How to make next year awesome for your career - part 1

Plan next year part 1

It's November, and if you want next year to be better than this year was, I think there's a few things you need to think about.

Now's a good moment to stop and reflect on what's happened in the past year, how it was for you and what you need to be different in the coming year.

Most of us are in the process right now of receiving, and giving, performance appraisals.

And from the thousands of managers I've trained and coached over the years, I know that the vast majority find the process stressful and even if not stressful, don't find it particularly useful.

And that really gets me burned up because each year you come to the end of a business cycle.

You come to the end of a voyage and you should be doing what sea captains do.

End of every voyage, they stop and do an “end of voyage review”. What worked, what didn't, what are we going to do different next time??

Not an appraisal, but a review; of something that was agreed in advance, and monitored closely day by day to ensure it never went seriously off track; and is therefore not in dispute, just available for discussion and improvement.

And then in just a few weeks, maybe a month or so, you're going to be starting to do the voyage plan for next year.

We don't know what's going to happen next year. But given the pace of change this year we do know it's going to be different and things are going to continue changing at an ever increasingly fast and unexpected pace.

So I think plans for the coming year need to be with a, I don't want to overuse the word, but with an agile, a flexible mindset.

Expect things to change and, and be on the balls of your feet so that you can react.

The way I found you get your mind in that place is to spend a little bit of time reflecting on what happened, reflecting on what you did or didn't do, and exploring possible alternatives.

So just get used to examining situations unemotionally and opening up other "what if" scenarios.

I've got several things I'd like to take you through as a thought process to prepare for next year.

But before we can start analysing and applying the data, we need to get the data.

So, today's task.

Take a little time to look back over the past 12 months.

Have pencil and paper out, or whatever you use for making notes.

Make a note of what worked.

Make a note of what didn't work.

And (and this could be in all aspects of the job) how you executed, how you interacted with people, how you coped with the restrictions of the work.

Put things in categories, classify them as what worked and what didn’t.

Then sit with the list and see if you can identify what were the causes.

What were the triggers, what were the elements that had an impact on whether something worked or didn't.

Now, I don't want this to be a blame game exercise.

I want this to be a factual analysis.

• Here's what I did.
• Here's what happened.
• Was it the way I wanted or not?
• Could it have been better?
• What were the parameters that touched it, that impacted it?

And once you've got that, we'll talk about analysing to reset and change those parameters.

Because I think if we approach this from a mathematical perspective, we put the formula out and then we can just change the parameters; change the variables.

Next time we'll look at the formula for performance. And by performance, I just mean getting whatever outcomes you were looking for. Plug the data in, and then we can simply identify which are the variables and which ones you can change.

I think that's a big enough task for one day. I'll see you next time.

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