How do you measure personal growth?

I work in Social Work. For the past 17 years, I have seen trends in Social Work come and go. Currently, we used Motivational interviewing and Illness Management and Recovery techniques to help people move forward in their recovery journeys. Now, the people in charge of our mental health programs are looking for "measurable" goals. I get it. It means, if someone has a goal for themself how do we, the workers, measure their progress. It makes sense from a beauracratic point of view because in this day and age of cut backs and diminishing budgets, the government wants hard data to show that people are getting better.

I'm conflicted about the methods being bantered about as to how to do this. I believe that individuals are their own best measuring tool. Unfortunately, the tools we're given want to measure things in percentages. For example, if someone states their goal as "I want to be more socialable." The tools ask us to give this a percentage which might look like "Joe will attend Social Group 3x per month." Now that doesn't look so bad except I have to wonder if Joe only shows up for 2x per month, does make Joe a failure? Or what if Joe increases to 5x per month, does that make him an overachiever? The problem I have is that these measurable goals say very little about Joe's personal experience at that social group. It leans more toward making poor Joe another statistic than seeing him as a human being.

I remember 17 years ago, when I was just starting out, these types of percentage goals were very much the norm. Case management was like being a broker and all we managed was numbers, not people. It saddens me to think that we seem to have come full circle. I hope that there is a way to keep the person at the center of it all. I wish there was some way to convince funding sources and government agencies that just talking to people is the best measure of how successful a person is in achieving their goals. And, when someone is living with a mental illnes, those goals are fluid, they change, they take small steps and relapse is expected but not devestating. Isn't that the way it should be for all of us?