By / Jessica Kirby, Editor
A new year is a fresh start. It means a crisp new calendar, a blank slate featuring 365 opportunities to improve from last year. Taking advantage of this means more than half-hearted resolutions to hit the gym, be friendlier, or tidy up the bathroom closet. It means turning focus away from nostalgia and towards a disciplined state of improvement requiring hard work and honesty. Are you ready?
What Worked?
Reflect with your team on the highlights and milestones of last year. Pull out those calendars and appointment schedules and identify the best of the year, turning points for success, and the company’s proudest moments. What did you do best as a team last year? What are people saying about your company? What did you achieve that was beyond your group’s goals? Acknowledging your strengths and hard-fought wins builds momentum moving into the new year.
Lessons Learned
Time to be honest and true—but reserve judgement. Resist the urge to blame or lament when discovering what didn’t go so well last year. Sharing failures and disappointments is a powerful tool for learning, observing, and building resilience. So, ask your team to discuss one thing the company could have done better last year. What did you learn from mistakes as a team? What can each person do to be more helpful to the team? What is holding your group back?
Looking Ahead
Imagine the next 12 months unfolded with picture-perfect success. What would that look like for you and your team? How would the company change to achieve this vision?
What will people be saying about your group a year from now? What challenges will you have conquered? What will bring employees through the door each day, besides the paycheck? Envision your company making headlines in a prestigious magazine for its accomplishments in 2020.
What would the headline say? Creating a vision of where you want to be and how you will get there is an effective way to stay on track and reverse engineer a solid plan for achieving greatness. Express this vision in a way everyone can see and refer to it throughout the year as a source of inspiration and motivation.
Change. Right now.
Reaching your 2020 milestones is going to take hard work, commitment, and change. It is going to take a steady realization that things aren’t perfect, and even if they were perfect in another era, times change quickly and only successful teams have the courage to adapt. What projects should be your company’s top three priorities? What groundwork will be required to get those done? What is the game plan for meeting (and crushing) the challenges that inevitably arise? What resources will you need?
Imagine yourselves at next year’s Christmas party. Everyone is feeling relaxed and relieved to head into some time off. You’ve just had a nice dinner and maybe a beverage or two and the speeches are about to begin. What will those speeches, celebrating the year’s accomplishments and successes, be about? What will be the group’s biggest win? What will be its most important step towards resilience?
Start now to make that vision a reality. Set time aside, gather your team, and get excited. Those 365 chances are waiting for you. Show the world how success is done. ▪
