How to set goals for, and with, employees

New year, new goals—and new strategies for setting them? Yes, please.

“I absolutely love goal setting,” Garima Shah, co-founder and president of B2B SaaS platform Biller Genie, said during a recent episode of HR Brew’s People Person podcast. But goal setting isn’t just up to HR leaders, or even people managers. “It’s really about letting the person who’s setting their goal have ownership over it. I think sometimes what we do as people managers and HR leaders is that we set goals for people and we think that we understand what they want and we take the words out of their mouth.”

Shah sat down with Kate Noel, SVP and head of people operations at Morning Brew, to discuss goal-setting frameworks and faux pas.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the biggest misconception about setting goals?

There’s often this misconception that the more goals the better, and that someone should go into the year with this huge list of things that they should achieve…There’s so many things that can be added to these goals, but if you just say, “There’s two things that no matter what I’m going to get done this year, max three,”...and those become your north star and everything that you’re doing is about that.

Why do you think we overshoot when setting goals?

I think humans have no concept of time…how often do you doom scroll and it’s 30 minutes later and you’re like, “What did I just do for the past 30 minutes?”...It’s not about how long this should take—it’s about how much better you can get towards it every single day…tiny micro changes that get you better and closer to your goal every day are so much more sustainable than these large sweeping, “I’m going to change everything today, right now, and for the future,” because your brain just cannot measure that construct of time in that way.

Should we be setting goals in tiny bits?

It should always be these little things. For example, I’ve had someone on my team say, “I want to become a better people leader.”...And it’s not like today they’re going to be a better people leader…But there’s little things. Like, okay, let’s break this up into a million segments: There is how to handle tough conversations. There is how to inspire people, how to public speak, how to set goals, how to have quarterly conversations, how to do one-on-ones. And let’s come up with these 30 different things. And if every week you can just learn a little piece of one of these things, how much better are you at the end of the year?

How granular do I need to get?

I personally believe that it depends on the goal itself, and it depends on how lofty that goal is. And the more lofty, probably the more granular…because it becomes so overwhelming so quickly. If you said, “Hey, I want to lose 50 pounds,” well that’s really lofty. If you said, “Well, okay, I’m going to lose 50 pounds in the course of three years, and this is what happens every month in order for that to happen.” It’s taking a lofty goal and making that much shorter.

Let’s talk about tracking goals. Something I always hear as an HR person is that we are beating a dead horse with checking in, tracking, and reminding people of the things they need to do. How can you track progress without the dreaded check-in ritual?

Let the person who is setting that goal take their own ownership…So let’s say that we set this goal that you want to be the top salesperson in the company by the end of the year…What do you think are the steps? What are the skills that you think that you need to get in order to do that? What are the specific weaknesses that we need to improve upon in order for you to get closer to that goal? And those become these micro goals, and it puts it in the hands of the person who’s setting the goal as opposed to the HR leader or manager. Because now they’re saying, “Oh, I see it. And if I did this…I know that that’ll make me better”...allowing people to have these micro wins, allowing people to say that, “Oh, I did this little thing and now I won because of it.” It just makes them more motivated to get to the next goal.

For more from this conversation, tune into the People Person podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, or watch it below.