Planning for the new year — Part 2 (Ask your employees.)

In the first article in this series, we walked through Guidepost statements, and why they are so important to the success of your initiatives.

However, if you think of goals as your ultimate destination, it’s not enough to know that you are headed to Bangalore, Boston or Brisbane. First, you should know if you’re starting out in Copenhagen, Cambridge (US) or Cambridge (UK).

There are two ways to check your starting point.

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Planning for the new year – Part 1 (Guidepost Statements)

Avoid detours: Smash your 2022 goals by following your guidepost statement

Halloween may be over, but for many organizations, the scariest time of year has just begun. As we march toward December 31st, we scramble to deliver on our goals for the current year. For many of us, it’s busy, it’s rushed, and often hard to keep straight what needs to be done next. It hardly seems like the right time to deliberately plan strategic initiatives that will support and elevate long-term business goals, but if not now, when?

Planning ahead is crucial in business, whether it’s laying out kicking off a new initiative or being part of a multi-year transformation journey. While leaders often specify the destination, they can forget to provide the details of the journey.

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Seek to understand before you seek to solve…

It’s the time of year when organizations review what they’ve accomplished, evaluating achievements against goals set in January. Often, this navel-gazing will result in revised projected budgets, staffing changes, or executive bonuses. Even when things seem to be going relatively well, it’s easy to (mistakenly) assume there is a good alignment between what the leaders project and what employees experience in the trenches.

2020 has gummed up the gears of business even more than usual

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Rethinking the Legacy of a Leader

The definition of “a leader,” specifically in the corporate world and western hemisphere, has morphed and evolved quite a bit in the last century or so. Early in the 19th century, a business “leader” was a titan of industry, usually a once-poverty-stricken lad (and yes, way back when, it was a young man) who pulled …

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6 simple questions firefighting chiefs ask—and you should, too

As leaders, we have grand plans: those that will help our organizations, our customers and dare we admit it—our own careers. Unfortunately, we don’t have much time to translate strategy into practical projects for our operational managers to implement. So, we end up with statements like: Here’s what we need to do by X date, …

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Enterprise startup hack

(or how to get results from a Pilot in 30 days)

When we walked prospects through the results they’d see in just 30 days using Klever Insight software—a digital coach for tech support managers—the most common reaction was: “Sounds too good to be true. Can you prove it works?” And we were stumped.

Klever Insight is the world’s first digital coach that uses augmented intelligence—a human-centric application of artificial intelligence—to provide tech support managers the confidence and time they need to implement strategy, in just minutes a day. So how do we  prove that a digital coach helps managers achieve a better outcome than managers that receive no coaching?

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Sophomore Slump at work – how do you compare?

In the US, a sophomore is someone who is in their second year of college, with two more years before they (hopefully) graduate. The term ‘sophomore slump’ refers to the significant drop in morale many sophomores feel after the initial excitement of college (and the elaborate on-boarding process) is replaced by the reality of harder courses.

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“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Yes that’s an attention-getting line, famously coined by boxer Mike Tyson. But it really is something to think about, especially since it’s that time of the year for most of us – when we are neck deep in planning. A time when hope still springs eternal – *this* is surely the year when we will duck those right hooks and our fancy footwork will guide us to success. Or, when some of what we plan for gets completed rather than smashed by a flurry of incoming urgent issues.  

If you are anything like me, here’s how you would approach this task :

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