Managing objectives | Documentation

An objective is a goal in Performance Blocks. Objectives have a scope, an owner, a status, and progress updates. They appear in summaries, on dashboards, and in conversations — and they connect day-to-day observations to the outcomes you actually care about.

This article covers the three objective scopes, the cascading model, the approval workflow, and how objectives link into the rest of the system.

The three scopes

Every objective has one of three scopes:

Org

Set by an org admin. Visible to everyone in the organization. Org objectives are typically a small number of high-level goals — three to five for a quarter or half — that frame what the whole organization is trying to achieve. Managers and employees cascade their own objectives from org objectives where applicable.

Manager

Set by a manager, owned by them, scoped to their team. Manager objectives capture what the manager is committing the team to deliver. They may cascade from org objectives, or stand alone where the team has goals not directly traceable to the org list.

Manager-level objectives require the managerObjectives feature. If the feature is not enabled in your org, you will only see org-level and employee-level scopes.

Employee

Set by an employee, in collaboration with their manager. Employee objectives are the personal goals each individual commits to for the period — usually three to five. They cascade from manager or org objectives, or stand alone where the work is unique to that employee.

Employee-level objectives require the employeeObjectives feature. If the feature is not enabled in your org, employees will not have personal objectives in the system, and you will set goals for the team at manager scope only.

The three scopes form a tree: org objectives at the top, manager objectives below them, employee objectives below those. Cascading is not strict — not every objective at a lower level has to roll up to one above — but the structure is there to make alignment easy when it does.

Anatomy of an objective

Every objective has the following fields:

Field	Description
Title	A short, action-oriented name.
Description	A longer body explaining context, success criteria, and any constraints.
Owner	The single person accountable for the objective.
Scope	Org, Manager, or Employee.
Period	Start and end dates.
Parent objective	Optional — the objective this one cascades from.
Status	On track, At risk, Off track, Done, Cancelled.
Progress	A 0–100 percent estimate, updated by the owner.
Updates	A timestamped log of progress updates.

Status and progress are independent — an objective can be 80 percent done and still flagged at risk if the remaining work is the hardest part.

Setting team-level objectives

To create a manager-level objective:

Open the Objectives page from the primary navigation.
Click New objective.
Fill in the fields:
- Title and description.
- Set the owner — usually yourself, occasionally a senior IC who is accountable for a team-level goal.
- Set scope to Manager.
- Set the period — defaults to the current quarter or half, configured by your org admin.
- Optionally pick a parent org objective to cascade from.
Save.

The objective appears on your dashboard's objective status panel and on the Objectives page.

Editing and updating

Open any objective you own and click Edit to change fields, or Add update to log progress. Updates are short notes — what changed, what's blocking, what's next. Updates roll up into summaries and the team summary's objective status section.

You can change status (On track / At risk / Off track) and progress percent at any time. Significant scope changes — moving the end date, dropping a key result — should be accompanied by an update explaining why.

Cascading from org objectives

When you create a manager-level objective, you can pick a parent org objective to cascade from. Cascading does three things:

Links your objective to the parent in the objective tree.
Surfaces your objective in the parent's "child objectives" view.
Makes alignment visible to anyone reading the org objectives.

Cascading is optional. Some manager objectives genuinely don't roll up to an org objective — operational targets, internal-team commitments, hiring goals — and that is fine.

To cascade an objective:

Open or create the manager-level objective.
In the Parent objective field, search for the org objective.
Pick the parent and save.

You can change or remove the parent later without deleting the objective.

Approving employee-proposed objectives

Employees set their own objectives and submit them to you for approval. The approval workflow ensures alignment without micromanaging.

How proposals work

When an employee creates an objective, they can save it as a draft (visible only to them) or submit for approval. Submitted objectives appear in your Pending approvals view with:

The employee's name and the objective.
Any parent objective they have selected.
A note from the employee explaining the goal.

Reviewing a proposal

For each pending proposal you can:

Approve — the objective moves to active status; the employee can start logging progress.
Request changes — the objective returns to the employee with your comments. They revise and resubmit.
Reject — used rarely. The employee can start a new proposal, but the rejected one is closed.

The approval workflow is also where you spot misalignment early — an employee proposing a goal that conflicts with a team priority, a stretch goal that is unrealistic given the period, or a goal that is too small for the cycle. Use the comment thread on the proposal to discuss; live conversation often makes more sense for substantive disagreements.

Default behavior without proposals

Some organizations do not use formal proposals — employees set objectives in collaboration with their manager during a 1:1 and the manager creates them directly. Both flows are valid. Your org admin sets the default workflow.

