The New Year is always a good time to reflect on the past before charging into the future. In business, anytime that you start feeling yourself getting stuck in the day to day crisis, week after week, then it’s time to step aside, reevaluate, and adjust for a successful overall strategy.
As a leader in any level of the organization, your ability to balance the needs of the business relies on taking a hard look at the strategies for long-term success. Evaluating and ensuring that the day to day tactics are preparing and propelling the team to the next level are critical.
What are key questions to consider?
- How has your team performed against daily and long-term
goals. - Where has your leadership contributed to the priorities set and accomplished by the team?
- Are the day to day tactics adequate for overall improvements?
- What communication have you had to support the goals?
- Are you consistent in sharing praise toward the end goals?
- Where have you steered the team in the wrong direction or off track?
We’ve all been there. We have every intention of staying on point, focusing the team on key business metrics, but then we begin to deal with the multiple priorities driven by the different departments within the business. Each has their top priorities on what it takes to successfully contribute to the company.
What happens to your team’s direction?
As the leader, it’s your goal to work with the rest of the leaders to align priorities, projects, and commitments to the capabilities of the current workforce.
- Consistent expectations to keep the team aligned in the right direction.
- Recognize that there are times when the team must adjust to the critical issue at hand. Whether it’s a major breakdown, new innovation, process implementation, or major audit that will shift priority for a temporary, yet necessary move that over the long-term impacts bigger strategy. Metrics and key business priorities may suffer.
- Realign team to top priorities as quickly as possible after a disruption.
- Look for new ideas to keep priorities fresh and at forefront of the team.
- Evaluate current information sharing and adjust for better understanding where day to day matches long-term strategy.
Take a day or two out of the year to reflect and evaluate your team’s day to day actions against needs of long-term strategy.
- Are your leaders driving for same priorities?
- Do they have the tools for helping the team move toward overall strategy?
- How can you provide them with key messages and ideas to meld the tactics with actions?
- What needs to be done differently?
I’ve recently sat down and evaluated my team’s prior year performance and how to make changes on tackling the main priorities that will be required this coming year. I’m excited about the way the team is coming together and where we’re headed.
Between myself and the supervisory staff, our team has worked through various leadership changes and a major program implementation. Now that we’re fairly stable with new tools available to us, we have the opportunity to realign our actions with our overall business strategy.