You’re sitting with an employee for their performance review. Neither of you has looked at the goals you set during the previous annual review. The employee has made good progress toward it, but there’s one serious problem.
It’s completely irrelevant.
Whether your business strategy changed or the team’s priorities did, the employee worked toward something that didn’t contribute to any broader objectives. That’s the problem adaptive goal setting aims to prevent.
Adaptive goal setting helps organizations revisit, refine, and realign goals throughout the year rather than only address them in performance reviews. It’s closely related to agile goal setting, goal alignment, OKRs, and continuous performance management.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to implement this goal-setting framework and how performance management software can help.
Key takeaways
Adaptive goal setting is an approach to creating, reviewing, and adjusting goals. It’s a flexible framework that allows goals to evolve based on real-time business needs, performance data, and changing priorities. In many organizations, goals are static. They’re set at a yearly or quarterly interval and are rarely updated. That means an employee’s goals could become completely irrelevant after just a few months, with no system in place to update them.
Adaptive goals stay relevant. But that doesn’t mean they’re vague. Adaptive goals should be clearly defined, following a goal-setting methodology like OKRs or SMART goals.
Adaptive goal setting allows you to set goals that reflect both an employee’s performance needs and overall business strategy, even as these things change. Goals are reviewed regularly, whether that’s in weekly 1-on-1s between managers and employees, monthly alignment sessions, or more informal check-ins. Adaptive goals are part of broader performance conversations, essentially serving as metrics to represent the progress employees are making toward their priorities.
Traditional goal setting is very different. It happens either annually or quarterly (usually during a performance review), and goals aren’t reviewed until the next time they need to be set.
That means they usually quickly become outdated as priorities shift, both the company’s and the employee’s. The link between these goals and an employee’s day-to-day work becomes tenuous, meaning they don’t contribute to keeping them motivated or engaged.
Most organizations set goals a few times a year and never revisit them. While that leads to a consistent, reliable process that’s easily replicated throughout your org chart, it means they can’t adapt. You know your organization needs to adapt to business shifts, but the goals you set for employees need to, as well. Just like your broader strategy, these goals need to adapt to:
If your goals don’t have the flexibility to account for these shifts, then employees might work toward priorities that no longer matter after your broader strategy changes. Worse, their goals might actually conflict with others.
If you’re not sure whether your current goal-setting methodology works or not, you should look for the following signs that a change is needed:
Adaptive goals don’t just help maximize employee performance; they help keep everyone aligned as they work.
Adaptive goal setting and agile goal setting have one element in common; they both allow goals to be reviewed and improved on regularly. Beyond that, they have some key differences.
Adaptive goal setting describes a characteristic of more effective goals. Agile goal setting is more specific, borrowing elements from agile project development. In a way, agile goal setting is a type of adaptive goal setting.
Typically, goals are time-bound, with shorter timelines between two and six weeks. Employees and managers alike regularly look at performance, adjusting goals or changing their approach as needed. Tasks and work are kept transparent by default, and managers help employees focus on a certain number of goals so they’re not overwhelmed.
Adaptive goals are a broader performance management approach. You might use agile goals to set them, but that isn’t always the case.
Agile goal setting gives you many of the elements adaptive goals require:
Adaptive goals need a strong framework, and that framework needs to promote alignment at every level of your organization. That makes OKRs one of the best frameworks for setting adaptive goals.
OKRs have two parts: objectives and key results. An objective is what you hope to accomplish. Key results are the quantitative metrics you use to measure progress toward that objective.
OKRs are easier to measure than traditional, vague goals, but they’re also naturally suited to maintaining alignment between teams and across your org chart—essential for adaptive goal setting.
Objectives clarify the broader direction of each goal, aligning managers and employees on what needs to get done, while key results show progress. By regularly reviewing OKRs, managers can compare progress with shifting business priorities, making adjustments as needed.
Because they’re more robust than traditional goals, OKRs give you enough detail to know what’s working, what needs to change, and how that needs to change. Tradeoffs become more visible, allowing teams to make better choices with every goal.
The broader organization’s performance is rooted in the day-to-day work of its employees. But without goal alignment or clear communication around those goals, it can be hard for employees to know how their work contributes to a broader strategy or for managers to know how to coach their teams.
OKRs allow for better alignment and communication around that alignment. And, by enabling adaptive goal setting, they give you what you need to maintain that alignment.
Making the shift from traditional goal setting to adaptive goal setting is a strategic commitment, but one that will pay dividends in the long run.
Goals need to align with broader business priorities, and that’s no less true with adaptive goals. Before you start setting goals for teams and employees, ensure you’ve identified your most important business outcomes and clearly communicated them to the organization at large.
Be clear about which priorities can change over time and which ones are non-negotiables. This certainty will contribute to the goals employees set, giving them clear guidelines on how they can adapt.
Use a goal-setting framework like OKRs or SMART goals to create goals that are measurable, realistic, and flexible. Giving each goal clear success metrics allows managers and employees to stay aligned on progress and tie that progress to broader initiatives. A clear timeline is essential as well.
