. The mechanism is approval, not politeness: a goal connected to a target your manager is accountable for gets time, budget and attention. An unconnected one gets a nod and then starves. ### 4. Draft three or four goals — the examples, by category Now you write. Nearly every well-ranked guide on this topic — Indeed, Upwork, ClearCompany, Profit.co — organizes goals around SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. The acronym matters less than what it buys you: a measurable goal is one both of you can settle at the next review without argument. "Improve my communication" gives your manager nothing to credit you for twelve months later, which is how real work becomes invisible. The examples in circulation fall into four recognizable categories, and a good set draws from more than one: - **Business or delivery goals** — increase website traffic by 20% over the next six months; reduce customer support response time to 24 hours by year end; save 10% on operating costs by the end of the fiscal year. - **Quality and reliability goals** — complete assigned deliverables on time and within scope for at least 90% of projects, tracked with a weekly self-tracker; reduce revision rounds on submitted work by 15% by mid-year by adding a personal quality check before anything is shared. - **Development goals** — improve public speaking by volunteering to deliver two team presentations this quarter; develop as a mentor by supporting one junior colleague through their first project. - **Behavioral goals** — improve punctuality by arriving at every meeting five minutes early for the next three months. Two details are worth stealing from how these are written. Mix your horizons: short-term goals show visible movement inside this review period, a longer-horizon goal sketches where you are heading, and a review can hold both. And write in numbers and dates rather than adjectives. Culture Amp's guidance on self-reviews makes the same point about accomplishments, recommending concrete phrasing — contributing to three cross-functional projects and receiving positive peer feedback on two — over a self-assessment adjective. A goal with a number and a date reads as a commitment; the same goal as an aspiration reads as a wish. ### 5. Pressure-test each goal before you propose it In the same session, run every goal through two questions. Is it challenging enough that hitting it is worth crediting? And can you reach it with the time, access and authority you actually have? The most common failure is committing to an outcome someone else controls. If your goal depends on a budget you cannot approve or a client decision nobody can forecast, you have written a hope with your name on it. Rewrite it as the part you genuinely own — not "win three new enterprise accounts" but "run discovery calls with twelve qualified prospects by the end of Q2." Keep the set short, too: Culture Amp and PerformYard both point toward a compact self-review, a handful of [quantified accomplishments](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-assessment-performance-review/) and one or two development goals rather than a long list. ### 6. Send the draft ahead, then propose it in the conversation A few days [before the review](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-reviews/), send your draft goals to your manager. If they read them cold in the room, the conversation becomes an evaluation of your proposal. If they arrive having read them, it becomes a joint edit — a different meeting entirely. Then propose them out loud rather than waiting to be asked, and expect changes. When your manager reshapes a goal, you are learning what they are under pressure to deliver, which tells you where your effort will count next year. ### 7. Agree the support, the authority and what "done" looks like This is the step the example lists never mention, and it decides whether a goal survives. For each goal, name what it needs from the organization: the training, the tool access, the introduction, or the latitude to decide without checking first. The manager-facing literature treats this as obviously collaborative. People Managing People instructs managers to involve the employee in goal-setting and map out action steps and resources together; Workhuman frames the close of the conversation as confirming goals, timelines and the resources needed to succeed. Those instructions are written for the person on the other side of the table, so most employees never learn they were invited to shape any of it. You are allowed to ask for what a goal requires — and to settle what "achieved" will look like, so neither of you is reconstructing it from memory next year. ### 8. Put it in writing and set the check-in rhythm Within a week, confirm the agreed goals in writing — a short summary email is enough — and get a [recurring one-on-one](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/one-on-one-meetings/) in the calendar. Workhuman and Quantum Workplace describe the same follow-up pattern for managers: document the takeaways, send a summary, schedule check-ins weekly, biweekly or monthly, and adjust when circumstances change. If your manager does not run that pattern, run it yourself. The default failure mode is a goal agreed in March and never mentioned again until the next review, when both of you are trying to remember what it meant. The check-in prevents that, and it gives you standing permission to renegotiate when the work shifts underneath you — which it will. ## The skills that make this conversation easier to handle Read back over those eight steps and notice how few are about goal-writing. Gathering evidence, reading feedback honestly, asking for what a commitment needs, keeping something visible over months — the form is the smallest part. Underneath sits a handful of ordinary work skills, all of them learnable rather than fixed. **Working with Your Manager** does most of the work here. Reviews are one of its core situations: preparing properly, influencing your own evaluation, staying future-focused, and asking for what you want instead of hoping it gets noticed. It also covers what step 7 depends on — treating the relationship as a partnership, agreeing where your decision-making authority actually sits, and keeping your results visible between reviews rather than reconstructing them the week before one. **Building Self-Awareness** is what makes step 2 possible. It covers receiving developmental and evaluative feedback well — understanding it first, adding your own view, then reflecting — and proactively asking for specific, future-focused advice rather than waiting for the annual verdict. It also covers identifying what you are genuinely good at, as opposed to merely competent at, which is usually where the goal worth setting is hiding. **Influence**, in the sense of earning it and applying it, explains why steps 6 and 7 work. Taking the initiative includes being willing to ask, and setting the agenda by volunteering to draft something first — exactly what arriving with written goals does. Preparing well means understanding what is in it for the other person, so your goal connects to something they need. And persisting, by following up on commitments, keeps a goal alive between March and December. The free Work Skills Test measures all twelve of the work skills the framework covers, these three included, so you can see [which skills to build next](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) instead of picking a development goal by instinct. Wherever a gap turns up, it is in something you can practice — not a verdict about you. ## What this looks like a few reviews from now Some of this may already be how you operate. If you keep a running note of what you delivered, or have ever asked a manager what "good" would look like before starting something, you are further into this than the blank goal box suggests. These skills compound. Each cycle where you arrive prepared, propose your own goals and follow up on them makes the next one less like an assessment and more like a planning meeting you are running. And they count for more, not less, as your responsibilities grow — the higher the stakes on a commitment, the more it matters that you chose it deliberately. You have already done the part most people skip: you came looking for the reasoning behind the examples, not only the examples. What is left is knowing which skills to put your attention on first. ## See where your own skills stand The one thing left is finding out which of these are already strong for you and which are worth a development goal. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills that takes about seven minutes: you answer a set of questions and get a profile showing where you stand across all twelve, the three above included. It is the fastest way to turn "I should improve something" into a goal you can write down and defend. **Get my skills profile** Free, and short enough to finish before your next meeting. ## 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? Real performance review goals examples across delivery, development and behavior - plus the eight steps that get your goals agreed, resourced and remembered. ### 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-review-goals-examples/ Preferred summary: "Real performance review goals examples across delivery, development and behavior - plus the eight steps that get your goals agreed, resourced and remembered." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.