Tracking progress

The Objectives page is the central view for tracking. You can:

Filter by scope, status, owner, or parent objective.
Sort by progress, by period, or by recent activity.
Group by owner, by parent, or flat.

Each objective row shows progress, status, and the date of the most recent update. Click any row to open the objective.

Status conventions

Use status flags consistently:

On track — the objective will land at or beyond expectations by the end date.
At risk — there is a real chance of missing the objective; the owner is taking action.
Off track — the objective is unlikely to land as defined; scope or timing needs to change.
Done — the objective is complete.
Cancelled — no longer being pursued.

Move from On track to At risk early, not late. The point of the status flag is to surface risks while there is still time to do something about them.

Inactivity warnings

Objectives without an update in 30 days are automatically flagged as Stale in the dashboard view. Stale objectives don't change status — they're a visual signal that the owner has not logged progress recently. If you have no real change to report, log a one-line update saying so.

Linking objectives to summaries

Every individual summary includes an Objectives section that pulls in objectives the employee owned during the period. Each objective shows:

The title and description.
Final status (or status at period end, if still in flight).
The latest progress percent.
The most recent updates from the owner.

You can write commentary on each objective in the summary — what landed, what didn't, what was learned. This commentary lives on the summary, not on the objective.

If an objective spans multiple summary cycles, it appears in each cycle's summary. The summary captures status at that point in time; the objective itself continues.

Linking observations to objectives

When you write an observation, you can optionally tag it with one or more objectives. Tagged observations:

Appear on the objective's detail page as supporting evidence.
Are surfaced when drafting the summary's objectives section.
Show up in objective trend reports.

Observation-to-objective tagging is most useful for opportunities — an observation about a missed deadline is naturally tied to the objective it endangered. For strengths, the tag is less critical; the connection is usually obvious from the summary narrative.

Closing and archiving objectives

When an objective ends:

Done — completed at or above expectations. Mark status as Done; progress goes to 100. The objective stays in the period's summary.
Cancelled — no longer being pursued. Mark status as Cancelled and add an update explaining why. The objective stays in the period's summary with the reason visible.

Closed objectives are not deleted. They remain searchable and continue to appear in the period's summary forever. To remove an objective from the active view, archive it from the overflow menu — archived objectives still appear in summaries and historical reports.

Permissions

Org objectives — created and edited by org admins. Visible to everyone.
Manager objectives — created and edited by the owning manager. Visible to the owner, their direct reports, and their skip-level manager. Org admins can view in audit contexts.
Employee objectives — created and edited by the employee. Visible to the employee and their manager. Skip-level managers see them in the team summary's objective roll-up.

You cannot edit an objective owned by someone else, except to leave a comment. Reassignment requires the owner to transfer or the org admin to step in for transitions.

Best practices

Few, sharp objectives

Three to five objectives per scope per period is healthy. More than that and the list becomes a wishlist; nothing is genuinely a priority when everything is a priority.

Make success criteria explicit

Every objective should have, in its description, a clear statement of what "done" looks like. "Improve onboarding" is not an objective; "Reduce average new-engineer time-to-first-PR from 14 days to 7 days by end of Q3" is.

Update on cadence

Owners should log updates at least monthly, ideally every two weeks. Updates don't have to be long — two sentences and a status check is enough.

Don't let objectives drift

If the objective changes — new scope, new deadline, new definition of done — edit the objective and add an update explaining the change. Drift that is not captured in the objective record produces unfair surprises at summary time.

Use the right scope

If only one or two people care about the goal, it belongs at employee scope. If it shapes work across the team, it belongs at manager scope. If it shapes work across the org, it belongs at org scope. Many goals get logged at the wrong scope; the cascading view makes mismatches visible.

Notifications

You receive notifications when:

A direct report submits an objective for approval.
A direct report updates an objective.
A direct report's objective moves to At risk or Off track.
A manager objective you own has been stale for 30 days.

Adjust delivery channels under Settings → Notifications.

Troubleshooting

I cannot see the manager scope

Manager-level objectives require the managerObjectives feature. Ask your org admin to confirm it is enabled. If it is enabled and the scope is still missing, check that you are signed in as a user with the manager role.

An employee proposed an objective that does not appear

Proposals appear under Pending approvals. Confirm the employee selected your name as their manager and clicked Submit for approval rather than saving as a draft.

Cascading does not show the right parent

When picking a parent, the search is scoped to objectives in the same period. If the parent objective is in a different period — for example, you are creating a Q3 manager objective and the org objective spans the whole half-year — adjust the period of either to allow cascading.