2009 Your Best Year Yet

Peter Rogan has forged a successful career in leadership development and cultural change.  In his visiting blog, Peter sets out how you can lead change for your own personal development or that of your teams.

Here we are at the start of another year and faced with the big question: How will you make 2009 the best year yet for you or your team?

You arrive in 2009 better equipped than ever to succeed, more experienced and skilled than ever before. And there’s more in there. There are talents to be unlocked, breakthroughs to be made, ambitions to be achieved and goals to be met. You can make 2009 your best year yet and set yourself up for more success in 2010 and beyond.

The first step is to create a motivating and realistic picture of what your great year will look like. Then you have to keep you or your teams development towards these performance goals on track.  This is called performance leadership, whether leading yourself to your goals or leading your team.

This can be done using a simple weekly review process. This helps you take comfort and confidence from your progress, identify any shortfalls or wrong turns and plan and take action to get back on track. It also has the additional side-benefits of helping you manage your and your team’s work-life balance and reduce stress. It’s a simple habit, works like a treat, used by everyone who is genuinely committed to getting the best of themselves at home and their team at work.

In shaping your vision of 2009 and why you will make it your best year yet, it’s worth asking:

• FOR MY TEAM: What does the big picture look like for my team and my organisation? What’s all the hard work for – what do I want my team to achieve? What am I passionate about? What really motivates and engages my team and gets them excited, makes them proud to be part of the organisation? (Let’s call this your  Vision and Values to give it a name – see the Vision and Values action in the attached pack)
• FOR ME: What are the key roles in my life?  What is important to me about these roles, where could I make a difference this year, where could I make a breakthrough, change something that’s been an itch for ages?  What are my goals for each this year? (See ‘Key roles’ and Goals in the action pack)
• Am I actually investing time managing myself or am I surrendering a fair bit of control and pretty much just reacting to stuff that happens to me? Do I have clear goals that I really want to achieve or just a hazy and general bunch of hopes and stuff I might get round to?  Do I have a simple and easy system that works for tracking my goals and keeping me and my team focused, confident and energised?

All sorts of evidence, from big academic studies to good old common sense, suggests that the more often we reflect on our team’s development aims, our present reality and our next actions, the more likely we are to be able to steer things in a favourable direction. To not do so means we are opening ourselves to drift and putting circumstances and other people’s priorities in charge of our time and choices. Why bother? As they say in the L’Oreal ads “because you’re worth it” (See the Weekly Review tool in the action pack).

To help you get your Best Year Yet in focus use the actions in the attached action pack and create a simple but powerful goal-setting system.  This will enable you to keep your year on track and create an equally simple and powerful goal-achievement system.  They are the highest-leverage set of personal effectiveness tools I know of and they work like a treat if you use them with quiet consistency. The instructions are straightforward and included in the pack and it’s all free of charge.

That’s it for now. I hope it’s been useful and you have your Best January Yet!

Peter Rogan

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