For many companies, January signals more than the beginning of a new year. It is also the start of a fiscal year with new goals, deadlines, and challenges ahead. December is treated as a period for reflecting on the past 12 months while gearing up for the year ahead. Thus, it’s the perfect time to prepare for a successful new year.
If you’ve struggled with anxiety or fear of failure at work, you’re not alone. Employees often deal with feelings that they may not be qualified enough for a position or that they lack the ability to perform as well as their peers. There is a term for this feeling of not being good enough or qualified enough: the imposter syndrome.
Since the dawns of humanity, people have used the cyclicity of time—sunrise/sunset, day/night—to make it measurable and easier to predict. Because when you know what follows, things are easier to deal with. Back in the day when people lived in caves, they used this known variation to optimize their hunting process. And then slowly, days turned into weeks, months and years. We invented work days and week-ends and now we know when to work and when to rest. Suddenly, at some point in history—most might not know it, but there is a perfectly logical explanation for this—the beginning of a new year has suffered a dramatic transformation. It swiftly became a threshold, a time when you leave the past behind, gaze into the future full of hope, and even make a resolution of some sort.
Focus at work is under siege. Everything can interrupt your focus. Coworkers asking you out on a break. A nearby call ringing its way into your focus. And most of all, the myriad distractions new tech put on the table. The buzzes, the dings, the rings. The trouble is, if you don’t focus at work, work doesn’t get done by itself. Hence, focus at work matters.
Achievable goals are the pinnacle of a smart goal-setting strategy. Sure, you should be able to achieve your goals, generally speaking. Yet, there is a lot more to achievable goals. This is because goals are high-productivity enablers. By itself, goal-setting provides structure to individual or team efforts.
And making sure that goals are achievable builds on that. Most of all, achievable goals motivate. They become a milestone. One that requires resilience. To put it simply, achievable goals are something people feel. Achievable goals reward because they feel like the achievement that they are.
Successful teams are what drives any company. They are what makes the difference. And, above all, it’s successful teams that make or break your business.
However, creating successful teams isn’t quite science yet. After all, you can put a bunch of very smart and talented people together, and still fail miserably. Or you can band together a group of people that, for whatever reason, synergize. They click together, overcome obstacles, and overachieve.
Meetings are about to die. Particularly since collaborative work has become the staple of modern office life, they are about to die. And after they die, they will move somewhere better, virtual. Somewhere in the cloud, or in a special bundle of apps. But don’t get your hopes up high yet.
After all, there have been attempts to put new life into meetings. Some preach against inherent inefficacies. “Make meetings purposeful”, they say. Others are deluding themselves that theater methods will do. So “treat your meetings like an improv session”, they say. Seems like everyone thinks that “The Office” is a documentary. That we should all turn Michael Scott and do some improv.
Goals can be flexible, and not just metaphorically. Flexibility is what allows you to improve your reach. It’s what protects you when you move, fast or strong. Flexibility delivers stability and lets you breathe, in and out. Goals are the tip of your reach. The target. The final, scalable, observable destination. In the pursuit of goals, teams are relentless, yet not always productive. Hence, let’s find out how flexible planning, goals, and productivity interconnect.
