Start of a new financial year – Goals and Activities

When you started this year, did you make some new year’s resolutions? Did you look back over what you did in 2015 before you made your plans for 2016? Maybe you reflected on a great holiday, before you started planning for the next one; or thought of the hobbies and skills that you want to improve before another year is out. For me, I always work better if I have projects with a start and end date, so I like to set myself tangible goals for my personal life – this year I want to improve my golf game before the season is over!

In business I’m no different. I start a new year by reviewing what my team did the year before:

  • Did we hit our targets?
  • If not, why not? What happened?
  • Did we realise too late that we wouldn’t make them?
  • Could we have taken action sooner if we had spotted the signs earlier?

As the new financial year approaches for many, it can be a great time to take stock and plan for 2016/17, but where do you start?

What should you be monitoring?

We’re all good at setting goals, but we’re not always great at using them to best effect. We often make the mistake of focusing on our goals without really considering what we need to change to get there. What do we need to be monitoring in our business to give us clarity on whether our goals are attainable or not?

By monitoring the correct KPIs, not only do we give ourselves a better chance of reaching our business goals, but we get a clearer picture of which actions are contributing the most to us achieving them. If you spend too much time focusing on the activities, you may not deliver the results you wanted or expected – similarly, if we only consider where we are in relation to our goals, we’ll not be able to see how we reached that position!

Understanding the trends

If we look too long at how close we are to a goal without analysing why we’re in that position, leaders can make knee jerk reactions to what could simply be natural variation. If your target was losing weight, you wouldn’t step on the scales three times a day and work out what you eat based on the numbers! You would weigh yourself at regular intervals over the course of a month because you know that your weight fluctuates during even a few hours. It is no different in business. Leaders need to understand the natural variations, and not just react to the numbers.

Choosing the right activities to reach your Goals

If you want to get better at an existing skill this year – maybe like me, you want to improve your golf swing – then you’ll identify what needs to change. Maybe you’ll take some lessons or get some advice from a professional, and of course you’ll get some practice time in. Your goal at the end might be more confidence on the course, or fewer hits to go the same distance! But your activities are what will make the difference; they are what will help you reach your goal. Goals are achieved by managing activities and monitoring results – not one or the other, you need to do both.

Choosing the right goals

In business, the right goals make the difference between being successful, or just being busy! For instance, if you use the number of sales calls your team makes as a target, you’ll most likely end up playing a numbers game without necessarily making a positive impact on your business. That will depend on the quality of the calls.

Choosing the right goals isn’t a matter of just doing what your industry or competitors are doing either. An organisation I worked with saw that their competitors were selling a certain product, and decided to focus on doing the same.

By putting all their efforts into reaching this single goal, they missed the signals that would have alerted them to the impact their actions were having – the unintended consequences. They needed to manage the activities and monitor the results. By doing that, you’ll be able to see when the goal you’re striving for is the wrong one.

If you’re struggling with setting goals for this year, or need help reviewing last year’s – get in touch.

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