Your Growth Is Your Responsibility — Making Goals That Work

I was talking to one of my fellow employees recently, and something came up that genuinely surprised me.

They were having a hard time setting goals for themselves.

This wasn’t because they were unmotivated,  they didn’t care about their work, or because they lacked ambition. Rather, it was because the work they were doing did not feel easily measurable. A lot of it involved clients. A lot of it depended on other people. A lot of it had unknowns. A lot of it required collaboration, feedback, decisions, handoffs, approvals, or movement from someone else before the work could actually progress. From their perspective, setting a goal felt risky.

What if they committed to a measurable outcome and then could not achieve it because the outcome was not fully in their control? What if they were held accountable for a metric that depended on a client responding, a team member completing their part, or a decision being made above them? What if the goal made them look like they had failed when the reality was more complicated than that?

Sound familiar? 

The reality is that we aren’t always taught how to build strong goals, and so those muscles aren’t always as strong as we’d like them to be. Not everyone has run a business or managed a team. Not everyone has had to think about KPIs, identifying gaps, building roadmaps, or tracking high-level progress. Not everyone has had to sit down and ask, “What are we actually trying to achieve? What are we measuring? Why are we measuring it? What is inside our control? What is outside our control? What is the outcome? What is the behaviour? What is the leading indicator? What is the evidence that progress is happening?” And if nobody has ever taught you how to do that, then yes, goal setting can feel like someone has just handed you a corporate noose and asked you to invent a trap for yourself.

So let’s make this simple.

GOAL SETTING 101 If you are in an organization and you have been asked to set goals, the first thing you need to understand is whether the goal is top-down or bottom-up. 

TOP-DOWN GOALS

A top-down goal is a goal that comes from the business. It is a sales target. A delivery target. A client satisfaction score. A utilization rate. A number of calls. A response time. A project margin. A team metric. A reporting requirement. It is something your manager, leadership team, client, or organization has determined matters. 

In this case, your job is not to invent the outcome. The outcome has already been identified. Your job is to understand the gap between where things are now and where they need to be, and then determine what has to change in order to close that gap.

This is where people often make the mistake of thinking they are being measured only on the end result. But success here means not only looking at the end result. It means also looking at the conditions required to achieve it.If you are manager working within a top-down goal and your team is expected to improve delivery speed, the question is not simply, “Why are people not working faster?” The question is, “Do they have the skills to do the work? Do they have the tools? Do they have the information? Do they have clear priorities? Are the workflows helping them or slowing them down? Is there too much red tape? Are there too few checks and balances, causing rework later? Are people going in the wrong direction because alignment is weak? Are two people doing the work of six people while everyone pretends burnout is a time-management issue?” 

Answering those questions will show you where the gaps are between your team and the mandate they’ve been handed. From there, the goal becomes how to close those gaps.

If you are an individual contributor working within a top-down goal, your job is to understand what part of the larger goal you can influence and then set your individual goals around that influence. 

If the company wants better client satisfaction, for example, and you do not control every aspect of the client experience, that does not mean you cannot set a goal. It means you need to identify the part of the client experience you do touch. Maybe you can improve response clarity. Maybe you can reduce handoff confusion. Maybe you can create better documentation. Maybe you can follow up faster. Maybe you can surface risks earlier. Maybe you can seek to create better discovery questions so fewer misunderstandings happen later. 

The business outcome may be client satisfaction, but your goal might be to improve the behaviours, systems, or quality markers that contribute to client satisfaction within your role. This is how you take something that feels outside your control and make it goal-worthy. 

Again: You do not need to pretend you control everything. You simply need to identify what you control, what you influence, what you can observe, and what evidence would show that your contribution is improving something that contributes to the larger mandate. 

For example, “I want clients to be happier” is not a strong goal. “I want to reduce client confusion during onboarding by creating a clearer handoff process, tracking the most common clarification questions, and decreasing repeat questions over the next quarter” is much stronger. It connects to the business. It is observable. It gives your manager something to support. It does not require you to pretend you control the entire client relationship. It focuses on the part of the system you can actually affect.

BOTTOM-UP GOALS

On the other side of the goal equation we have bottom-up goals. 

A bottom-up goal starts with you. It comes from your own vision for your role, your future, your skills, your responsibilities, or the kind of work you want to be trusted with. 

Maybe you want to lead a team. Maybe you want to become a director. Maybe you want to move toward a C-level role. Maybe you want to work more directly with customers. Maybe you want to become the person who owns a specific function because right now only one person in the company knows how to do it and you can see that this creates risk. Maybe you want to become faster, more organized, more strategic, more technically capable, or more independent. All of those can become legitimate goals, but only if you translate them into something that matters inside the company.

Which is an important distinction that sometimes people miss. 

Your personal aspiration is the starting point, not the finished goal. “I want to be a leader” is not enough. “I want to develop the skills required to lead a team by taking ownership of weekly project coordination, improving my delegation and follow-up practices, and receiving feedback from my manager on readiness for people leadership” is much closer. Now the company can see the value. Your manager can see a measurable, defined path. The goal is not just about your identity or ambition. It is about capability, responsibility, and readiness. It connects who you want to become with what the organization needs from someone in that role.

