# Self Performance Review Goals: Examples and How to Pick Yours Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-performance-review-goals-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-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 Self performance review goals examples across five categories - performance, development, behavioral, career and weakness - plus how to choose the right one. ## Key facts - Title: Self Performance Review Goals: Examples and How to Pick Yours - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Setting Goals - Primary keyword: self performance review goals examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-performance-review-goals-examples/ ## What this page covers - Self performance review goals examples across five categories - performance, development, behavioral, career and weakness - plus how to choose the right one. - Practical guidance for self performance review goals examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation Most of a self-review is manageable until you reach the box that asks what you plan to work on next. [The accomplishments section](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/self-performance-review-examples/) you can reconstruct from your calendar. The goals section asks you to commit, in writing, to something your manager will read before they sit down with you — which is exactly why people go looking for examples first. A self performance review goal is a short, specific commitment for the period ahead, and the workable ones fall into five kinds: performance goals, development goals, behavioral goals, career goals, and goals that answer a weakness you have already named. Deciding which kind you are writing makes the sentence itself much easier. That choice, not the wording, is where people actually get stuck — and it is the part the long example lists tend to skip. ## The five kinds of self performance review goals Search this term and you get volume. Status.net publishes 60 examples, Marlee 100, Klaar more than 100, PerformYard 110. The quantity is not the problem; having no basis to choose between a hundred sentences is. Underneath the lists, though, the sources converge — Teamflect, Peoplebox, People Managing People and ThriveSparrow all sort goals into the same small set of categories, and those categories are far more useful than the samples. They differ in one thing that matters: what counts as proof at the end of the period. ### Performance goals These target a measurable result inside the responsibilities you already hold — a target reached, a turnaround time cut, a backlog cleared. Sources tie them directly to what the company already measures, which is what makes them easy to write and easy to assess. The evidence arrives inside the review period, and it is a number or a delivered thing rather than a description of effort. Their weakness is that they are only as good as your control over the outcome. If the number depends on a team decision, a budget, or a client you cannot influence, you are committing to something you may not be able to deliver. Write these where you genuinely own the lever. ### Development goals These build capability rather than output: a certification, a tool you currently need someone else's help with, a kind of work you have not been trusted with yet. Sources place them inside a longer-horizon development plan, and that horizon is the point — success may not show up as results during the period at all. That makes them the most commonly misjudged kind. "Complete a relevant certification within six months" is a real, checkable commitment. "Become better at data analysis" is not, because nothing tells you when it is done. If you write a development goal, name the thing you will be able to do at the end that you cannot do now. ### Behavioral goals These are about how you work with other people rather than what you produce — speaking up earlier in meetings, raising a disagreement instead of going quiet, giving a colleague feedback at the time rather than three weeks later. Several sources frame them as the behaviors an organization wants to see because those behaviors drive the results. There is no natural metric here, which is why they so often collapse into vagueness. What rescues them is specificity of situation: name the recurring moment and the changed behavior in it. "Improve communication" says nothing. "Raise concerns about scope in the planning meeting rather than afterward" is something you and your manager can both recognize when it happens. ### Career and growth goals These are about direction rather than this period's work — scope you want, exposure you are missing, [a role you are moving toward](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-ask-for-a-promotion/), or the shape of the job itself. They show up as a distinct category across sources, and they are the kind most often left out of self-reviews entirely. The reason is that they feel presumptuous. They are also the only category that asks something of your manager rather than only committing you: access to a project, a seat in a meeting, a piece of work currently held elsewhere. That is not a weakness of the category — a review is one of the few structured moments where such a request is expected. Leaving it out means the one person who could act on it never hears it. ### Goals that answer a weakness This is the category the guides push hardest. Indeed's guidance recommends setting goals against the weaknesses you identified earlier in your self-review, on the reasoning that it shows commitment to improving. It is sound advice and it is easy to follow, which is why remediation goals fill so many review forms. It is also worth using deliberately rather than by default. A review made entirely of goals that patch gaps quietly defines you by those gaps, and it spends the whole period ahead on the things you are worst at. One weakness goal, chosen because it genuinely blocks you, reads as judgment. Four of them read as apology. The harder question is which of your weaknesses is actually costing you something — and that is difficult to answer [from inside your own head](/knowledge/setting-goals/strengths-and-weaknesses/), which is why it can help to [check which areas are genuinely yours](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you commit one to writing. These are learnable areas, not fixed limits, so what you find is a starting point rather than a verdict. ## How to choose yours instead of borrowing one The categories narrow the field. Turning them into your goals takes four moves, and only one of them is about wording. **Start with last period's goals, not a blank page.