New Year, New Organization — Learn How to Make It Work

Welcome to the new year! If you’ve been following our blog series, you can look back at January with relief because you’re already ahead of the game.

1. You set goals for three years.
2. You defined one-year goals.
3. You clarified your Quarterly Rocks.

You’re ready to go, right? Well, wait just a minute.

Before you jump in too quickly, it’s important to take one final step — and this one may sound a little strange. You have to identify issues that might put the brakes on your success.

What “issues” are we talking about?

These are the obstacles, concerns, and problems you face in achieving your vision. Up to now, you have been focused on the “perfect world” scenario and you’ve been avoiding addressing complaints, barriers, and negativity for a reason: You had to be able to see the positive path to your vision.

Now it’s time to take a quick but honest look at what could prevent that vision from becoming reality. The intent of this analysis isn’t to destroy the vision, but to ensure you’re prepared to handle challenges as they come up.

The good news: Typically, only a handful of serious issues affect any business. The better news: The same issues come up over and over again. What has changed is that now you are able to solve them.

[cta]In our Traction blog series, we’re exploring how to create a clear vision for your business. Inspired and guided by the concepts in the book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, by Gino Wickman, these blogs will walk you through essential steps that will enable you to get traction, grow, and thrive.[/cta]

The key is creating an environment that smokes out those issues and allows people to bring them up so they can be addressed. This step requires openness and honesty. Your team has come a long way to get to this point, and if dysfunctions remain, this step will expose them pretty quickly.

Making your issues list

With open and honest communication, the issues list becomes a very useful tool.

1. Start with the issues around your vision, and focus on only those that can be tackled in the first 90 days. They may be:
   1. Technological needs
   2. Office or staff needs
   3. Product ideas
2. Next, look at the issues within your leadership team, especially those that crop up often (think weekly) and cause distractions. They may be:
   1. Client difficulties
   2. Employee problems
   3. Process failures
3. Last, examine the issues within your departments; these are on a very localized level and must be tackled in weekly department meetings.

Bring issues into the light

Bringing up issues may not be a comfortable conversation for everyone on your team. They may need to be encouraged, but once the conversation gets started and people feel safe about bringing up issues, the floodgates generally open up.

Your goal is to create an environment in which issues can be brought to the table and then solved through the efforts of your team. This is an ongoing effort, so get good at it early in the game and it will be easier on everyone in the long run.

Knowing the issues you’re going to face gives you power because they can now be solved.

[cta]Get help: Contact Financial Gravity at (469) 342-9100, by email, or through our contact page.[/cta]