Setting Priorities, Goal & Targets for the Year.

In our recent planning session, Align not only set our quarterly priorities and goals, we also created an annual plan for what we want to achieve by the end of the year that would put us on the right path to meet our BHAG of 1 billion priorities completed in our software.

Our team is excellent at the quarterly goal planning rhythm.  It’s usually pretty easy to see the next steps in front of us, and we all come to the table with pretty similar priorities and numbers. But planning for growth a year out, when you can’t as easily see the exact tactics to get there, took a little more digging in. Finding the right mix of aggessiveness and attainability felt as much like art as science.  

As we were in the middle of this planning, we got a peek at Vitamin B (For Business), the new book from Andy Bailey that delivers a daily dose of learning, served in bite-size chunks. The entries for the first two workdays of the year were so spot on that we asked Andy to write a guest blog post inspired by those entries which you can read below.

TIP:  You can read those specific entries for January 2 (How’s Your Team Health?) and January 3 (What Can You Do in A Year?) along with the whole month of entries for January in the book here.

Dream More – Remember Less

By Andy Bailey, CEO of Petra Coach and Author of Vitamin B (For Business)

2020 marks not only a new year, but also a new decade. As Bill Gates famously said, “We overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade.” Both my personal life and the work I do each day with teams proves it over and over: most everyone underestimates what they can achieve in all areas of both business and life. We can always do more – believe me.

As we enter this new white space of 2020, I encourage you to spend some time thinking about both your business and your team. Do your very best to shake off the past – it’s the past, and you cannot change it. Just sit in a space of dreaming about what can be. What is it that you want for your business and for those who show up every day to build it with you? What would success look like on December 31, 2020, and even farther out, at the next decade end on December 31, 2030? Think big and get it very well-defined in your mind. We cannot accomplish what we cannot clearly ‘see’ in our minds. Grab a pen and write these thoughts down and do so in a manner of specificity. Write them as if they have already occurred, in past tense, and use as many descriptors as possible. You need to get as precise as you possibly can about what you want it to all look like – not just because you need to be, but because your team does as well.

The human mind is like a swiss army knife: it is a tool that can do anything, as long as it is clear on what that thing is. Think of it like this – when you begin to put a puzzle together, the very first thing you do is look at the picture on the box. Even before you dump out the pieces, turn them upright, organize them by type or start with the edges, you simply stare at the picture so that you know what the end result is. You get a clear picture of what it is supposed to be, and then you start putting the pieces together. Now, think about how difficult putting a puzzle together would be without knowing ‘exactly’ what it is supposed to look like when done. This is how most business leaders and truly most teams go to work each day. They show up and start putting pieces together without clarity of what it is supposed to look like when done.

Once you have your defined vision of the future state of your business – your picture on your own puzzle box – it’s time to communicate that to your team so they show up each day and put the pieces together faster than before and in the direction of achieving the final result – what you have defined for your year and your decade. Stop going at it without knowing what you want. You need this clear picture for you and them so you can maximize the work that everyone does.

Learn more about growing your team by checking out my book “Vitamin B (for Business)” where I have a short daily 5-minute read with one action item for personal and professional growth in 2020. 

Andy Bailey is a serial entrepreneur who spends the majority of his time coaching other entrepreneurs, business owners, leaders, and teams to grow dynamic businesses that focus on: people, strategy, execution and cash. When he’s not coaching, Andy is relaying his business and leadership experiences to readers of his recurring Forbes, Huffington Post, SmallBizDaily and AllBusiness columns and to audience members at professional events and conferences. He is Founder and Head Coach at Petra Coach, an entrepreneurial coaching firm.

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If you would like to learn more about a technology that helps you set priorities and improve your team’s performance using critical number and goal tracking, schedule a demo of Align today!

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