You're setting someone's goals and you want them to actually get done
This is for you if you set someone a goal that matters and it never gets done. You nudge, you follow up, the deadline slips. From where you sit, it starts to look like they are not trying, or do not care.
The reflex is to push harder: repeat it, raise the stakes, check in more. But a goal set on business need alone, with no thought for how this person is built, slides down the list. Work that fits them gets done first. The one that cuts against them slides.
You are not stuck. Before the next goal, open this person's results. Read their The Five Types of Work for their main type and its complement, then their top few in Discovering Your Strengths.
Now do one thing: keep the target as it is, but change the road. Run it through the work they are best at, and put a top strength first in the ask. Now it reads as their kind of work, not a chore.
Say the target is cutting missed handoffs to near zero. Keep the number. Change who it is written for.
- An Analytical person hears a problem to crack: which steps cause most misses, and how to fix them.
- An Influential person hears people to bring along: get upstream teams to own the new handoff.
- An Operational person hears a system to run: the checklist and cadence that keep every handoff on time.
Write the reframed goal in one sentence and bring it to your next one-on-one. Same finish line, a road they are built to run. That is the version that gets done.
