Ready, Set, 2023!

It’s here! The actual first day of the new year. Not a weekend. Not a holiday. A real working day! The first. If you haven’t already formulated your goal resolution or mission—it’s go time. Here is the step by step guide to crafting the goals, articulating a mission, establishing the habits, taking the key steps, and making it happen! Are you psyched??I am!

Complaints

How do you even begin to decide what to work on this year? Well, I suggest you think in terms of mission. So, what is the mission? Or, at least, what are you resolved to fulfill, create or stop??

As a human being, we always start with complaints. “My team shows no urgency!”, “I’m too fat”, “I need more money.”, “The Board is obstructing me”, “I should exercise.”, “Our sales team doesn’t follow through”. “We need to raise the next round”.

For most people, there are a bunch of these. Despite the feast of possible complaints to tackle, it’s a good idea to limit yourself to a single focus.?can you choose just one BIG FIX to use as a resolution?

The whole process probably feel familiar, and may leave you bored, or feeling overwhelmed or hopeless? If so, you are well-attuned to a reality about resolutions. They usually stem from fault-finding—with ourselves or others. And they often fail to change anything. But you can’t help your humanity. None of us can. So we start with complaints. But we aren’t doomed to staying there.

Doing all that complaining lets you purge the natural fault-finding, problem-fixing and self-loathing that obscures your own magic. But once purged, you can start to imagine a created future— a future just one year away in which you have fulfilled something extraordinary. Envision the year you want—with the people you love both at home and at work —in a body that serves you—having created the business results that express your true possibility and mission.

Imagine it in rich detail. Consider all of the possible perspectives and add the opulence necessary to make the vision truly i

The Mission

From that large set of visionary descriptions and images, select one?or?two areas to focus on — and craft a mission statement that truly conveys their power and magnetism. That mission statement itself can pull you and your team forward when process and pragmatism fall short.

Let that mission statement set the context for the next steps. Because the next steps are the bridge from imagination to action.

Take the mission and create a?metric that represents its fulfillment.?The measurement may be your ARR as of January 1, 2024, or your average lifetime revenue per customer. It may be your split times in your next triathlon, or the completion of the next funding round. It could be the number of articles you’ve had published or copies of your book that have sold.?

The key is that your mission should now have a quantifiable expression.?But don’t get confused, the resolution is ALL about the mission, not at all about the measurement.?The measurement is like the menu for a meal. It’s key to describing something, but you wouldn’t eat a menu.?Eat your mission, not its measurement.

Take that measurement and (if you think the progress could be linear), break it into twelfths. For example, if the goal is to end the year at 150% of last quarter’s revenue (annualized), then that additional 50% can be broken into 12 incremental increases.

You may want to apply some subject-specific nuance to that, because things grow at different rates.?Growing revenue can start off slowly and increase geometrically with networking effects and the moment of referrals or up sales. Losing weight is inverted. It starts fast and slows down.?Apply your own or some expert information to crafting the one month goal.

Today, with that one month goal in hand, you are ready to act.

The List

It’s time to make a list. This one is of all of the?actions, behaviors, habits, routines and customs?associated with the vision that inspired your mission.?Start with this question: “When my mission is accomplished, what will my new practices and behaviors be?”

Answer the question by listing the kinds of things that would accompany the results you expect.?Don’t just look at what you and your team do, but also ask what kind of thinking you would all be doing and what conversations you’d engage in.?

You may consider that someone with the same mission as you would study certain principles, learn specific skills, provide some critical training to their team or build important infrastructure.

The key is to be guided entirely by your mission — NOT by your metric.

Make the list of all of those possible actions, behaviors and routines.?

Of course, you aren’t doing all of that today. But look at the list and choose three actions that you will take.??

Actions

One action should be a daily (or more) behavior.?

For example, if your mission is to build urgency, your team needs a daily practice that will reinforce that perspective. One of my clients was determined to instill a sense of urgency with his team. So he began holding a daily all-hands every day to drive up the same kind of energy that accompanies the starting line at a road race.

Another action should be weekly.?

This might be one related to tracking progress or reinforcing the mission—including reflection on the previous week.

A different client of mine was concerned about sustaining cohesion in her team when they went fully remote. So, she began sending out a weekly CEO email that shared everything from how last week went to what were her own key priorities for the coming week. In her weekly letter she also acknowledged one employee’s outstanding work in the last week, and told the team what she most needed from them in the next week.

That weekly practice was integral to building an incredibly close, aligned and effective organization.

This was a long one. But try these steps as you look at your own 2023. The rest of the week I’ll continue this process with you. By week 2 of the new year, you will hit your stride in taking the steps to ensure you fulfill your 2023 mission!

Happy New Year!

The surest way to fulfill your organization’s missions is to support your team in growing their own skills and mental models. Schedule call with me to learn how Beyond Better Coaching-as-a-Service can massively improve your organization’s performance and cohesion.