Everyone thinks they can tell a business objective apart from a personal development goal, right up until they’re sitting with someone watching them write one down. That’s when it gets interesting: the business outcome quietly moves into the personal development box, wearing softer language to fit in.
“Improve sales in the restaurant” is a phrase I see under personal development goals fairly often. It shouldn’t be there. It’s a business objective, describing what the business wants, not what the person needs to grow.
That distinction matters. Business goals are performance outcomes the organisation is chasing. Personal development goals are the skills, behaviours, knowledge or confidence someone needs to build. The two often get blurred together, but connection isn’t the same as sameness.
Business objectives versus personal development goals
Business objectives are tied to an outcome the organisation needs; they exist whether or not the individual grows as a result. Personal development goals are about building capability, and they exist for the individual. The measure of success is a behaviour you’ve changed, a skill you’ve developed, or a way of working you’ve adopted.
If we take the example of improving sales, the business goal might be to drive revenue in the restaurant or store by 20%. However, the personal development goal that sits underneath it could be something like: “developing the skills to coach team members to become confident at upselling and delivering a higher standard of customer service” One describes what the business wants, the other describes what the person needs to get better at. Both can be true at the same time, but only one belongs in the development plan.
Business objectives are:
- Reduce staff turnover across all sites from 68% to 55% by the end of Q3
- Increase like-for-like sales across all ten sites by 4% year on year
- Achieve 90% compliance across all locations on the new food safety audit framework by the end of the financial year
- Reduce average labour cost as a percentage of revenue from 34% to 31%.
Personal development goals are:
- Get more comfortable having difficult performance conversations without delaying or softening the message
- Build the habit of reviewing site-level profit and loss data weekly rather than waiting for monthly reporting
- Develop stronger coaching skills so that critical impact visits lead to improved performance rather than me fixing things myself
- Become more confident presenting to senior stakeholders by preparing and delivering at least three cross-functional updates in the next six months.
Language is a great indicator: business objectives look from the outside in. They contain the words improve, increase, reduce or achieve. Personal development goals are from the inside out and often start with words like develop, build, become, get better at, or learn to.
Where it gets a bit blurry is where you say something like: “I want to improve my ability to manage underperformance across my sites.” Is that a business objective? Not really – it doesn’t tell us what the outcome is. Is it a personal development objective? Well, it still doesn’t say what improving looks like in practice. So, I’d split it into two:
- Business objective: reduce the number of sites operating below the minimum performance threshold from four to one by the end of Q2.
- Personal development goal: have timely, direct underperformance conversations without avoiding or delaying – evidenced by completing all formal performance processes within the agreed timescales.
The importance of lag and lead measures
This is where the concept of lead measures becomes useful, because it helps people see that the behaviour and the result are genuinely different things, even when one drives the other. A lag measure is the outcome you’re trying to hit: your sales figure, your NPS score, your retention number. A lead measure is the behaviour or action that, if done consistently and well, gives you the best chance of hitting it.
Personal development goals, when written properly, look a lot more like lead measures than lag measures. They describe what a person is going to do differently, practise more deliberately, or build over time, and it’s that behaviour change that eventually moves the needle on the business result.
From experience, the cleaner question to start with is this: what skill, behaviour, capability, or confidence does this person actually need to develop?
Once you’re clear on that, you can absolutely link it back to the business outcome it supports, but the development goal itself should describe the growth of the person, not just the result the business wants to see.
This blog is an excerpt from a LinkedIn article by Lee Sheldon. Read the full version and learn why Big Rocks can be personal development goals too and discover the key lever in personal development goals: Business objectives vs personal development objectives: why the difference matters more than you think.
