How to set up your business goals for success in 2020?
Kerri Day
It’s January. The insanity of the peak silly season with its bizarre Christmas deadline a distant memory.
A time for New Year’s Resolutions. Stepping back from the business and thinking about your goals for 2020.
You might even spend time to create a plan. After all it’s a well-known formula:
Vision – what do you want the business to look and feel like in December 2020. What’s changed, different, better.
Strategy – how are you going to get there.
Business Data – how has the business performed across all areas.
Action Plans – specific things that need to be done.
Measures – to check on progress. The cliché holds true you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Except that like most New Year’s resolutions most business plans made in January rarely survive till March.
Why? Because most people do not understand how change is made.
The three things your goals need to succeed.
1. It’s a process
It’s the work along the way. Focusing on the doing that underpins success. The saying pro’s stick to process is there for a reason.
Your goals are just the outcome of the process – the doing. Businesses that focus on what needs to be done are 43% more successful in achieving their goals.
2. Investment
Giving people more work to do without allocating time and resources to do it is just giving them more work. Processes only work when they become regular habits.
Allocate specific time each day or week to work on the goals. And give people the tools to do the work.
3. Accountability
Gym classes are popular for a reason. Most people lack the will power to make themselves exercise alone. Gym classes are delegated accountability.
Accountability works. Have someone review your progress. Ask the probing questions.
And above all be kind to yourself and your team. The key reason New Year’s resolutions fail is that when people slip up, as they will, they give up.
Yet true change comes from repeated effort. Knowing you will make mistakes, go off track, get distracted.
Just start again.
No baby learnt to walk straight away. It’s the same with your goals.