Learning a new task: what goal should you agree with your manager?

When a manager assigns a new task, agreeing on the expected outcome seems a reasonable starting point. Yet the useful question is more specific: should you immediately target a level of performance, or first define what the employee needs to learn to achieve it?

What the literature establishes

Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham (2002, American Psychologist) synthesise research showing that specific, difficult goals can improve performance more than a general instruction to do one's best. This effect depends in particular on ability, goal commitment, feedback and task complexity. Their review therefore does not justify turning every new assignment into an immediate numerical target.

Learning draws on resources that goal pursuit can compete for

Ruth Kanfer and Phillip L. Ackerman (1989, Journal of Applied Psychology) examine the interplay between motivation, cognitive abilities and skill acquisition. Their experiments show that self-regulatory demands can compete for the attentional resources needed for learning, particularly in the early stages of a complex task. In the relationship with a manager, this mechanism suggests distinguishing the mobilisation of effort from the development of an effective method.

The premature conclusion

One might conclude that outcome goals should be abandoned whenever a task is new. The more nuanced point is different: when the method has yet to be discovered, a learning goal can be a step towards the outcome rather than a replacement for it. An employee might therefore propose comparing procedures and explaining when each should be used before committing to a production rate. (our executive and employee training programmes)

What the evidence cannot guarantee

These studies do not demonstrate that a particular way of wording a goal will, on its own, improve the manager–employee relationship. Experiments on skill acquisition do not reproduce all the constraints of public services or regulated industrial settings either. A learning goal suspends neither safety and quality requirements nor the manager's responsibility to provide the necessary resources.

A practical check in Berne

As part of the SHR programme « Construire une relation efficace avec son manager », one exercise involves agreeing on an expected outcome, a strategy to test and evidence that will make learning verifiable for a new task. In Berne, this evidence might be an annotated procedure in the federal administration, a documented simulation in public health, a diagnostic approach tested outside the production environment in telecoms, or an approved machine-setting trial in precision manufacturing. Over a four-week pilot, count the new tasks for which a learning criterion was agreed beforehand and subsequently reviewed with the manager, and divide that number by the total number of new tasks tracked. This indicator checks a dialogue practice, not a performance gain; the usual quality criteria must be monitored separately. To go further: explore the Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

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