Working with Intention: Self-reflection and the use of the five whys requires an open mind and a strong ego in order to challenge potential unconscious bias and consider answers that may not be popular or fit neatly into existing narratives. Hence, it's seldom the case that meaningful results come solely from self-reflection exercises. To make more progress, we will need the help of our coaches and mentors.

Optimally, your company’s budget should be an elegant financial expression of a tight, cohesive storyline that explains how tactics and execution in the upcoming year align with the company’s purpose, long-term vision, and master (or top level) goals.

The point I’m driving at is that while you as a leader may do just fine with the ambiguity of unfinished goals—simultaneously cleaning up last year’s mess and rolling out shiny new initiatives, many of your people detest loose ends, unfinished business, and incomplete goals.

What do your people want (other than more money)? They want clarity, autonomy, empowerment, respect, and organizational accountability. They want to make a difference and do good, meaningful work. They want to know that leadership cares and that everyone in the company is rowing in the same direction with the same commitment and vigor that they apply to their own work.

Requiring everyone to sit next to each other in a physical space will not drive an enlightened corporate culture—giving individuals and teams meaningful work and a sense of purpose is what matters.

When purpose and vision are not clear, the status quo becomes a warm, comfortable blanket to snuggle up in. It takes discipline to get to where you want to go. When you take a look around at the “successful” people in your life, I’d put all the money in my pocket on the bet that they all share the skill of discipline. 

In my experience, run rate and momentum are the most important things that determine a business’s performance early in the new year. You can have glorious PowerPoint presentations that illustrate a bright, shiny New Year, but if there’s no momentum and your teams haven’t already upskilled and allocated significant resources to the plan, then you’re almost certainly going to face disappointment in Q1.

What we know about resolutions, is that most of them fail. Why do they fail? Because they’re typically not integrated into a broader long-term personal plan. Loads of energy and attention get poured into resolutions early in the year. Then time passes, entropy sets in, the inertia of the previous status quo sets in, and the hopes and dreams of New Year’s Eve are eventually dashed—leading to disappointment and regret.

Moreover, what does hardcore even mean? To some, that might be five 10 hour days a week. To others, it might literally mean working around the clock and catching a few zzz’s—leaving a pool of drool on the break room couch! This lack of clarity, coupled with mass terminations and ultimatums will create an environment of suspicion, insecurity, and self-doubt. Trust and accountability have no way to take root in an organizational culture like this. Active disengagement, obfuscation, mistrust, and a$$ kissing are the most likely results.

If you’re a leader and are frustrated that flow is difficult for your people to experience, then make your purpose, vision, and cultural aspirations crystal clear; align goals up, down, and across the organization; respect your people by treating them as your most valuable asset; minimize waste and unnecessary organizational friction; foster a maniacal focus on the customer; install effective visual management systems; and make sure incentive systems are congruent with all of the above.

Trust builds when actions are aligned with words. Flow is maximized when work is aligned up, down, and across the organization. Accountability flourishes in an environment of strong communication and multidirectional transparency. The three are inextricably linked, and strong goal-setting practices serve as the foundation for establishing trust, accountability, and flow.

Goal setting within a business can be fraught with start-stops, discontinuity, extra-processing, and long wait times from ideation to implementation. Poorly designed goals that do not connect up, down, and across an organization can do more harm than good. That harm evidences itself in the form of team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance. Moreover, if corporate goals change too frequently, the organizational change management curve and many individual contributor change management curves can’t keep up, leading to–you guessed it–team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance.