Free your coatings company to ramp-up in 2012 without fear of failure. Help yourself, and the people around you enjoy a happier journey in the process. You’re good at what you do because you know the traps and you can paint a fast, straight, red line past them all. Where projects are concerned you know where you stand and where you’re going—you easily visualize the finished product. The trouble we have is transferring that confidence to meet important goals of our own. We’re also quick to abandon personal goal aspirations at the first roadblock because we’re not fond of losing control. It’s how we’re wired. The solution is simple; when dealing with personal goals and/or working ON the business you have to abandon the straight-line approach that works IN the business. Reward yourself with stops along the way. You’ll have a much better chance to actually achieve goals that have otherwise eluded you in the past. I think you’ll find there’s far less to fear with this approach.
Enjoy the journey on a road less traveled
If you want to achieve goals you must have a plan. A strategy is best because it forces three necessary states that assure you’ll get the job done right:
1. Starting Point: Pick a pain and define your current state
When you get colorful about your situation, relative to the pain you want to alleviate, you gain the clarity you need to describe the goal in the next step. Be specific with your description; imagine you are explaining it to me! Get the numbers; include the “whom”; and talk about why you are where you are and why you want to change it. This is not the easy part. You’re establishing a benchmark. You have to know exactly where you are to recognize the smallest achievement. In this process those small ticks are key to sustaining interest and motivation, the prerequisite of goal achievement.
2. Ending Point: Create a short list of goals
This should be the fun part. Make a list, start with pains and work up toward an exciting vision of where you want to go. No limits at first. Forget being precise. (You are not alone, none of us know what we’ll be doing in ten days, let alone ten months.) From the list, and hopefully with your team, negotiate a small set of goals you think you can achieve given enough time. It’s a good idea to include some tiny ones along with the Big Kahuna’s so that progress will be evident more frequently along the way. Attach a date to each with a clear description of the objective and/or the intent. Financial goals should be easy enough to measure whereas process improvement stuff will obviously need lots of words, pictures and diagrams.
3. Midpoints: Allow yourself 4 course corrections
The proposed path from current reality to your goals is never a straight line (see “From A toward B” below). This is the critical difference between customer work and your work—between working ON the business and working IN the business. The straight-line approach is a pass/fail proposition. It’s where we get into trouble trying to keep resolution promises. It’s why we fear goal setting; it’s not realistic and there’s little to gain from it. Break down each goal, large and small, into four intervals. I don’t use quarters because not all of your goals should be on the scale of 12 months. Plan to revisit each goal with your team on each respective interval. If you’re on course and therefore get it done in just 5 minutes, great. If not, better yet—you’ve got changes to talk about now when you’re off course only a little bit.
From A toward B
At the start of a voyage, prudent sailors write in their log, “From A toward B,” not “A to B.” They know that conditions may change dramatically during the course of the voyage, so they have to be prepared to reconsider the way to their goal. For them, survival may depend on their ability to adapt. So planning is great, as long as you plan to make changes where needed.
Why YOU are last
Coatings professionals are masterful at laying out a plan, and then executing on the plan toward a certain goal dictated by their customers. They know well, in order to profit, each endeavor must be a smooth, very predictable passage from start to finish and without surprises (LOL). The focus is on the customer. Growth or change is so gradual it’s hardly noticed until after the fact. The process repeats and there’s never any time left for YOU.
Ever since you started in business, you’ve been on a certain kind of trajectory. You found a way or chose a path and, out of shear momentum, you progressed. But few of us are happy with our progression. We understand the need to set goals but we know how difficult it is to stick with it “because we’ve TRIED it.” The notion to make a change or set a goal usually starts out like a new year’s resolution. In a quiet moment we get an idea that both resonates and seems achievable. Soon after we commit, priorities begin to change and with a slap of reality and we’re right back in line on the treadmill. Here we know the road, we know how fast we can tread, and we know it’ll all be over soon. There’s good reason fewer than 10 percent of people turn new year’s resolutions into any real change.
INSIGHT:
Goal planning is a process, not a single event. Just as the sailor observes, our perspective changes as we move along the way. Pausing to allow for smaller, less painful actions amount to greater achievement in the longer term.
I welcome your comments, questions or more discussion.