Get Ready Now for the New Year Ahead
As the end of the year creeps closer, now is the time to ensure you are finalizing your plans for the year ahead. I have written previous posts on goal setting, but there is an additional part that is equally critical to ensure you can reach those goals.
Begin with the end in mind
As you build out ideas for your upcoming goals, where do you want those to lead you to? Where do you want to be at the end of the next year? How will you define success twelve months from now? Do your goals lead you to that place? Having a clear vision of where you want to be can ensure you build a better map to get you there through your goals.
What will it take to get there?
A great question to start with when thinking about goal achievement is, ‘in order for that outcome to be true, what things need to happen or be in place?’ The steps that must happen along the way can sometimes help refine, or even define the goals that you set for yourself or your team. For example, if you want your sales to improve 3% over the previous year by next December, what would have to happen for that to be true? It certainly will take a lot of work along the way. It would not be something you could begin working on in October and hope to get there. So begin planning the steps it would take to achieve that. This can also be a good way to test whether your goals are achievable in the current environment or time frame you are specifying.
What is possible, based on what you know today
This is a similar process to what I mentioned above, but think about this from an external standpoint. There are certain factors that may be outside of your control that you need to account for as you set your plan for the year ahead. Based on what you know today, how can you work around those known obstacles? Are there areas you need to steer clear of due to the risks that cannot be mitigated? We do not always like to admit there are things we cannot accomplish, but the reality is, there are some areas that have so many hurdles that it does not make sense to try to attempt to achieve something you know is not going to happen.
You can look for ways to set yourself up to succeed in these areas for the future. Explore what options you do have based on the circumstances. Goals do not have to be limited to a year at a time, you can set multi-year goals based on the realities your business faces now and work towards the longer-term outcomes.
Build a theme
I have found that creating a theme for the year is a good way to engage the entire team around what you hope to accomplish. Whether this is an acronym of some type or a play on words - if it is simple and catchy, it can be a useful way to make the plan memorable for people at all levels. It is not always easy to get part time hourly associates to connect to the bigger picture goals. Having a theme they can identify can be helpful to create a common language that everyone can speak to and be aware of.
Taking time to think through all of what you want to achieve in the new year is an important part of a leader’s role. Your team will be looking to you to cast a vision for what is possible in coming months. Having it ready to go at the start of the year gives you the longest runway for success and allows you to take advantage of the natural feeling staring point that we experience at the start of each new year.
What are you doing now to get ready for the coming new year?
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