25 leadership goals for work, counted in what you do for your team

Leadership goals examples

These work for a first team lead and for a manager of managers, because each one counts something the leader does.

• Ask every person on your team what they want to learn this year, and write it down.
• Thank one person a day, by name, for something specific, for 30 working days.
• End 20 meetings on time, each one with written next steps.
• Ask your team for anonymous feedback on your leadership twice a year.
• Put one team member's idea into practice each month, and say whose it was.

Leadership goals for managers: one-on-ones and delegation

One-on-ones and delegation are where a manager's week goes, so they are the easiest place to start counting.

• Hold a 30 minute one-on-one with each person every 2 weeks for a quarter.
• Let the other person bring the first topic to every one-on-one for 3 months.
• Delegate one task a week that you used to do yourself, for 12 weeks.
• Write down the owner and the due date of every task you hand off.
• Hand one recurring meeting to someone on your team to run.

Communication goals for leaders

Communication goals count the times the team heard the why, not only the what, and talking to a whole team is a short speech that public speaking goals help you practise.

• Send a short written update to the team every Friday for a quarter.
• Explain the reason behind every big decision in writing before it takes effect.
• Ask "What am I missing?" at the end of every decision meeting for a month.
• Hold an open question time with the whole team once a month.
• Give every piece of hard news face to face or on a call, never only in a chat.

Team development and coaching goals

Coaching is teaching on the job, and teacher goals has feedback and routine ideas that carry over from a classroom to a team.

• Write a growth plan with every person on your team in the first quarter.
• Give each person one specific piece of feedback on their work every week for 8 weeks.
• Set up 6 skill swaps between team members this year.
• Give each person one project to lead of a kind they have never led before.
• Train someone to cover your job, then take 2 weeks off to test it.

Personal leadership goals

Personal goals keep the leader learning, and the ones about your own next step belong with career goals.

• Make every small decision within 24 hours for a month.
• Read 6 books on management this year and try one idea from each.
• Block 2 hours a week with no meetings to think and plan.
• Meet a mentor for 30 minutes once a month for a year.
• Take every day of holiday you have this year, with work email off.

What is a good leadership goal?

A good leadership goal counts what the leader does, because most of the result happens in other people. A review of 35 years of goal research, done mostly in work settings, found that specific, hard goals lead to higher performance than being told to do your best. "Be a better leader" is a do your best goal. "A one-on-one with each person every 2 weeks" is not.

The same review gives a leader two more things to use. Goals worked whether they were assigned, set by the person, or set together. And goals worked better with feedback on progress than without it: if the goal is 30 trees a day, people need to know how many trees are down. A leader's goal is often someone else's growth, so count your part of it: the plan written, the feedback given, the project handed over.

Tell one peer what you are counting. A peer who checks in once a month is an accountability partner, and research on progress monitoring found the effect was larger when progress was reported to someone else.

How to track leadership goals

Log each one-on-one, each piece of feedback and each handoff on the day it happens. A review of 138 studies found that people who monitored their progress reached their goals more often, and that recording it beat keeping it in your head.

One-on-ones, feedback and tasks handed off are amounts that add up. Fridays with an update sent are a day count. Most of these fit in a quarter, which is about the length of a 90 day challenge.

A team grows too slowly to see from one week to the next. A honeycomb that fills one cell per one-on-one shows the work while the team is still growing.

Frequently asked questions

What are some examples of leadership goals?

Hold a 30 minute one-on-one with each person every 2 weeks. Delegate one task a week that you used to do. Send a written team update every Friday. Write a growth plan with every person in the first quarter. Each one counts what the leader does.

How do I write leadership goals for a performance review?

Name an action, a number and a date, then the result it serves. For example: a one-on-one with each person every 2 weeks this half, so that every person has a written growth plan by June. The count is yours, and the result is the team's.

What are good leadership goals at work if I am not a manager?

Lead without the title. Run one team meeting a month, help one new colleague through their first 90 days, and explain the reason behind your own proposals in writing. Each one is a count, and each one is leadership.