what achievement is?

Recently in company, where I work, we tryied to introduce new ways of people evaluation. I don't want to go into details, today I want to write down my thoughts on one word, which occurs on each meeting. The word is - achievement.

I noticed that we are using this word on those meetings in so many different contexts, so I proposed, that we should firstly define what achievement is, before we will go further in this discussion. Everyone agreed and each of us had to bring proposition of this definition on next meeting.

I thought about this definition, I even had my own propositions and just few hours before the meeting I sit down and asked myself - what we're trying to do? We want to define word which is already defined? We want to invent a circle once again?

I typed in google "achievement" and after few clicks I was on the page with a definition. Below I pasted definition from this page:

achievement - something accomplished, especially by superior ability, special effort, great courage, etc.; a great or heroic deed.

What can I say? When I looked at this definition I was little disappointed, even if it was great explanation of this word and I really liked it, it allows for to much interpretations and that means, that we still could use the same word and got something different on mind.

Let's look closer on this word and try to analyse it little bit, try to remove ambiguities:

superior ability - skills or abilities which are above the limits of any others people in the team.

special effort - it isn't part of the job, it isn't an issue or task, it requires research, gathering information and preparation or other additional activity (even thinking on particular thing can be treated as a special effort).

great courage - to complete something, which you believe is worth to done, even if all others people don't see value in it until it's not achieved.

great or heroic deed - to achieve something, what seems to be too hard for everyone else, because of various reasons.

As you can see, even with help of the dictionary it wasn't so easy to understand everything in the way, that it would have the same meaning for everyone.

Problem with the meaning of an achievement could grow to something really problematic, because one of our's performance measurement factors is based on list of achievements. We cannot allow ourselves for being unclear when peoples salaries depends on that. It wouldn't be professional and each issue in this case would lead to decreasing motivation.

As you can see, it's worth to defined each confusing term to avoid misunderstandings. And it won't be even so problematic when those problems came up during conversations, because it would lead "only" to time wasting. But what if we notice this after decission are made and actions are taken?