Goal Setting
Team-scale goal setting — what each person on your team is aiming for this cycle, and how it all ladders up to where the organization is headed.
How Goals Cascade
A leader sets goals at two altitudes, not one: the team's own goals, and each direct report's individual goals. Both should ladder up — a direct report's goal should visibly serve the team's, and the team's should visibly serve the org's.
Organization — the company's own goals for the period.
Team — the team's goals, which should visibly serve the org's. See OKRs for how this part of the cascade actually works.
Direct Report — each person's own goals for the period, which should visibly serve the team's. This is what the rest of this page is about.
The Cadence
Direct report goals don't live in a single annual document — they move through the same cadence already built out under Self's Reflection Practice, just run with another person instead of just yourself.
Year — the big goal: where this person wants to be a year out, and what the business needs from their role over that stretch. Written the same way Set Goals frames any longer-term goal — SMART, not a vague intention.
Quarter — OKRs for the quarter, reviewed the same way Quarterly Review zooms out: what actually landed, what slipped, what got learned.
Month — the lightest, most frequent touchpoint: Monthly Log, run together instead of solo. Its existing Core Goals and Growth Goals prompts already split almost exactly into Performance and Professional Development — see below.
Performance vs. Professional Development
Every goal in that cadence falls into one of two categories, and a direct report needs both every cycle, not just one.
Performance
Tied to the business — what this person is accountable for delivering in their current role. Mirrors Monthly Log's Core Goals.
Professional Development
Tied to the individual — the skill, capability, or career step they're building toward next, independent of this cycle's output. Mirrors Monthly Log's Growth Goals. When one needs more than a line — a specific, meaningful gap to close — that's where Development Plans picks up.
Performance goals are easy to default to exclusively — they're the ones a scorecard already tracks. A direct report with strong Performance goals and no Professional Development goals is still coasting toward a plateau; it just takes longer to show up on the scorecard.
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