The Goals List Is the Wrong Place to Start

Here’s something I've said to managers so many times that it has become something close to a reflex: during year-end reviews, don’t discuss with your employee how well they performed relative to their goals.

The reaction is usually the same. A pause. A slightly puzzled look. And then, almost always: "But what else would I talk about?"

It's a fair question. The goals were set at the beginning of the year precisely to provide a record of what the person was expected to accomplish. They're sitting right there in the system, organized and timestamped. Pulling them up and working through them one by one feels like doing the job properly.

The problem is that goals and accomplishments are different things, and the year-end review is better served by the latter.

Goals are directional. They are not scorecards.

This distinction matters more than it might initially seem. Goals are set at a point in time, under conditions that will change, with targets that are necessarily estimates. A well-designed goal-setting process should encourage people to aim high — which means some degree of shortfall is not just possible but expected. That's not a failure of the process. It's the process working correctly.

But here's what a goals-based review does to that logic: it converts a directional tool into an evaluative one, and in doing so creates a perverse incentive. If my goal was 50 and I reached 60, and your goal was 80 and you reached 70, a goals-based review creates the implication that I outperformed you. I didn't. You set a more ambitious target, fell short of it by a smaller margin in absolute terms, and almost certainly contributed more. The review has measured the wrong thing.

I have my own term for stretch goals, by the way. I call them goals. The modifier "stretch" has always struck me as a concession to the sandbagging that goal attainment reviews reliably produce. When employees know their year-end conversation will be organized around whether they hit their targets, the rational move is to set targets they're confident they can hit. A review process that effectively penalizes ambition trains people out of the instinct to reach, and that’s among the most expensive outcomes a performance management system can produce.

What the accomplishments frame does differently

The reframe is this: use the goals list in your preparation — it's often the most valuable input you have — but when it comes to writing the review and delivering the conversation, shift to the language of accomplishments. Not "you had a target of 80 and reached 70" but "here is what you achieved this year, and here is why it mattered."

That shift changes what you look for, what you write, and ultimately what the employee hears.

A review built around accomplishments tends to surface things the goals list misses entirely. The pivot that wasn't planned but turned out to be critical. The problem that got solved sideways, through a collaboration that nobody anticipated. The contribution that didn't fit neatly into any stated objective but mattered enormously to the team or the organization. Goals, by definition, capture what was anticipated at the start of the year. Accomplishments capture what actually happened — which is almost always a richer and more accurate picture of the person's contribution.

The conversation changes too. A goals-based review, however well-intentioned, carries the structure of a verdict: here is what you said you would do, here is what you did, here is the gap. An accomplishments-based review carries the structure of a reckoning — a genuine attempt to understand and articulate what this person did for the organization over the course of the year. Those are different experiences for the employee, and they produce different levels of engagement, trust, and motivation going forward.

The practical objection

The most common pushback I hear is about accountability. If we're not evaluating people against their goals, how do we hold them accountable for anything?

The answer is that the goals still matter — they're just doing a different job. They set direction at the beginning of the year and provide context for evaluating accomplishments at the end. An employee who achieved 70 against a goal of 80 isn't let off the hook by the accomplishments frame. The manager still has full visibility into the gap and can address it directly. What the accomplishments frame removes is the structural incentive to sandbag on the front end in order to look good on the back end.

It also removes the perverse dynamic in which an employee who set an ambitious goal and fell short is penalized relative to one who set a conservative goal and hit it. That dynamic, left unchecked, is one of the more reliable ways to drain the ambition out of an otherwise high-performing team.

A note on language

The shift from goals to accomplishments is, at its core, a Choose Your Words problem. "You had a target of 80 and reached 70" tells the employee how they measured against a number. "You led the reorganization of the client delivery process in Q3, which reduced turnaround time by 30% and was cited by two clients as a reason they renewed" tells them what they contributed and why it mattered. Both statements might describe the same year. Only one of them reflects it accurately.

The goals list is a valuable input to that second kind of statement. It is a poor substitute for it.