Change is hard. Whether you are changing for great reasons (growth) or bad ones (COVID) it still means that the targets you set are constantly moving. Instead of a set it and forget it attitude, you need to be a little more on top of things – there is no autopilot for most companies right now.
This is the position in which we find ourselves: our targets are changing and we needed to reassess everything that we just put in place in DECEMBER!
We LOVE and have implemented Traction at CathCap. For those of you that don’t immediately recognize the name, Traction is a book by Gino Wickman that outlines EOS – the Entrepreneur’s Operating System. (We also love Gino – he wrote a quote for the front of my book!) In Traction, you have an Annual Planning Meeting to set the Goals for the year and then Quarterly Meetings to set the Rocks that will lead you to achieve those goals. I’ll be honest, the goals we set in December were only OK. They weren’t SMART goals so they were hard to evaluate and harder to get behind as a company.
So last week we had our Quarterly Meeting and it was an exciting one. First, because we knew we had the opportunity to really re-evaluate our Goals and set great Rocks and also because we had a new person joining the management team. Beth Bell, Director of Client Services started with us on March 1st. We had rolled out the new Org Chart the week before and now we had the opportunity to reset our goals.
We started by putting the original Goals on the screen – then we deleted them all. And while we were looking at our VTO (Vision Traction Organizer) we decided that our Purpose wasn’t worded to really reflect what we do. Oh, and then we decided to rework our Niche.
How did we end up practically starting over? After having just done this 3 months ago?
We know ourselves better now. Our team is filling out to reflect what was just an idea 9 months ago. We are stepping into the future version of our company.
This can be scary, but it is incredibly fun. It’s like the moment you start to realize you have grown up into the adult you always dreamed you would be. And now it’s time to get to work.
If we are becoming this new company, we need to up our game. Hence the Quarterly Planning Meeting. With Beth’s help, Pam and I rewrote our Purpose – finally landing on one that for the very first time, felt RIGHT. The Niche took moments to wordsmith – because we had our Purpose nailed.
Full transparency, we are still working on our Guarantee – You will suck less doesn’t seem to be appropriate but is a temporary placeholder.
All of a sudden, our Goals seemed so obvious. They flowed out of not only our financial aspirations but from what we want our different business functions to accomplish. Marketing’s Goal is backed up by what Admin/HR needs to do, and Client Services has renewed purpose and direction.
Why am I talking about all of this? I guess I want to say that owning a business can be messy. That sometimes you redo something you JUST did. And that, especially in this environment, reviewing and REVAMPING your goals is OK. How do you know you should take a look at your goals?
- You aren’t on track. You might be ahead or behind your goals. Don’t beat yourself up, simply look at the assumptions you made when you created the goals and see which ones might not be right. I promise you have more information than you did back then. Even if back then was only a month or two ago.
- Your team doesn’t understand or isn’t excited by them. This was our problem. Every time we talked about goals at least one person said they weren’t Measurable (part of the SMART requirements) and everybody else just went, uh-huh. There wasn’t any excitement. There wasn’t a challenge. The team just didn’t care that much.
- There has been a major shift – in something. This can be something external like COVID or it can be internal, like the opportunity for a new business line presenting itself. How is the reopening of the country going to affect the plan you set out for the year?
- You aren’t challenged by them. Yes, your team needs to be excited, but as the owner of the company, as the Visionary, YOU need to be excited about what your team is trying to accomplish. If you feel “blah” about your goals, chances are high you will feel “blah” about your company pretty soon.
Do you have goals? Do they excite you and your team? Are you on track? Are they the RIGHT goals? As we approach the second quarter, this is a great time to go back and take a look. This isn’t a failure. It doesn’t mean you messed up when you set the goals. We just have more information now and the ability to make 2021 even better than we thought 3 months ago. It’s exactly what we are doing with our clients.
