In addition to your own focus on goals, employees should also have a clear understanding of what they’re attempting to accomplish. Managers have the responsibility to help employees with this understanding as they set work goals. You can be more effective at helping employees set goals if you use the following eight suggestions:

• Identify an employee’s key job tasks. Goal setting begins by defining what it is that you want your employees to accomplish. The best source for this information is each employee’s job description.

• Establish measurable, specific, and challenging goals for each key task. Identify the level of performance expected of each employee. Specify the target toward which the employee is working.

• Specify the deadlines for each goal. Putting deadlines on each goal reduces ambiguity. Deadlines, however, should not be set arbitrarily. Rather, they need to be realistic given the tasks to be completed.

• Allow the employee to participate actively. When employees participate in goal setting, they’re more likely to accept the goals. However, it must be sincere participation. That is, employees must perceive that you are truly seeking their input, not just going through the motions.

• Prioritize goals. When you give someone more than one goal, it’s important to rank the goals in order of importance. The purpose of prioritizing is to encourage the employee to take action and expend effort on each goal in proportion to its importance.

• Rate goals for difficulty and importance. Goal setting should not encourage people to choose easy goals. Instead, goals should be rated for their difficulty and importance. When goals are rated, individuals can be given credit for trying difficult goals, even if they don’t fully achieve them.

• Build in feedback mechanisms to assess goal progress. Feedback lets employees know whether their level of effort is sufficient to attain the goal. Feedback should be both self-generated and supervisor-generated. Feedback should also be frequent and recurring.

• Link rewards to goal attainment. It’s natural for employees to ask, “What’s in it for me?” Linking rewards to the achievement of goals will help answer that question.

Based on E. A. Locke and G. P. Latham, Goal-Setting: A Motivational Technique That Works! (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984); and E. A. Locke and G. P. Latham, “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation,” American Psychologist, September 2002, pp. 705–17.