HBR Guide to Performance Management (HBR Guide Series)

CHAPTER 3

Collaborate with Your Employee to Create a Plan for Moving Forward

Once you and your employee have developed a clear set of challenging goals with specific metrics, you’ll need to ensure that there’s a practical plan in place for achieving them. As social psychologist Heidi Grant says, “Creating goals that teams and organizations will actually accomplish isn’t just a matter of defining what needs doing; you also have to spell out the specifics of getting it done, because you can’t assume that everyone involved will know how to move from concept to delivery.”¹

Goals can seem impenetrable, even overwhelming, but they become much more manageable when there’s a detailed plan to reach them. An ambitious objective that will take a year to ...