Last time I showed you how to plan a yearly cycle of check-ins and feedback across your organization – one that helps you keep working toward company goals, support employee growth, and keep everything up to date on an ongoing basis.

Today I'll show you why, despite agreed-upon goals, so often nothing changes – and what to do to make those decisions actually work in practice.

Why do the goals exist, but the results never show up?

In practice, it very often looks like this: during a performance review, you set goals to work toward – you agree on something.

Then a week goes by, two weeks, a month… and everything slips back into the old pattern. You sit down with the employee for the next meeting, and it turns out you're circling back to the same challenges, discussing the same situations, and hearing the same stories that were supposed to be "closed" by now.

And you start to feel like the whole process is going around in circles.

Why does this happen?

Because a goal – even a well-defined one – doesn't change the way people work on its own.

And the way people work is exactly what determines the results.

👉 A goal tells you what you're supposed to achieve. It describes the end state.
👉 It doesn't tell you how to get there in day-to-day work.

This came up in part back in lesson 5, when we covered the four areas that belong in a performance review form. I talked there about how, during the meeting, we often wrap up topics at the level of decisions:

❌ "improve your communication,"
❌ "keep a closer eye on deadlines,"
❌ "we're changing our approach to collaboration."

Decisions phrased this way are too vague, and they don't tell the employee what specifically should change once they walk out of the meeting.

One crucial step is missing here:
👉 translating those decisions into concrete actions that are supposed to happen between meetings.

And until that happens, it's very hard to expect any real change.

How do you decide what to actually work on after the conversation?

Before we get into how to build an action plan with an employee, it's worth pausing for a moment on one very important thing: how to set priorities.

During a performance review, it often turns out there are a lot of things to improve. After managers meet with their employees, I frequently see lists written up with 15–20 points.

And at that moment we often fall into wishful thinking – we'll tackle everything – which I can guarantee you won't.

When someone is facing too many things to change, something kicks in that psychology calls decision paralysis.

In other words, a situation where:

• you don't know where to start,
• everything seems equally important,
• and in the end… nothing happens.

That's why the first step after the conversation shouldn't be creating a plan – it should be choosing what you're really going to focus on. And if there's time left over, then of course you can keep an extra list of topics to work on.

How can you approach this in practice? You have a few simple options.

1. Spreading priorities out over time

Not everything has to happen right now.

You can spread the areas you want to work on across different periods of the year, for example:

• in Q1, you focus on areas 1, 2, and 3,
• in Q2, you move on to the next topics,

This way:

• you have a clear direction,
• you don't overload the employee,
• you increase the chances of real change.

2. Choosing the key priorities "for right now"

If you work in a more fast-moving environment and it's hard to plan far ahead, you can do something simpler:

👉 pick the 3–5 most important areas for this moment

And in line with what I wrote about in lesson 10:

• you come back to them in your quarterly check-ins,
• you check what has changed,
• and you decide whether to keep going or change something.

👉 The key rule is very simple:

it's better to do less and actually put it into practice than to agree on a lot and change nothing.

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One tool that can help you here is the APM matrix (Action Priority Matrix).

This tool lets you organize actions by two criteria:

• impact (the benefit to the team / company)
• effort (how much time, energy, and resources they require)

This way you can quickly see:

• what's worth doing right away (big impact, little effort),
• what to schedule for later (big impact, more effort),
• what to do when you get the chance (small impact, little effort),
• and what shouldn't be your priority at all right now (small impact, big effort).

This is especially helpful when you have a lot of topics and it's hard to decide where to start.

👉 instead of guessing, you make a decision based on a simple structure

I've put together a ready-made matrix for you to use with your team.

You can:

• print it out,
• fill it in together with the employee,
• and use it as the basis for choosing priorities for the coming period.

👉 download the file

And only once you've clearly chosen your priorities can you move on to the next step: turning those areas into concrete actions.

How do you build an action plan together with the employee?

Once you've chosen your priorities, you can move on to the next step: turning decisions into a concrete action plan that lets you and the employee track progress toward the goals you've set.

It's very important not to build this plan "for the employee," but with them – or to ask them to prepare the plan and then go through it together. Why? Because then they:

• understand the expectations better,
• take more ownership of the actions,
• and are far more willing to put changes into practice in their day-to-day work.

This is also a good moment to take an honest look at the employee's current workload and check whether, with everything already on their plate, they'll actually be able to carry out the agreed actions.

Because even the best plan won't work if it's unrealistic from the start.

That's why, for each of the chosen priorities, it's worth asking yourself 3 more questions:

👉 What exactly are we doing differently?
👉 When / how often are we doing it?
👉 How will we know it's working?

And then, instead of:
❌ "improve your communication"

You can agree on:
✔️ sending a project status update to the team every Monday by 12:00 p.m.
✔️ flagging the risk of delays earlier
✔️ summarizing decisions after meetings

To make it easier to translate those decisions into concrete actions, I've also prepared a ready-made document: Action Plan After the Performance Review – Quarterly Plan.

It's a simple tool that you can:

• print out,
• fill in together with the employee during the meeting,
• and come back to throughout day-to-day work.

Inside, you'll find:

• space for the chosen priorities,
• room to lay out the specific actions for each one,
• a place to define the support needed,
• a way to track progress,
• and a summary of the results at the end of the period.

This way, the conversation has a chance to end not just with decisions, but to genuinely translate into action and into the way people work.

To wrap up

A well-run performance review can genuinely support employee growth, improve collaboration, and help the company reach its business goals more effectively.

But that only happens when the decisions made in the meeting are turned into concrete actions. And that happens when you:

• focus on a maximum of 3–5 priority goals,
• translate those goals into concrete actions for the employee,
• agree on how to track them,
• and come back to them regularly, reviewing progress as you go.

Because the value of a performance review isn't created in the conversation itself. It's created only when the decisions start shaping day-to-day work.