One of the things I celebrate about my team is how different they are. So setting objectives has to be personal to them. I have regular 121s with them some formal, some informal. So every time I talk to them individually, my objective is to learn something new about them.
I remember in the past I made the mistake in my early managerial career of setting the same objective for my whole team of presenting an area of their expertise to the team…well not all of them were comfortable doing presentations, nor would they be. Their characters were entirely different, so I learnt to embrace that as a strength.
For me their individual objectives are about continuous improvement.
Some objectives I set are based around drawing up measures that focus on quality, effort and timescale thats unique to their projects and their work but getting them to come up with solutions, get team buy in and implement them.
Some objectives are about their ambitions, so if they want to learn something about new skills, giving them the space to do that but ensure they come back to the team and talk about what they found.
These objectives improve the individual, improve the teams results and hence become quite public wins. The last point I would mention is objectives are fluid, I don’t buy in to setting objectives for the year and thats that. Keep talking to your team, extend objectives, remove objectives, add objectives throughout the year. The reality is that some objectives with the best of intentions aren’t helping them and/or the team improve.