The Bridges Between Goals and Performance

This January, I’ve been finding myself caught between celebrating last year’s successes and starting all over again at ground zero. With each new beginning, there is also an end. This time is a wonderful bridge—a space to get some time to reflect, think about the future, and confirm your goals and priorities for the new year.

How can we shake off the cobwebs of the holidays? Did we use winter’s quiet to regain and recenter our commitments to our resolutions and business priorities? How can we, as leaders, cast a clear eye on the previous year’s learnings and recognition while motivating this new year’s work and the level of commitment needed for the next level of growth?

My guidance: don’t miss this opportunity to breathe, reflect, and think. It’s typical for our focus to be on all the ways we’ll improve or be better in this new and promising year. To hone in on the work that lies ahead and the performance goals we have.

Ground zero requires a combination of speed and pace, but they are often two different motions. Give speed to celebrating personal and work-life success from the previous year, which will carry forward as energizing momentum. Create a pace of excitement and a sense of the next big moment for the new year without getting caught up in whatever the “next great idea” feels like, or overreacting to a performance measurement that was exceptional or didn’t meet expectations.

Slowly, clarity on your goals and priorities will begin to crystallize and will be the single driving force for you to move forward at an exponential scale. This will include not only a great strategy and vision, but also a plan of execution that everyone will understand and want to be part of.

Looking Forward and Casting Vision in a Human-Centric World

We now firmly live in a digital era with robotics, artificial intelligence, and data at the center of the economy and society. Do you have a vision? Are you ready to embrace the next exponential leap in tech impact?

Understand that tech innovation is for more than just profit. IT is here for good as much as it is needed for today’s economic results. In a changing world of autonomic cars, ChatGPT for AI, virtual reality, and the metaverse, what are we doing within our Vision and Strategy to accommodate for a new Human-Centric reality that realizes literacy improvement, medical advancements, and democratization of access?

At Compugen we are growing faster than the economy across North America. In the US market, we are doubling the business consistently year-over-year, readying ourselves for the next major leap in recognition as a Best Place to Work in corporate America.

Kindness, Empathy, Inclusion, Acceptance, and Wellness are just some of the new performance measurements that need to be part of our near and long-term plans.

We are sharing with all our team members in the United States, and the market, our 2030 Vision: Enabling a Modern America direction:

·??????Creating Sustainable Innovation + Fueling a Circular Economy

·??????Democratizing Access + Breaking Down Digital Barriers

·??????Building a Safe + Secure Future for All Citizens

With our direction and plans in place, our next focus must be on governance and ensuring we meet them. So many times, we speak about plans and build lofty goals, priorities, and roadmaps for the new year, but we don’t execute. Why not? What holds us back? At CSI, we say Progress is our Measurement and each year needs a measurable plan for your long-term goals and near-term expectations.

Building Focus and Accountability Steps

One of my favorite quotes is “Vision without Execution is Hallucination,” by Thomas Edison.

Executing our dreams and ambitions is hard without disciplined rituals. Setting the pace and creating a governance model to hold us accountable to practical steps. In every facet of our life.

Just as rest and reflection are essential to work success, personal goals are as important as business targets or institutional metrics.

Why do we spend so much time planning the business, but don’t set the same intentions for our own personal lives? How often do we have feelings of guilt for the hours we work? Better yet, the time we are physically but mentally at the office?

I find the highest performing leaders have a game plan for both and set a strategy for the year, particularly now, that tries to ensure one doesn’t compete with the other.

In a world with information overload, with work and personal life buckets spilling over, focus and priority management is becoming increasingly important.

A favorite book of mine is The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller. One of my biggest takeaways from this book is to try as we set our week, to focus our days on the ONE Thing—the one, most important task for the project or goal—we will move the yardsticks and increase personal and business performance.

Set a calendar plan and determine the “rituals” that should become part of your daily routine. Wake up each morning with a sense of purpose and end the day by checking off your ONE thing: this is an intentional recipe for success.

Bringing People In

What does this look like in our work life?

At Compugen, our use case stories are building around those big, moonshot goals. In 2023, we have a priority to start measuring progress through a scorecard. This will give all of our teams a sense of accomplishment—alongside the near-term efforts specific to the in-year expectations of expanding our physical presence in the communities we operate to support a hybrid work environment and to continue to outpace the market growth in our sector by doubling the business once again.

It’s so important to create near-term efforts that don’t sacrifice long-term possibilities.

Organizational health is strengthened through clarity and cascading expectations. Understand your teams need to hear the same thing seven times, or more, to fully appreciate how their role helps achieve the objective.

Allow enough time and room for healthy debate on definitions, on your organizational “Why”, and on the metrics that fully create alignment between vision, strategy, and execution up and down the organization.

Cheers to 2023 and the freshness the new year brings. There’s no moment like this one when it all lies ahead of you. What are you celebrating from 2022? What goals have you set this year, personal and professional? What will be your ONE thing each day? What are the steps to make the execution happen and how will you be measuring—and celebrating—your incremental successes?