What Are You Planning to Achieve in the New Year?
As we enter the final month in what has been (insert your crazy word here), planning for the year ahead is something most people are looking forward to. However, we cannot just hope, especially from a business or goal perspective, that the calendar's flip will make everything better. Being prepared with a well-defined game plan is critical to creating the success you want to have for the coming year. This year has been nuts, but there can be multiple silver linings if we look beyond the surface and even the suffering and see what we may have learned or tried that we would not have otherwise. The challenge now is to apply that learning to our future. The rest of this article is one that I wrote a couple of years ago, but still has many applicable ideas for planning the year ahead.
December is usually a busy month for a multitude of reasons. People are celebrating the holidays or preparing for them. A lot is going on, both personally and professionally. It is not just the holiday season; it is budgeting and planning season as well. Working to get ahead for the coming year is leading many people’s lists. Having a plan for the new year is something I highly recommend. However, even before you get into the details of planning, what is it you want to accomplish in the coming 12-months?
Regular readers know that I am a strong advocate of planning. There is no substitute for adequately preparing yourself and those around you for what needs to happen in the future. But knowing what the most important things to work on is equally critical. If you are like me, I am sure there is no shortage of possibilities in your work or personal areas. Narrowing down those options and understanding their impact becomes step one and an excellent exercise for December.
The Store Manager Perspective
Planning and strategizing can look a little different from different points of view. For those running a store, taking time to evaluate how the current year has progressed is an important step to begin looking at where you can go. A key reminder as you reflect on the year that has passed: be honest with yourself. This is a chance to dig deep into what was and was not accomplished. Don’t be hard on yourself, but be brutally honest in where the gaps are. Think about the distractions and factors that took you off your game at different parts of the year. Why did those occur? How can you better prepare for them next time? What steps can you take to avoid making those same missteps in the coming year?
Beyond looking at what has occurred and conducting a short self-assessment, what do you want to accomplish in the full year ahead? And then begin to ask, “What would need to be true in order for that to succeed?” Again, it would be best if you faced the realities of your situation. Some of those barriers may be yourself or your team. Begin to think about what steps would need to be taken to clear that hurdle at some point next year. Don’t bog down in the details; keep your thinking at a higher level.
Make sure you write down your notes and ideas throughout your session. You will want to come back to those a couple of days later and begin to refine. That is when you can start to explore the next level of detail to define the action steps it will take to accomplish what you have narrowed your choices down to.
The Multi-Unit Perspective
There are some subtle differences when you begin looking ahead from a multi-unit point of view. The self-evaluation process I mentioned above is still a crucial step that every leader needs to take, but at the next level, many different people and factors must be taken into consideration. How you will lead in those different areas will be a key point to spend time on.
I used to mentally work through an evaluation of every person on the team. (This was also a super way to begin capturing ideas for the upcoming performance appraisal process.) Understanding what strengths could be leveraged in the coming months helped to avoid feeling overwhelmed when I started to think about all that I wanted to accomplish in the new year.
Connecting the different ideas for what you want to achieve will make it easier for the team to grasp and begin to make their own. As I narrowed the list of items I want to work on, I also thought about how they could be brought to life for the team and those they lead. It may sound a little odd, but I am a big fan of creating a theme for the year that connects the critical initiatives for everyone to remember easily. Using an acronym (think: TEAM — Together Everyone Achieves More) can be a fun way to build a strategy into something any associate can grasp and can recall later. The other benefit that can come from this is it tends to keep the focus narrow. No one looks for 12 letter acronyms.
Regardless of what perspective you are looking at your year ahead from, you need to keep the selections narrow. If you finish with a list of 10 or 15 items, you will need to prioritize and select no more than 3 to 5 things to begin building out. The other items on the list can be used when you accomplish the more important items. They can also be a great starting place for next year when you take on the same strategic planning process.
Set aside an hour or two this week to begin exploring the possibilities for the coming year. This is something I always look forward to. I enjoyed the initial thought process and then doing it with my team. It was a great way to celebrate many of the things we had accomplished in the past year and then define the desired outcomes of the months ahead.
What have you done in the past to set up your strategy for the new year? What different steps will you take this year? Share your ideas in the comments section.
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