Keeping goals flexible isn’t about removing accountability; it’s about staying responsive to evolving circumstances. Goals should be adapted when they go against the organization’s evolving priorities or don’t serve the employee as well as when they were first set. Not just because an employee is struggling to achieve them.
Progress toward goals should be used as a metric for an employee’s performance, signaling when they’re exceeding expectations and when they need additional support. Managers should check in on goals frequently, with the exact cadence depending on the kind of work you’re doing and the employee’s seniority.
A junior employee might benefit from weekly, face-to-face check-ins with their manager while a more senior contributor might only need a biweekly 1-on-1. All employees benefit from better goal tracking, however, whether that’s manually or with performance management tools.
Whatever the cadence you choose, these check-ins allow teams to detect misalignment earlier, updating goals as needed. Manager enablement is also crucial here, ensuring managers have the coaching skills needed to help employees make progress.
Check-ins shouldn’t just be for reviewing progress; managers should use them to identify blockers and opportunities to coach their teams. Examples of questions managers can use to do this include:
Goals shouldn’t be adjusted because an employee’s frustrated with them or a manager doesn’t think they’re a good fit anymore. When you assign success metrics to your goals, you can use data as a signal for whether a goal should be adapted or scrapped. Examples of data that can trigger these adjustments include:
Goals need to be properly documented, especially when they change. Teams need clarity on why goals are changing, how they’re changing, and how success will be tracked. Where you document these things depends on how your teams work.
Managers should learn to document:
Documenting your goals and the way they evolve avoids confusion and increases trust throughout your teams.
When first pivoting toward adaptive goal setting, watch out for these common mistakes.
Adaptive goal setting means employees and managers can update goals to better reflect evolving business priorities. That doesn’t mean goals should be constantly changing. When goals change too often, employees can’t make any meaningful progress toward them. Only update goals when it’s clear they’re no longer relevant, like after a shift in the market or the organization’s strategy.
Flexible goals aren’t hands-off. All goals need clear owners, a defined timeline, and measurable outcomes. Goals shouldn’t be any less rigorous just because they’re supposed to be flexible. Every time you update a goal, make sure timelines, expectations, and owners are clear.
Goals need to be documented, especially when they’re changed. Whenever you update a goal, document the reason for the change. That way, performance conversations and other conversations don’t start with managers asking why there wasn’t any progress made toward an outdated goal.
Managers and employees should have ongoing performance conversations rather than a single annual review. Goals should be part of these conversations. Quick check-ins, 1-on-1s, and team alignment sessions should all be used as opportunities to discuss goals. This is called continuous performance management, a framework for discussing and aligning on performance year-round.
Adaptive goals are more relevant over time than static goals, which means employees are consistently working toward priorities that matter. That means your performance management efforts track with actual work and actual objectives, rather than feeling disconnected from an employee’s day-to-day work. Connecting adaptive goals with performance management leads to:
Performance management involves multiple conversations and check-ins throughout the year so managers and employees stay aligned on progress. Adaptive goals can be discussed and modified in each of these conversations.
Adaptive goals more accurately represent the work employees have to do than their static counterparts. Employees and managers stay aligned over time. Employees understand how their goals contribute to a broader objective and managers have more opportunities to coach them as they work toward goals. Manager effectiveness increases as they’re more involved in these conversations over time, rather than once a year.
Instead of being the only element of your performance management efforts, performance reviews become a summary of ongoing conversations, since managers and employees align on goals throughout the year.
15Five is dedicated performance management software that connects goals, performance conversations, manager enablement, and employee growth in a single platform. Its capabilities include:
With 15Five, teams stay aligned as priorities change, since everything is documented in a platform accessible to leadership, managers, employees, and HR. Built-in manager enablement and learning resources support managers in coaching employees as they work toward their goals. Performance conversations are better structured and recorded, making them more actionable. Finally, employees can clearly see the link between their goals and the organization’s priorities.
Want to see what 15Five can do for your teams? Book a demo.
Adaptive goal setting is a framework for setting goals that can change and evolve over time to better reflect market shifts or updates to your business strategy.
Traditional goal setting typically happens annually or quarterly, with little room for goals to change. Adaptive goal setting creates more opportunities for discussing and updating goals, whether that’s in short check-ins, 1-on-1s, or team alignment sessions.
Not exactly. Agile goal setting is a specific framework that borrows concepts from agile project management, like short planning cycles and iterative reviews, to ensure goals stay relevant over time. Adaptive goal setting is a broader approach, and agile goal setting can be used to support it.
Goals should be adjusted when they need to be better aligned with business strategy changes, broader market shifts, resource changes, missed milestones, or new opportunities.
OKRs (objectives and key results) allow teams to set goals that are naturally more aligned organization-wide, with clear metrics for measuring progress. This gives goals more rigor while keeping them flexible.
Goals should never be so rigid that they don’t support employees in contributing to changing business priorities. Adaptive goal setting allows employees and managers to have ongoing conversations about goals, adjusting them as needed when they’re no longer aligned with broader objectives.
Just like other goals, adaptive goals should be clear, measurable, and time-bound, while having clear owners. These goals support broader performance management objectives, since they lead to regular conversations rather than a single annual performance review.
Want to see how 15Five can support you in setting and tracking adaptive goals? Book a demo.