[WJW]

I agree that what you describe would be termed the "happy path" of goal setting. It's important to recognize the edge cases though:

- First off the whole setup only really works if the employee has goals that are approximately aligned with the company. Someone who dreams of maximum money for minimum effort will need "creative" managing to make it work for both the employee and the company. (Maybe something in automation though?) Employees whose life goals reside outside the default company promotion track cannot really be motivated with "career growth" and often the manager has no means to accommodate growth in the desired direction.

- Both manager, employee and company need to be in a position to actually provide. The easiest example is probably promotions: if a manager has only one senior position available and multiple candidates available, some candidates will be disappointed. If that happens often enough, the system falls apart since any promises of "career growth if you meet these goals" will no longer be trusted.

[analog31]

Indeed, to the second point, the system falls apart because neither the worker nor the manager believes the promises, and so goal-setting becomes a pro forma exercise on both parts.

For this reason, ultimately, the only way to make this work is to visibly deliver on the growth at a level consistent with messaging.