** Both Lattice and UC Davis Human Resources advise working through the previous period's goals one at a time: did you achieve it, what specifically resulted, and if not, what blocked progress and what did you do about it. This is the most useful method in the entire genre and it is missing from almost every example list. It also solves your credibility problem — a new goal that visibly follows from a named obstacle reads as thinking, while a goal that arrives from nowhere reads as filler. **Write the outcome, not the activity.** Culture Amp and Lattice both make the same correction: say what changed because of the work, not what the work was. Vague statements are simply skipped by the reader. For a goal specifically, this gives you a test you can apply to your own sentence — if you could mark it complete just by doing the activity, there is no outcome in it. Attending a communication workshop is attendance. Presenting at the monthly review without notes is an outcome. **Use SMART to check the sentence, not to choose it.** [Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound](/knowledge/setting-goals/smart-criteria-for-goals/) is the organizing framework in most of the top results, and it does one job well: it turns a vague intention into a testable one. It cannot tell you which intention was worth having. That is why applying SMART to a borrowed example produces a well-formed goal that still has nothing to do with you. **Find out what your manager is being measured on.** Nearly every source tells you to align your goals with company goals; none explains how an individual contributor is supposed to know what those are in practice. There is no clever answer here — you ask. A goal your manager can connect to something they are accountable for gets resourced. One they cannot connect to anything competes with everything else on their plate. This is also the reason to treat the form as a proposal to a specific person rather than an entry in a system: the same goal succeeds or fails depending on whether the person reading it agrees it matters. ## What makes the goals section easier to write Notice what the four moves above have in common. None of them is really about goal-writing. Working out which of your weaknesses is worth naming, judging what you are actually good at, and putting a request to your manager in terms they can act on are separate abilities — and they are the reason two people with identical work histories produce very different reviews. **Working with Your Manager** is the one doing most of the work here. The self-review is your best structured chance to influence how you are evaluated and to set expectations for the period ahead: prepare properly, stay future-focused, make your results visible, and ask for what you want rather than waiting to be offered it. Goals that are challenging but achievable are a negotiation with a partner, not a promise to a grader — and the more you treat the relationship that way, the more the form starts to feel like an opportunity rather than a test. **Building Self-Awareness** is what supplies the raw material. Every credible goal starts from an honest read of what you are genuinely good at rather than merely competent at, and where your blind spots sit. That read comes from feedback — taking it in, adding your own view of it, reflecting on it, and asking for specific, future-focused advice rather than waiting for the annual verdict. It also explains why writing about yourself feels exposing: you are working with material you rarely have to state out loud. **Setting Goals** supplies the filter the example lists lack. A review cycle's six-to-eighteen-month window is exactly the planning horizon worth working in, and the question it puts to you is whether a goal points where your work actually has energy. Prefer goals inside your strengths zone over goals that patch weaknesses, and let direction emerge from what the work has taught you rather than from what you assume you should want. Goals absorbed from other people's expectations are precisely why copied examples read hollow — and why they get quietly abandoned by March. Where each of these three currently stands for you is measurable, and so are the nine others in the same set of work skills. Getting [a clear picture of your work skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before your review means walking into the conversation with something specific to discuss rather than a form you filled in alone. ## Goals you would actually want to hit Some of this may already be how you work — the colleague who knows what their manager is measured on, or who asks for feedback in March rather than waiting for December, is usually not doing anything mysterious. If parts of the four moves felt familiar, that is worth noticing. The parts that did not are the interesting ones, because none of them is fixed. Knowing which weakness to name, or how to put a request to your manager, are things people learn by doing them a few times, and they stay yours afterward without requiring you to become a different person at work. That matters more with each review cycle, not less — the goals you write get read by more people and shape more of what you are given as your responsibilities grow, and the reading you bring to them is what turns an annual form into something that moves you. You have already done the part most people skip. Reading about how to choose a goal, rather than pasting the first plausible sentence into the box, is the entire difference between a review that changes your year and a review that fills a field. ## See where your work skills stand The one thing left is finding out which of these is actually your gap right now. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. It takes about 7 minutes and shows you where you stand across all twelve — including the three above — so you can see which ones would make the biggest difference to the goals you are about to write, and to the conversation that follows them. **Get my skills profile** Free, 7 minutes, no account needed — 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? Self performance review goals examples across five categories - performance, development, behavioral, career and weakness - plus how to choose the right one. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Setting Goals. ### 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/setting-goals.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/self-performance-review-goals-examples/ Preferred summary: "Self performance review goals examples across five categories - performance, development, behavioral, career and weakness - plus how to choose the right one." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.