Anyone who manages a business understands the challenge of balancing the day-to-day operation while keeping the vision, strategy and business goals moving forward.
The day-to-day management issues associated with people, processes, facilities, equipment, etc. can be very distracting and can affect our ability to accomplish goals. For this reason, it is important to keep goals incorporated into what we do every day.
As difficult as this is, we need to proactively stay focused on the annual goals. Some things you can do to keep goals a priority are:
- Have a monthly calendar that shows tasks for the month and due dates.
- Block out large spans of time to specifically work on goals.
- Keep certain days of the week open to work on goals.
- Use a team to help review goals and status of completion.
- Review goals monthly so you can see the progress.
- Review employee goals on a monthly basis to help keep employees focused on priorities.
It is also important to be consistent with messages to employees. They need to understand their goals and how their goals support what the organization is trying to achieve. If goals are constantly communicated and reinforced to employees, they can help be a catalyst to getting them accomplished.
The beauty of employee goals is that if done right, they are the fuel to help you achieve your business goals. Meeting with your employees on a regular basis and reviewing goals with them is an important step in working toward goal completion. This process communicates to them the importance of their goals and it also allows you the opportunity to help them overcome any barriers they may be encountering in achieving those goals. Bottom line: employees learn very quickly that if it’s important to you, you will talk about it and if it’s not you won’t. Keep talking about it!
A fact of life is that day-to-day distractions happen and compete for our attention but we cannot allow distractions to slow us down. We need to stay focused on tasks that keep moving the organization forward. This is always a tender balancing act but can be strategically managed. In the same way you stopped to think about and map out your goals, stop right now and map out a plan that will enable you to achieve them!
