It’s that time of year again. The New Year. A fresh start. A chance to get rid of old habits and begin to instill new ones. We so often make New Year’s resolutions for ourselves: I want to lose 10 pounds, I’m going to finish that home improvement project, I’ll cut my caffeine intake in half.
But how often do CEOs make corporate New Year’s resolutions? If you haven’t considered doing this before, this is your year to begin! And I’ll help you identify three very important New Year’s Resolutions for your company that I assure you will make a dramatic impact in the months to come (without the fear of gaining the weight back!).
- Set Goals and Write Them Down
I firmly believe that writing down goals and sharing them is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible. Do you make a habit of setting corporate goals? How many of those goals have you actually written down? Did you know that people with written goals are 50% more likely to achieve them? But the reality is that only 3 out of every 100 adults actually write down their goals! And most businesses fail to properly set and convey their goals. In fact, the Harris Poll recently surveyed over 23,000 employees and found that only 37% of employees clearly knew the company’s goals.
Setting goals is crucial to success. We find it so important at PFSbrands that we’ve developed a required course for our team members: Goal Setting 101. We look to recruit and coach people who want to be more successful, and we help them get there by providing education on best practices for goal setting.
- Tolerance for Failure
This is the reason for the second “T” in our GRITT model. It seems now more than ever people and business are ruled by this irrational fear. It dictates decisions, actions, and ultimately outcomes. Just imagine if people like Abraham Lincoln, or the Wright brothers, or Thomas Edison gave up on their dreams because of the fear of failure. Edison said it best: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Because of the zero-tolerance-for-failure mentality, people have become afraid to try new things because they don’t want to be punished. This fear of being punished absolutely kills innovations. This isn’t of course to say that we want to be a failing company. We make it pretty well known that we like to win. But winning doesn’t happen without a lot of failure.
- Remove “I’ll Try” From Your Vocabulary
At PFSbrands, we accept no less than “I WILL” as a commitment. “I’ll try” is not good enough, because it builds an unspoken but present excuse: “I TRIED.” As an organization with a tolerance of failure, we begin with “I will” and use the “failures” to grow and recommit to “I will.”
There you go! Three New Year’s Resolutions for success in 2019!