Establish your Goals and Vision for the Forthcoming Year

A great idea at this time of year, and something we do annually at Brayshaw Morey is to sit down and establish your goals and vision for the forthcoming year.  It can be tough for employees coming back from a long Christmas break to get back into the swing of things. Taking a little time to identify goals and priorities can help you and your staff get refocused and revitalised for the year ahead. You can carry out this exercise yourself and also ask your managers, if you have them, to do it. Start out by identifying the main things you want to achieve for the business as a whole in 2012; for your managers, they should do the same thing for their particular area of the business. You don’t want too many goals – three to four key objectives, in order of priority. And they need to be specific and measurable.  Once you’ve listed your primary goals then sit down and discuss them in detail with your team. Clarify and agree the objectives and also work out a plan of action – practical, achievable steps - so that you have some idea how you are going to reach them. Agree them as a team, with a timeframe in mind by which they should be attained. 

Have a look at the successes from the past year along with the activities which didn’t go so well, and evaluate what you’ve learnt from them. Work out the main lessons you can draw and how these lessons will help you build and do things better in the future. It’s amazing how many companies don’t do this and go blindly into a New Year with no idea what they want to get out of it. You can’t expect your managers and your staff to know what they are supposed to be aiming for, if you don’t know yourself. “More of the same” is not enough of a strategy to grow and develop your business in these tough economic times – you need to take stock at key moments like the beginning of the year to check things are heading in the right direction and correct your course if not. 

If you don’t achieve all your goals, don’t beat yourself up about it. That would be perfection, which would be great but probably not realistic.  Nonetheless having something concrete to aim for, a combined company vision, is vitally important so everyone is pulling in the same direction with shared goals and a clear plan of how to get there. So the message in this tough economic climate is that businesses need to evolve or they will die. Having a clear idea of your goals is essential to keeping on track. 

If you’d like any more guidance from me on goal setting and how we do it here at Brayshaw Morey, then drop me an email on info@brayshaw-morey.co.uk and I’ll do what I can to help.