You're setting someone's goals and the ones you set never quite get done
This is for you if you set someone a goal that matters, and it never quite gets done. You nudge, you follow up, the deadline slips again. From where you sit it looks like effort, or focus, or not caring enough.
The reflex is to push harder. Repeat the goal, raise the stakes, check in more often. When it still slips, the easy story is that the person is not trying.
Here is what is usually underneath. A goal set on the business need alone, with no thought for how this person is built, gets quietly outranked. Everything that fits their grain gets done first. The goal that cuts against it slides, however much it matters.
You are not stuck with that. Before the next goal, open this person's results. Read their The Five Types of Work, near the back, for their primary type and its complement. Then read their top few in Discovering Your Strengths.
Now do one thing. Keep the target exactly as it stands, and change the road to it.
Most goals can be reached more than one way. Pick the road that runs through the work this person is best at. Where one of their top strengths fits, put it at the front of the ask. Framed that way, the goal reads as their kind of work, not a chore bolted on.
Say the target is cutting the team's missed handoffs to near zero. Keep that number. Change who it is written for.
- An Analytical person hears a problem to crack: which two steps cause most misses, and how to fix them.
- An Influential person hears people to bring along: get the 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.
