Set and Achieve KPIs That Matter For 2023
Take the ‘December Pause’ and create synergy between personal and professional goals
By John Schreurs
In professional life, goal setting is often formalized each year through the acts of strategic planning and employee reviews. Universally, it’s recognized as a valuable and important use of time.
Have you ever considered adopting a more formal planning process for your personal goals, too?
If you’re simply too busy – hear me out. The busier you are, the more important goals become, in all areas of life. Your goals are a north star, guiding you back to the actions that truly matter. And, because success in one area tends to bleed into another, at Strategic America (SA), we encourage both professional and personal goal-setting exercises annually. Cultivating balance, alignment, and synergy between personal and professional achievements creates a powerful dynamic.
As the year draws to a close, we are following a set approach for goal setting for 2023. Our approach may offer insights on how you fuel productivity and purpose among your teams.
Personal Goals Fuel Productivity, Purpose at Work
In the business world we certainly aren’t unique in feeling that every day is full of new challenges and opportunities. Sometimes, too many! The end of the year often feels particularly busy and full. But we have come to believe that even when the world is moving fast, one of the best things you can do is slow down. We’ve even given this valuable year-end practice its own moniker – the “December Pause.”
At its core, it’s about intentionally carving out time for the luxury of contemplation. Not mind-wandering, but creating a vision of a successful next year — professionally and personally.
Many of our long-time team members have shared when personal goals fall to the wayside it eventually shows up in their work. But when the important things in life get meaningful attention, their strongest work performance tends to follow. (It’s well-documented that people are simply more successful when they’re happy.)
At SA, setting and pursuing personal goals is strongly supported because it builds a culture of happier, more fulfilled employees who are instrumental to our company success. Instead of once-a-year reviews, we initiate more frequent check-ins with team members to see how things are going – and not just work-wise.
The December Pause is an important time to reset and refocus on what each of us want to achieve in the year ahead. Sometimes, it takes discipline to slow down and gain clarity about where you want to go; but, in the long-run, it helps you move faster, and with purpose, in all the right directions.
Professional Goals Ensure You Live Up to Your Brand, Unleash the ‘Multiplication Factor’
Over the course of 42 years, our business has undergone many changes, but evolving doesn’t automatically make anything easier. Business growth involves adding more layers of accountability, not just to meet your targets, but to live up to promises you make as a brand, an organization and an employer.
Many businesses build accountability with strategic plans, but still more work must be done to achieve the vision. This often involves breaking down the plan into annual, quarterly and even monthly goals. While this is an excellent approach, at SA, we think we’ve found a secret weapon for unlocking a business’s real potential. We call it unleashing the “multiplication factor” and believe any organization can benefit from the idea.
The multiplication factor happens when team member’s individual professional goals are aligned to the larger company vision. Then, managers and leaders focus on helping and serving the team so they can do their very best – whatever that may look like. With an understanding of how their actions make an impact, and support to harness their passions and strengths, the multiplication factor becomes an incredible force — a self-driving engine for progress.
In recent years, SA became an employee-owned company, implementing an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) as a way to further harmonize our business and employee interests and let everyone share in the rewards when we achieve our goals. Since making the change, we’ve been able to set – and achieve – ambitious growth targets and deliver on our strategic goal to “lead, serve, and win across North America.”
While an ESOP was the right choice for our company, there are many avenues for employee engagement to explore. By stoking the multiplication factor fire, motivation, growth, and success are sure to follow.
One Incredibly Valuable Annual Practice
As a final consideration for your year-end goal-tracking, there is an annual practice we’ve seen add incredible value for organizations of all sizes.
Creating an annual report – even if it never leaves the office walls – is an important exercise for reflecting on the previous year. It creates a space to memorialize and celebrate key accomplishments and provides another mechanism for accountability and alignment.
At its core, a good annual report will tell the story of the year through the lens of your goals, the meaningful actions you took, and the results you achieved. This provides an opportunity to evaluate which elements of your plan are on track, and which need revision. Plans and goals should always be dynamic so they can be refined and optimized along the way.
Collectively, annual reports tell an important organizational story over time. They form a history and trajectory for how you got to where you are today. It’s difficult to remember what you did two months ago – try recalling two years ago, or even 20! Your company’s annual reports will become a treasured archive and rich repository of important information, people and memories.
As we wind down 2022, I hope you’ve found something in this article to take into 2023. As we take our December Pause to reset and prepare for the new year ahead, we wish you success with every ambitious, audacious goal!