The same thing applies to communication. “I want to become a better communicator” is true for a lot of people, but it is not a manager-ready goal. 

Better according to whom? 

Better in what context? 

Better how? 

If you want that goal to hold up, you need to connect it to a business or team outcome. Are projects being delayed because people misunderstand instructions? Are clients surprised by decisions because expectations were not clearly set? Are teammates asking repeat questions because written communication is unclear? Are meetings ending without decisions because nobody is confirming next steps? 

Once you know the problem, the goal becomes much stronger. 

You might say, “This quarter, I want to improve communication clarity in project handoffs by tracking instances where my message is misinterpreted, identifying patterns in where the confusion happens, and implementing a confirmation practice so that next steps, owners, and deadlines are clear before work moves forward.” That is a real goal. It still supports personal growth, but it is not floating around in self-improvement land. It is tied to execution.

A good workplace goal often does one (or more) of four things: 

• improves performance

• increases clarity

• builds capability

• reduces risk 

I recommend using this as a useful test whenever you are setting goals. If your goal does not do at least one of those things, it may still matter to you personally, but it may not yet be framed in a way your manager can support as a work goal. 

Wanting a promotion is not automatically a goal. Building the capabilities required for the next role is. Wanting to feel more confident is not automatically a goal. Taking on a defined responsibility, practicing a specific skill, and gathering feedback on your performance is. Wanting to be more organized is not automatically a goal. Reducing missed deadlines, improving preparation, creating a repeatable planning system, or decreasing the number of dropped handoffs is.

This does not mean every goal has to be cold, corporate, and soulless. I actually think the best goals often sit at the intersection of what a person wants and what the business needs. In that space, you can often find both inspiration and motivation in abundance. It’s also where a company can invest in someone in a way that makes sense to everyone involved. 

If you want to work more hands-on with customers, and the company needs stronger customer feedback loops, great. There is a goal there. If you want to develop leadership skills, and the team needs better project coordination, great. There is a goal there. If you want to learn a technical skill, and the company currently has a bottleneck because only one person can do that work, great. There is a goal there. 

The trick is not to abandon your personal aspirations. The trick is to translate them into business language without losing the human reason you care.

And yes, managers have a responsibility here too. 

Companies cannot tell people to set goals and then give them no context, no expectations, no definition of success, no support, and no feedback. That is NOT goal setting. That is a company pretending to care about goal setting. 

I like to call it “corporate theatre”.

Part of a manager’s job is to to help an employee understand what matters to the team, what the role requires, what the company values, and what evidence would show growth. A manager should be able to say, “Here is what readiness for the next level looks like,” or, “Here is where I see the gap,” or, “Here is the business problem this goal needs to connect to.” 

But the employee also has responsibility. You cannot wait forever for someone else to hand you a perfect roadmap. You need to figure out what you want. You need to articulate it. You need to ask what is required. You need to identify the gaps. You need to take action to close them.

I have encountered too many people over the years who are waiting for somebody else to tell them what they are allowed to go after in their own jobs. They do not get the growth they want, and then they immediately decide the company does not care about them. 

And sometimes they are right. 

Some companies do not know how to grow people. Some companies do not provide clarity. Some companies will not be the right place for you. 

But before you decide that is the story, ask yourself whether you have actually taken ownership of your own growth. 

• Have you articulated the role you want? 

• Have you asked what would be required to hold that role? 

• Have you identified the skills, knowledge, experience, behaviours, and credibility you would need? 

• Have you looked honestly at the gaps? 

• Have you created a plan to close even one of them? 

• Have you tied your aspiration to something your team or company actually needs?

This is especially important if you want to move into management. If you cannot do this for yourself, you are going to struggle to do it for other people. Management is not just giving people tasks and checking if they are done. It is helping people understand what success looks like, what growth looks like, what gaps exist, and what support is needed to move forward. 

If you want to lead a team, you need to be able to sit with someone else and help them turn a vague aspiration into a practical roadmap. You need to help them connect personal growth to team value. You need to help them see the difference between “I want to get better” and “Here is the behaviour, capability, or outcome I am going to improve, and here is how we will know progress is happening.”

And finally, you have to leave room for surprises. 

Goal setting is not magic. It is closer to a science experiment. Sometimes you think the gap is one thing, and once you start working on it, you discover the real issue is somewhere else. Maybe you thought you needed better time management, but the actual issue is unclear priorities. Maybe you thought you needed more confidence, but the actual issue is that nobody has defined the decision rights. Maybe you thought the team needed to work faster, but the actual issue is rework caused by weak intake. 

That does not mean you failed. It means you learned. It means you gained visibility. It means the next version of the goal can be smarter.

That, to me, is the real point of goal setting. It is not about inventing metrics to punish yourself. It is not about pretending you control things you do not control. It is not about reducing all human growth to a spreadsheet. It is about creating visibility, direction, and movement. It is about understanding where you are, where you want or need to go, what the business needs, what gaps exist, and what actions can be taken next.

Your manager should be a partner in that. Your company should create the conditions for that. But your roadmap is still your responsibility.

Know what you want. Understand what the business needs. Find the overlap. Define the gap. Take action. Learn from what happens. Adjust.

That is goal setting.

And honestly, anyone can do it.