Halftime: Are You Ahead or Behind?

Posted by Greg Bustin (July 1, 2005)

Excerpted from the book, Take Charge! How Leaders Profit From Change, by Greg Bustin.

The year is now half over.

It’s a good time to catch your breath, assess your position and make any adjustments to finish the second half of 2005 strong. But this time of year also means that if you’ve not already achieved or made significant progress toward achieving the goals you set for yourself months ago, it will now take 50% more effort to accomplish what you said you wanted on January 1.

Did you make New Year’s resolutions? Have you kept them? Or have you abandoned them? The Journal of Clinical Psycology says 36% of us break our New Year’s resolutions by January 31. The study doesn’t say where we stand after six months, but it’s safe to say the 36% figure grows as the year flies by.

Unleash the power of the present

Have you ever wondered what our most precious commodity is? It’s time. Because once we lose it we’ll never get it back.

Goals, of course, are about the future. But the first part of “goalsetting and goal-getting” is understanding, embracing and realizing the “power of the present.” One reason most of us fail to achieve our goals is our failure to live in the “now,” to unleash the power of the present. View goal-setting as a three-point plan:

Living in the now.
Being very clear about what you want.
Executing the plan.

Living in the now is critical because the past is over – you can’t change it. The future is uncertain – you can’t foresee it. The past and the future are illusions. Only the present is within our grasp and, God willing, it’s the closest thing under our control.

By focusing on the present, you commit yourself to change and to success. This attitude embraces the idea that if you act today and do the things that you commit to doing, you can succeed. “Successful people,” said Earl Nightingale, “are willing to do the things unsuccessful people are not.”

But our annual plans dissolve when goals seem too abstract. Or when we live in the past and dream in the future. Or when we don’t set our attitude to make the required changes, figuring it’s more comfortable living with the devil we know rather than the devil we don’t know. Or when we don’t see that what we’re doing today makes a difference toward achieving our goal. These thoughts and others like them are nothing but excuses.

Clarity is key

Clarity is the second point of the three-point goal-setting plan, and there are three components to the discipline of clarity: Being very specific about what you want. Setting a deadline. Writing it down.

Wanting to lose weight is a dream; losing 10 lbs. by Labor Day is specific. Wanting to grow sales is a dream; increasing your revenue by adding five new customer relationships by December 1 is specific.

Assigning a deadline to a specific goal helps make the goal more attainable. Deadlines are powerful tools. In our work with companies, we use a series of 100 questions to uncover opportunities, examine problems, gain agreement and set goals. The first question we always ask is: What do you want to celebrate one year from today? Because if you don’t achieve your 12-month objectives, you can forget about your 3- and 5-year plans. It’s healthy to dream, and we leave room for that as we work with companies, but we must be focused on achieving specific, concrete, doable, measurable goals.

Committing goals to paper (or disc) allows you to preserve your thinking and measure progress. Saying it isn’t enough; writing down goals – whether they’re personal goals or company objectives – requires discipline and increases the chances of success. What are we doing? Who’s doing it? By when? At what cost? For what expected result?

Perhaps you’ve heard of setting Big Hairy Audacious Goals. These are goals that inspire wonder and sometimes even a little fear. But you can accomplish even the biggest goal the same way you’d approach eating an elephant – a bite at a time. By breaking down your goal into a series of smaller steps and projects and then working back from your goal to the present, you’ve developed your written plan.

Three of the most successful business leaders know the importance of committing goals to paper. Stephen Covey uses a four-box quadrant in which he places activities that are urgent but not important, urgent and important, not urgent and not important, and not urgent but important. Herb Kelleher makes two columns – “Must be completed today” and “Can be completed tomorrow/next week.” Andrew Carnegie favored a list of items with the six most important items circled to be completed today. Sound simple? Try it.

Just do it

Thomas Watson, the leader who turned IBM into a juggernaut, said, “The outstanding leaders of every age are those who set their own quotas and constantly exceed them.” Here are six keys to executing your plan:

Limit yourself to three goals; when you achieve those goals, set three more. Stay focused.
Carry your goals in your pocket or make them a screen saver. Look at them every day.
Be intentional, do not procrastinate. Why put off what you can do today?
Hold yourself accountable. Remember, you have adopted an attitude of change. Your list keeps you focused. A partner can get you back on track. Recalibrate if you must, but don’t give up.
Celebrate victories.
Replicate successes and eliminate (but learn from) mistakes.

It’s halftime in the great game of business. What adjustments are you making to position your team to win?

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