What Objective-Setting at Work Taught Me About Measuring My Own Growth
I’ve done my company’s objectives-setting exercise every year. And every year, I treated it like a box to check. Pick some goals, submit, move on.
This year, I was doing it not only for myself but for two juniors I work with. Spending more time on it than usual made me reflect on the process in a way I hadn’t expected. And it ended up teaching me something I needed to hear about my own life.
Shift 1: A manageable number of actions
The first thing that shifted was the structure itself. This year, we were capped at six intended actions, linked to two to four company priorities. That’s it. That constraint alone made this round so much better than the last, when I had seventeen actions on my list. I ended up with 3 objectives and 5 actions across. I felt motivated, not overwhelmed.
It reminded me of something my mentor shared early in the year: Chris Williamson, in a Diary of a CEO interview, touched on how we can only do about two meaningful things in a year. Chris warns of getting into what he calls “the buffet mentality” — having too many goals and achieving none, because real change demands a lot from our finite reserves of energy and attention.
Shift 2: Objective vs. Action vs. Success Metric
The other thing I got more intentional about was the difference between an action and a success metric. It sounds simple, but I used to blur all three together. Here’s how it plays out:
- Objective: What you want to achieve
(e.g., become more efficient in my job) - Action: What you will do
(e.g., develop AI-enabled workflows to do X, Y, Z) - Success Metric: How you will know whether it worked
(e.g., fewer errors causing rework)
Shift 3: Adding care into the process
Honestly, doing it once for myself still felt like completing a required task. Doing it for and with others changed how I saw the exercise. I had to think carefully about whether my juniors’ first drafts of their goals were too safe or too ambitious (even if only in the way they were articulated). I needed to make sure the goals actually served them and stretched them to grow. It mattered more because these goals would affect real people I cared about.
Shift 4: I “documented” the process
After the entire thing was done, my mentor asked me to do something extra: an AI-assisted documentation of the whole process. I recorded a brain dump of what went through my head building my own objectives, what I noticed reviewing my juniors’ drafts, what I liked and didn’t. Then I used an LLM to help turn it into a rubric I can use for making and evaluating goals going forward.
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That step of putting the process into words is honestly what made everything click. It moved this from something I did to something I understood a little bit better. The next time I do goal setting, I have something to refer back to.
Now onto a personal application
For a long while now, I’ve struggled with feeling stuck. I didn’t have a tangible way to tell myself I’m making progress, especially on days I feel like I messed up. I’ve leaned too heavily on external validation, and without someone else telling me I’m doing okay, I have no real read on whether I’m actually growing.
That’s a fragile way to live.
What the objectives exercise gave me, unexpectedly, was a model for changing that. About a month ago, I’d already narrowed down to two personal goals I want to pursue this year. Now I have a way to make them tangible and measurable — the same framework of clear objectives, specific actions, and defined success metrics — as an internal compass that doesn’t depend on how I feel that day, or on whether someone noticed.
Bonus POV
One thing my mentor said was important to include in the goal-setting rubric was to ensure my juniors’ goals cascaded to mine.
I’m sitting with a personal version of that, too! If my professional and personal goals are more connected than I’ve been treating them, work stops being just another thing I have to do. It becomes part of how I actually develop.
