As each new year dawns, we make resolutions about our diets, our hobbies and even our bank accounts. But how many of us make them about our careers? And even rarer, our organizations?
Successful businesses aren’t born, they’re built. And like any New Year’s resolution, achieving our goals at work requires deliberate, concerted and steady effort all year long. By putting simple plans in place, leaders can increase their velocity and set their organizations up for success in 2019.
Defining Your Goal
So how do you get started? There is an easy formula.
First, set your goal. Then determine the single-most important thing to stop doing, the strength you want to build upon, and thing to start doing to get there.
The same formula works well in an organizational context. If you are making a goal for your company, identify the best people to team up with.
Then, share your goal with your team, get their input, and enlist their help to identify the most important things to stop, build upon and start — in order to achieve your goal.
How will you know if your business resolutions will be successful?
The best way to quickly gauge this is to cross-functionally create an Envision-Design-Build-Activate (EDBA) action plan through a Strategic Profiling-Action Planning (SP-AP) session.
EDBA is a Roadmap
When designing a plan to set yourself up for success in the new year, it’s important to first ask the right questions. In a given time frame, it’s important to be able to articulate a single vision for where you intend to go and why.
This is where the EDBA (Envision-Design-Build-Activate) process, outlined in my book The Velocity Advantage, can make a big difference.
First, collaboratively answer a few important questions:
1. Envision: Where do you intend to go and why? And in what timeframe?
2. Design: Once you have a vision, what do you need to do and when?
3. Build: How can you most productively implement these priorities?
4. Activate: Given expertise, passions and skills-sets, who is the best person to carry out the implementation steps?
Making a Plan
When you cross-functionally establish and implement your vision, it’s important to set clear priorities in the design phase of the EDBA process.
Ask yourself a simple question: “If I could do only one thing to best achieve my envision statement, what would that one thing be?”
Then, “if I could do only one other thing, what would that be?” Generally, three or fewer things will make most of the difference.
From Plan to Action
Once you’ve clearly developed your cross-functional action plan through the EDBA process, you can ensure that your goals are realized by implementing the EDBA project management life cycle.
For more information on how EDBA can set you up for success and help you achieve your New Year’s resolutions at the office, contact us or read The Velocity Advantage.
