HBR Guide to Performance Management (HBR Guide Series)

CHAPTER 2

Define Employee Goals—and Decide How They’re Measured

As a manager, you’ll take the lead on setting objectives for your team as a whole. Each team member will be working toward these overarching targets, but each individual should also have unique, personalized expectations of their own.

From a purely logical perspective, goal setting should be a top-down process that begins in company strategy and cascades down from the top ranks of the organization—from the president to the VPs to the directors, all the way down the line. This system helps ensure that the goals of any employee in an organization would support their manager’s team goals as well as the organization’s broader objectives.

But the traditional “cascading goal” model has ...