# Work Performance Goals Examples: How to Choose and Agree Yours Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/work-performance-goals-examples/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/work-performance-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 A good work performance goal needs a metric and a mechanism. Eight steps for choosing, wording, and agreeing goals your manager will actually accept. ## Key facts - Title: Work Performance Goals Examples: How to Choose and Agree Yours - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Setting Goals, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: work performance goals examples - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/work-performance-goals-examples/ ## What this page covers - A good work performance goal needs a metric and a mechanism. Eight steps for choosing, wording, and agreeing goals your manager will actually accept. - Practical guidance for work performance goals examples - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation A good work performance goal names one specific outcome, a way to measure it, a realistic deadline, and how you actually plan to get there. Most published examples give you the first three and quietly skip the fourth, which is why a copied goal can look perfectly acceptable on the form in March and mean nothing by November. If you are looking at an empty goal field with a submission deadline this week, that gap is the whole problem. Examples are easy to find. Choosing between them, wording yours so it holds up, and getting your manager to agree to it is the part almost nobody publishes. ## How to use work performance goals examples: eight steps The example lists are input, not output. Below is the sequence that turns them into two or three goals you can defend in the conversation with your manager and still point to at [review time](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/performance-reviews/). The steps run in order, and the early ones matter most, because they decide what you are choosing between. ### 1. Find out what your goals are measured against Before you write anything, find two things: what your team and your manager are accountable for this period, and what the form actually asks for. Number of goals, categories, submission deadline. This ordering is not optional. Guides like Primalogik and JOP both stress that individual goals should not stand alone, but link to team goals and the organization's wider objectives. The practical consequence for you is blunt: a technically flawless goal about something nobody upstream cares about will still read as a weak goal. "What is my team being measured on this year?" is a more useful starting question than "what should I improve?" ### 2. Take stock of what you actually did last period Your raw material is your own record: what you delivered, what went well, what got harder than expected, and any feedback you have already been given in one-on-ones. Work from that in preference to inventing improvement areas from a blank page. Most people are vaguer about their own strengths than they expect to be, and a goal built on a wrong guess wastes a whole review period. That is fixable in a single sitting: getting [an outside read on your strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you draft gives you something more specific than memory to work from. ### 3. Draft more candidates than you need, then cut Notice the mismatch between what the internet supplies and what your form wants. PerformYard publishes 60 examples, Deel more than 60, Peoplebox more than 55, TalentHR and Culture Amp 30 each, Factorial 24. Your review form probably asks for two to five. A sixty-item bank is not an answer to your problem. It hands the problem straight back to you. So use the lists deliberately. Write down six to eight candidate goals across the categories that recur everywhere: productivity and efficiency, project delivery, communication, learning or certification, customer satisfaction, cost, and how you run or contribute to meetings. Then cut to the two or three that both matter upstream and play to something you are [genuinely good at](/knowledge/setting-goals/strengths-and-weaknesses/). Worth noticing while you cut: a large share of published performance goals are not about output at all. Factorial's list opens with enhancing communication skills, meeting project deadlines, improving conflict resolution, and developing collaborative skills. These are people-side goals wearing performance clothing, and they are often the ones that change most about how your year goes. ### 4. Give each surviving goal a metric and a mechanism Now make them specific. Essentially every top result on this topic organizes around the [SMART criteria](/knowledge/setting-goals/smart-criteria-for-goals/), specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, including Deel, Omni HR, TalentHR, PeopleGoal, Peoplebox, and ClearCompany. Treat that as the format your goal has to survive, not as guidance on which goal to pick. The detail that separates a strong goal from a copied one is the mechanism, the clause that says *how*. Compare a bare target with the shape Peoplebox and Sage use in their better examples: increasing a win rate by a set percentage **by** producing short product-focused videos with the content team, or hitting an on-time delivery rate **using** a weekly self-tracker to monitor progress against deadlines. The mechanism is what makes the goal reviewable in month three instead of judgeable only in month twelve. It is also the antidote to the failure mode self-review guides warn about most. Indeed and Culture Amp both make the same point about goals and self-assessments: general statements and vague wording are what sink them, and concrete details and measurable results are what make a contribution visible. ### 5. Pressure-test how ambitious each one is Hold each goal up against two things: your actual workload, and how much of the outcome is genuinely within your control. A goal that depends on three other teams delivering is not really your goal. Aim for challenging but achievable. Too safe and it will not count for much; too heroic and you spend the year quietly avoiding it. If the honest answer is that a goal only works if something in your workload changes, that is not a reason to soften the goal on paper. It is the thing to raise in the next step. ### 6. Agree the goals with your manager This is the step the example banks cannot do for you, and it is the one that decides everything. Bring