New Year’s Business Resolutions

Every year millions of people make New Year’s Resolutions fully intending on maintaining, measuring, evaluating, and keeping them. Likewise, millions of those same people never end up seeing those resolutions through to the end. One of the inherent problems in setting goals is that the idea of a goal for many people is often scary, nebulous, and intangible. A goal is too often something that is just as easy to break as it is to make.

Here is a list of 7 things to make your New Year’s Resolutions a better experience than years past.

1. Don’t set goals, Make Promises – Again, goals are as easy to break as they are to make, but people hate breaking promises.
2. Make your Promise Public – Shout it from the Rooftops. It is a lot easier to go back on your word to yourself. You can rationalize the daylights out of pretty much anything. Is it somewhat more difficult to rationalize broken promises to a big group of people you admire and respect.
3. Make short-term goals – many times people set goals that really do take the whole year to achieve. They get bogged down by the idea of needing the entire 365 days to get the job done, OR get lulled into a state of procrastination that they have a full 365 days to achieve their goals.
4. Make goals you can actually achieve and affect – many business owners make extremely lofty “pie in the sky� goals that take a lifetime to achieve, and rely on all the stars aligning perfectly. In many cases the achievement of their goals relies on people and things outside of their control.
5. Publish your Goals – many diatribes have been written on the power of written goals.
6. Inform your Success Team – Make sure you tell the important stake holders on your team. It could be the marketing director, sales manager, HR director, or admin staff. Everyone needs to be on the same page on what the business has committed to achieve in 2008.
7. Make sure that your Quarterly Goals Reflect your New Year’s Resolutions – most companies will review their financial health at least on a quarterly basis. A real review can only take place by when they are bench marks that you set, and have some orientation point to reference performance from. Use your quarterly goals as a marker to review performance of these New Year’s Resolutions.