
The lecture starts with real work: you take the goal that matters most to you this year, place it on four levels a goal passes through on its way from an intention to something that can fail a week, read the signs of each level and take the one move up from yours.
This course is built from six disciplines: OKR, what separates the strongest performers, performance management, motivation, time management and delegation.
The map of the course
A dictionary for reading lectures recorded about employees and managers as work on your own goal
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Goal Level Check and mark your level after the lecture.
What OKR is: the definition and the core principles
The history and the companies that made it work
How OKR connects long-term intent with what you do this week
Focusing on what is genuinely critical, and wording it correctly
Preparing before you set anything
Running the first objective-setting session
Practising the "from X to Y by Z" format until goals stop being vague
Selling the approach to people who have to live with it, and Kotter's accelerators
The cycle: planning, monitoring, evaluation
Setting up the regular check that keeps it alive
Adjusting an objective without abandoning it
Real cases, and why leading indicators matter more than lagging ones
Scoring delivery honestly and setting the next set
Running the wrap-up conversation
Recognising what was achieved, and planning growth from it
Drawing lessons, and feeding the outcome back into the bigger picture
Talents, and mindset type
The potential matrix, and where you currently sit on it
Engagement and burnout as measurable states
Indicators, performance, loyalty and professionalism, with a personal audit to run
What separates a strong performer from a competent one
What the large-scale research shows about it
Which of those differences are learnable
How one of the most selective employers assesses its people
Which signals it treats as predictive
What that implies for how you present your own work
Managing yourself before anyone else has to
Becoming the person a problem gets brought to
Where initiative helps and where it reads as overreach
Working with your manager rather than around them
What high-autonomy companies expect from that relationship
Micromanagement and what actually causes it
Reporting in a form that buys you more freedom rather than less
What a team needs from an individual contributor
Patrick Lencioni's test applied to yourself
The behaviours that quietly damage a team
What overdelivery means concretely rather than as an attitude
Using OKR to define what beyond the brief actually is
Connecting it to how you will be reviewed
Why classic personal productivity systems break for some people
Applying agile principles to your own workload
What that changes about planning and about finishing
How growth inside a company actually happens
Building development into the work rather than beside it
What to learn, and how to make it visible
Keeping yourself going when nobody is managing your motivation
Recognising the drop early
What restores it, and what only postpones the problem
Communicating your work so it is understood at the level above you
Written and spoken habits that make you easy to work with
Where communication failure is mistaken for performance failure
Why the process exists at all
What belongs to a manager and what belongs to the function around them
Modern approaches to it
Linking performance management to strategy rather than to a calendar
What a performance agreement is
The role profile and objectives derived from it
OKR, goal setting and cascading
Identifying required skills and behavioural competencies, and the development plan
Why feedback is the mechanism the whole cycle rests on
A model for delivering it, and the criteria for it to work
Regular one-to-ones, and diagnosing a drop in motivation
Difficult conversations, coaching as part of management, and delegation
What can be automated and what should not be
An overview of the tools
A worked example on a real platform
Where AI solutions currently help
Assessing results against responsibilities
MBO-based and indicator-based assessment
Assessment against standards
Critical incidents, and evaluation grounded in role analysis
Developing a competency profile
Organising a 180-degree assessment
Organising a 360-degree assessment
Competency interviews, and running an assessment centre
The review questionnaire and a bank of questions to draw on
Linking goal setting, feedback and the review into one thread
A template for the conversation itself
Feedback on the quality of the meeting, from both sides
Salary review and bonus decisions
Promotion, and revising responsibilities
Inclusion in a talent pool, and the development plan
Performance improvement plans, and the decision to part ways
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
You do not have a goal-setting problem. You set goals every year, and they are usually reasonable ones.
What you have is a gap between the goal and Tuesday afternoon, where the goal has no representation at all.
Why goals stop moving
The goal was written as a direction rather than as a measurable change, so no week ever fails it and no week ever advances it. There is no scheduled moment when you look at it, which means you look at it when you feel guilty. Motivation is treated as a character trait rather than as something with identifiable causes, so when it drops the response is to try harder rather than to diagnose.
And your calendar is full of work that could be someone else's, which is the cheapest and least used source of the time the goal needs.
A goal in a format that can fail
Thirty-nine lessons. Four on OKR, which is the most useful thing here for a personal goal: writing an objective in the "from X to Y by Z" form, running a cycle with a real tracking rhythm, adjusting without abandoning, scoring honestly at the end, and treating the score as information rather than as a verdict.
Then eleven on what actually separates strong performers, drawn from research and from how selective companies assess people: a personal audit across talent, mindset, potential, engagement and burnout; self-management; working with your manager so autonomy increases rather than shrinks; contributing to a team; overdelivery defined concretely; an agile approach to personal work for people that GTD never fitted; growth; and sustaining your own motivation.
Measuring, motivating, and buying back time
Then eight on performance management as a process: goal agreements, feedback models, check-ins, evaluating results against MBO, indicators, standards and critical incidents, competency assessment, the review conversation, and what the outcome is actually used for.
Then six on motivation with the mechanism explained: how motivation converts into output, what culture does to it, loyalty and engagement research, the twelve factors, and why reward and punishment stopped working on cognitive work.
Then six on time: SMART, the Eisenhower matrix, 4D, Pomodoro, GTD, Kanban lists, time audits, time-blocking, procrastination and its causes, and modern tooling.
And four on delegation, which is where the time comes from: the barriers, RACI, tools, feedback that does not demotivate, GROW for developing someone through a handed-over task, and converting freed hours into progress rather than into more tasks.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals, running OKR on teams and on myself, including the quarters where the score was low and useful.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
One rewrite to start with
Take your most important current goal and rewrite it as "from X to Y by Z". If you cannot fill in X, you have no baseline and cannot detect progress. If you cannot fill in Z, nothing will ever be late. Most goals fail on one of those two blanks long before effort becomes the issue. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.