Reboard Your Team to Accelerate into 2025

Welcome to 2025!

The new year always comes with fresh goals and ample possibilities. Objectives, however, may be the wrong place to start because they can overlook assumptions that may be misguided or outdated.

To avoid this misstep, leaders need to start with beginner’s eyes: reboard your team as if they were new hires you orient to the fundamentals. A framework I find useful is Purpose, Principles, and Performance.

Purpose is not a high-falutin’ aspiration. It’s a statement of the problem you help your customers solve (substitute “clients” if it is more relevant). So often, objectives are about revenue, costs, new accounts, or another internally focused metric that your customers don’t give a whit about. If you aren’t being useful to your customers, you’ll soon be irrelevant or tempted to engage in questionable activities just to make the numbers.

Starting with purpose can spur creative thinking, innovation, and commitment. Are you working on something customers care about? How do you know?

Principles articulate how you want to be as you pursue your purpose. They create boundaries for behavior, decisions, and actions amidst ever-changing market conditions. Make the principles concrete and tangible—to be fully trustworthy with your stakeholders, for example. You can then lead a discussion about how principles values can animate policies, protocols, and procedures. You’ll find ways to embed values in everyday activities.

Principles should reflect core values and turn them into practice. Done well, they can empower workers at all levels to take independent action that is aligned with the organization’s beliefs and standards.

Performance is how you measure progress. When metrics follow purpose and principles, you ensure that you measure what matters. Yes, profitability and a return to investors are necessary (or proper stewardship of funds for non-profits and public sector organizations). Are you acquiring customers but not retaining them? Are your top candidates accepting your job offers? You need feedback loops that give you insights, not simply information.

Performance matters. Yet it should not come at the expense of meeting the needs of customers or maintaining your standards.

When I have seen teams and organizations lose their way, it has often been because they started with performance or overemphasized it. It isn’t that performance is not important. It simply shouldn’t be more important than the other two factors.

Yet executives can be seduced into cutting a corner here or degrading quality there in mad pursuit of a goal. Short-term decisions are made that thwart long-term potential rather than building it. Problems are ignored rather than tackled head-on. Difficult truths remain unspoken and unheard.

The three p’s of purpose, principles, and performance need to be solved simultaneously. That isn’t easy. Yet look at organizations you admire and that have endured, and you’ll see that they’ve done just that. From Apple and Berkshire Hathaway to Costco and Patagonia, you’ll find “true north” commitments to purpose and principles that equal their emphasis on performance.

Great organizations know that onboarding new people accelerates their ability to contribute. Reboarding your veterans can give them renewed energy and focus for the year ahead.

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