Soft skills often decide who gets promoted, yet they produce the vaguest goals: "communicate better", "be a team player", "show leadership". The trick is to anchor each one in behaviours people can see and evidence you can show.
Communication goals
- Run the weekly team update for one quarter and ask for feedback on clarity after the first and last session.
- Write shorter emails: keep project updates under 150 words with a clear "action needed" line, and track whether follow-up questions drop.
- Present once a month to a group outside your team.
- Practise active listening in one-to-ones: summarise what the other person said before responding, and ask your manager whether they notice a difference by mid-year.
- Handle one difficult conversation per quarter you would previously have avoided, and reflect on what you learned.
These are easy to start and easy to evidence, which makes them good first goals. For measurement ideas, see what makes a goal measurable.
Did you know? The often-quoted claim that communication is "7% words, 38% tone, 55% body language" comes from Albert Mehrabian's 1960s experiments, which only studied how people judge feelings when words and tone contradict each other. Mehrabian himself has said the ratios do not apply to communication in general.
Leadership goals (with or without a title)
- Mentor a new starter through their first three months.
- Lead one improvement project from idea to implementation.
- Facilitate a team retrospective each quarter and track actions to completion.
- Give specific, positive feedback to a colleague at least once a week.
- Make one decision a month you would previously have escalated, and explain your reasoning.
Teamwork goals
- Share knowledge: document one process a month that currently lives only in your head.
- Help a cross-functional project hit its deadline by owning a clearly defined piece.
- Improve a handover between your team and another, measured by fewer errors or delays.
- Ask for input early on two major pieces of work each quarter.
How to evidence soft skill progress
- Before-and-after feedback: ask three colleagues the same two or three questions at the start and end of the period.
- A simple log: note each presentation, mentoring session or difficult conversation with one line on how it went.
- Outcomes: fewer clarification emails, smoother handovers, positive client comments.
The bottom line
Soft skill goals work when they describe behaviours, not personality traits, and when you collect simple evidence as you go. Pick one communication, leadership or teamwork goal and make it visible. For more help with the communication side, see our Communication Skills for Business course, and for goal-setting frameworks, our Business Planning and Goal Setting course.