It’s the most wonderful time of the year…and the perfect opportunity to gather your team for a meaningful review of 2018 and an accountable start into 2019. All it takes is an open mind in a supportive environment, encouraging everyone to share their honest feedback, ideas, and ambitions. This will be the best investment you can make to truly listen to your employees and boost performance and motivation. And yes, while you will not be able to get rid of every obstacle in their way nor provide every resource needed for your team to succeed and exceed, it will bring your team together and create a relevant and sincere roadmap to success, dedication, and teamwork.
Questions to reflect, ponder, assess, manifest and ask:
What distracts me?
What frustrates me?
What energizes me?
What is one good habit that I have and use?
What is one habit that I need to let go of?
What do I want to turn into a habit?
What did I enjoy doing and am good at it?
What didn’t I enjoy doing and am good at it?
What did I enjoy and am not good at all at?
What is my priority in the first 3 months of 2019?
What help do I need to accomplish my priority in the first 3 months of 2019?
What do I need to put aside and say no to, to accomplish my priority in the first 3 months of 2019?
What does success mean to me?
What is one thing I succeeded at in 2018?
What is one thing I failed at in 2018?
What support do I need to increase my success?
What goals did I meet?
What resources do I need to meet my goals?
What obstacles do I regularly face preventing me from meeting my goals?
What goals were too ambitious?
What goals were not challenging enough?
What initiatives produced the best results?
What initiatives caused the worst results?
What initiatives should be continued in 2019?
What initiatives should be canned for good or shelved in the meantime?
Actions to take, start, repeat, follow and do:
1 – Schedule 1-1 meetings with your team and yourself to review performance, achievements, and failures.
2 – Examine past year’s initiatives, experiments, and roadmap – the good, the bad and, foremost, the ugly.
3 – Set strategic and realistic goals and attach 1-2 tactical and ambitious metrics to those goals by determining the what, the how and the why.
4 – Establish a strong and fully-supported strategy, identify a sponsor/ champion and define what the successful outcome for each goal looks like.
5 – Evaluate the need to hire more team members and to implement new tools or resources to meet and exceed your goals.
6 – Design and schedule meetings to monitor and analyze the progress of each goal, to address imminent obstacles, to foster cross-functional collaboration and to celebrate successes along the way
7 – Follow-up, Follow-through, Deliver, Fulfill, SOAR…and soon you will Rinse & Repeat in December 2019!
Onward!
