As we head into the second half of 2022, a lot of us are asking “What’s next?”
The past six months have unfolded in a chaotic manner, capping off what has already been an intensely turbulent couple of years.
We know that these uncertain times have left many CEOs reassessing their plans and goals. Future planning, especially when dealing with an uncertain labor market and mixed signals about economic prosperity, can cause any CEO to ask, “are my goals still realistic?”
Times of uncertainty are a great time to reassess your goals, as long as reassessment doesn’t derail your forward progress. Times of economic prosperity are not necessarily an indicator of business success. As we mentioned in a previous blog post, there are many businesses that have done exceptionally well during times of economic downturn.
As always, creating and meeting your business goals starts with a solid plan. But planning isn’t enough. Your plan needs action steps to spur forward progress.
In this post, we revisited one of our earliest PFD blog posts,
How to Convert Plans Into Action and Impact which we posted more than 10 years ago. Today, we are updating and emphasizing those points and we encourage you to follow along as you look forward to the next six months.
Keep your 2022 (and 2023) plan fresh and relevant.
Have a one-page version printed where you and your team can see it on a daily basis. Use your plan to frame the agenda for your weekly leadership team meetings.
Review your assumptions.
Does today’s market validate your assumptions? Where do you need to apply more resources? Where do you need to refine your approach?
Track the metrics that support your plan.
Share the scorecard with your team and ensure that everyone is held accountable. There are numerous digital tools that can help you build and measure your success metrics.
Use virtual tools to help you create action plans.
There are plenty of free tools to help you organize your projects and share them with your team and clients. The free Google Docs has for project template planners (Insert > Table > Table Template), including a product roadmap, review tracker, project assets and content planner. But more professional tools include Smartsheets, ClickUp, Teamwork and Monday. You can log onto these platforms from any browser, easily collaborate on projects and the software automatically emails users updates made on their projects.
Bring your leadership team on board for your future planning sessions.
Are your Mission Statement, Vision Statement and Core Values highly visible? Make sure they are easy to find on your website and on all your internal planning documents so you and your employees can measure success against your most important metrics.
Celebrate your wins.
Recognize key players and acknowledge personal and company successes. Also check to assess what worked and why?
Repeat and review.
Make regular check-ins and reviews a part of your action plan. Set a regular cadence, but at least quarterly, to make sure your short-term goals continue to align with your larger three-year plan.
If you’d like to learn more about building a robust action plan, Group would love to support you. Please reach out to us to schedule a call.