This week in pm-clinic: mystery of personal goals
This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum:
In the company I work for, we have personal development discussions between manager and developers twice a year. One part of the discussion is goal setting for the next half year period, and I’m a new manager doing this for the first time.
Obviously, we want the goals to be measurable, realistic, specific, and all that. I am not that interested about general properties of good goals as I am confident (ok, arrogant :) about those. Instead, I want to see real examples of goals that have worked well or well written goals that failed. Not team goals, but individual goals.
The whole personal goal thing is shrouded in mystery – no one ever shows real examples from real reviews for real people, and I hoped pm-clinic might have some people willing to anonymize goals from people on their team, prior teams or share some of their own goals.
I realize that goal setting is dependent on context and I don’t expect that looking at other people’s goals would be transferable as such. Instead, I hope to get new ideas and food for thought in this subject that is new to me, and for that reason good and bad examples (with light commentary) would be valuable. Thanks.
Goals are nice, but are never measurable. What you need is a plan.
Plans are things you’ll do that will meet your goal. They have all the good attibutes you’re looking for: measurable, specific, etc.
Personally, I want to know more about Hibernate. That’s my goal. My plan is to:
1. read a book about it and give a presentation to the team
3. Apply skills above to map a bidrectional many-to-many relationship and present solution in code review.
4. Research transaction options and give a presentation/recommendation.
The goals that are most relevant to me at the moment are about personal interactions. I’ve found that technical skills and experience are usually covered in the work that we all do, and the feedback in that area can be rather routine: it feels like we are just paying lip service to the objectives.
I might keep the more personal ones out of the formal arena; privately, or with a colleague who I trust, I’ll agree something like:
* reduce the emotional heat when there are technical disageements, clashes of priority etc
* specifically, take time to listen and think before speaking
* measureably, avoid the discussion breaking up too early (happened twice or three times this year so far, used to be monthly)
Hope that helps.