your draft to [a one-on-one](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/one-on-one-meetings/) and treat it as a conversation rather than a submission. You have permission for this. Workleap and Primalogik, both writing to managers rather than to you, describe goal setting as something managers and employees craft together, and specifically advise managers to open a two-way discussion about priorities, workload, and potential roadblocks. Your manager has quite possibly read something similar. Coming in with a draft and a question is closer to what they expect than a completed form appearing in the system. Two things are worth settling before you leave the room: what "done" looks like for each goal, and what you can decide on your own along the way without checking back. Both are much cheaper to agree now than to argue about later. ### 7. Decide where the evidence will live A goal nobody sees between agreement and review is a goal you will be reconstructing from memory in the last week. Pick one place to log progress and one rhythm for mentioning it, and set both up the same day the goals are agreed. This is how the process is designed to work. Descriptions of the performance cycle from JOP and monday.com both assume employees provide updates as they go, which managers then refer back to at review time. A running note in your one-on-one document is usually enough. The point is that the evidence accumulates on its own rather than being assembled under pressure. ### 8. Revisit the goals before the review Look at your goals at least once mid-period. Priorities move, projects get canceled, and a goal that made sense in the first quarter can be irrelevant by the third. When that happens, renegotiate it openly rather than letting it lapse. A goal you and your manager agreed to change is a normal part of the cycle. A goal you quietly stopped working on is something you will have to explain. ## The skills behind a goal that holds up Read back over those eight steps and notice how few of them are about writing. Deciding what is worth committing to, judging your own performance honestly, and negotiating an agreement with the person who will later evaluate you are the parts that carry the weight, and they are the parts that get easier with practice. **Working with Your Manager** is where most of this actually happens. Performance goals are not a private writing exercise; they are an agreement with the person who signs off on your evaluation. That means aligning expectations rather than guessing at them, setting a level of ambition that is stretching but reachable, agreeing how much you can decide on your own, and shaping the content of your job instead of accepting whatever lands in it. It also covers what comes later: making your results visible during the period, and going into the review prepared, future-focused, and clear about what you want next. **Setting Goals** is about direction rather than wording. A review cycle covers six to twelve months, which is roughly the planning horizon that works best anyway, and the useful question is whether these particular goals point somewhere you want to go. That means choosing goals in the zone of what you are naturally good at rather than only patching weaknesses, letting the goals follow from what the work has already taught you, and checking that what you sign up for is something you value and not just something that sounds ambitious. **Building Self-Awareness** supplies the input for both. Picking goals requires an honest read of where you currently stand, and that comes from two places: looking closely at how you work and what results follow, and using the feedback you have already been given instead of inventing improvement areas from nothing. Asking your manager for specific, forward-looking advice is often the fastest way to turn a fuzzy sense of "I should get better at something" into two goals you can actually defend. The **Work Skills Test** is free and takes about seven minutes, and it will show you where these three currently sit for you, along with the rest of the twelve work skills the framework treats as learnable rather than fixed. If you want to know [which of these to build on](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you commit to a period's worth of goals, that is a reasonable place to start. ## Before you fill in the form Some of this may already describe how you work. If you have ever pushed back on a goal that felt wrong, or kept your own record of what you delivered, you have been doing parts of it without calling it a skill. None of these are things you either have or do not have. They are behaviors, which means they get better with use, and nothing about building them requires you to work in a way that is not yours. Goal setting simply happens to be one of the few moments each year when they are all visible at once. They also compound. The more responsibility you take on, the more of your work is agreed in conversations like this one rather than assigned, and the more it matters that you can shape what you are measured against. The fact that you are reading about how to choose goals rather than copying the first example you found already puts you ahead of most people filling in the same form this week. ## See where your work skills stand The only thing left is to find out which of these skills you are already working with and which one is worth your attention this period. The **free** Work Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your workplace skills. It takes about seven minutes, it covers all twelve skills, and it gives you a straightforward picture of where each of yours currently sits, so you can pick a goal that is actually pointed at something. One pass is all it is. There is nothing to keep up afterward. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** Free to take, and it runs about seven minutes. ## 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? A good work performance goal needs a metric and a mechanism. Eight steps for choosing, wording, and agreeing goals your manager will actually accept. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Setting Goals, 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/setting-goals.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/work-performance-goals-examples/ Preferred summary: "A good work performance goal needs a metric and a mechanism. Eight steps for choosing, wording, and agreeing goals your manager will actually accept." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.