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The Annual Reset – How To Compress It
Isn’t it great to have a fresh start? To be renewed? To begin the New Year with a clean slate? That’s the opportunity presented by a mere flipping of the calendar (remember when we used to actually have those?!).
In our personal lives, the New Year often ushers in ‘promises’ for self improvement, rebalancing, reprioritizing. There’s a ton of potential value in being able to reset – whether to pause for celebration of the past, to leave failures behind, or to be excited about the times ahead. It’s good for the soul.
That happens in our business lives too. Whether or not your fiscal year aligns with the calendar, the step into the new business year should represent an honest assessment of successes and failures of the past and a shift in focus. Reprioritizing should bring a new level of clarity. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
So let’s get on with it… NOW! LET’S GO! Why am I yelling? Probably because I know that many organizations will allow this reset to take on a life of its own. It will be burdened with process, take months to execute, and become such an agonizing grind that it sets exactly the wrong tone for the beginning of the year. And, any competitor who has figured out how to reset quickly is gaining ground.
Here’s what the annual reset often looks like:
- We wait to start the process until we can wrap up the books. That takes us two or three weeks into January.
- Next, performance evaluations begin, which require review up through the organization. Now we’re already in the middle of February.
- Compensation decisions and performance conversations take us right into March.
- Finally, we begin to talk about the next year’s (actually this year’s) goals sometime around the beginning of April.
Other factors contribute to slow resets as well. Business planning activity in environments where there is an absence of a relevant and clear strategic plan is another example.
Without the clarity provided by a strategic plan, business planning can become bureaucratic and time consuming. Strategic plans allow stakeholders to have the conversation/negotiation/argument once. In the absence of a strategic plan, it happens over and over again.
Try these tips to streamline your annual reset:
- Start earlier. There’s no need to wait until the books are closed. Most organizations are very attuned to how the year will end well before the calendar flips.
- Make the process less linear. Start business planning and performance evaluations simultaneously. Ensure performance evaluations are occurring at multiple levels concurrently, as opposed to cascading them by levels in the organization.
- Hold managers accountable in two ways. 1.) Allow them to make performance rating and compensation decisions – and hold them accountable for the decisions. They’ll like that. 2.) Establish a very aggressive timeline and guidelines to which they must conform. They may not like that as much.
- Consider a dedicated evaluation day. No meetings. No phone calls. Every manager spends the entire day finalizing performance evaluations.
- Examine the business planning and performance management activities that occur throughout the year. If either is treated like a one-time annual event, as opposed to an ongoing process, then make some changes to spread the activities out over the course of the year.
- If you don’t already have one, or if it sits on a shelf and collects dust, then develop a strategic plan.
It can be done. I know one organization that completed its reset in December. And there’s nothing unique that enables them to do so. They just committed to it. Just like any other organization can. Including yours.
I hope you have a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2015… and that it starts soon!
Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net