Fuel your life for next year with new personal strategic goal setting!

The increasing complexity of our environment demands more and more of us. How can we be prepared as individuals, as well as organizations, for uncertainties? –Through creating our own future on the basis of a strong personal strategic action plan.

If you haven’t yet set up your new strategic action plan for coming year, it’s time to do so. Draw a line under your last chapter and start writing the new one. First of all, although you have no influence whatsoever on the past, it’s essential to know how you did last year, good or bad. Go back to your last personal plan, and take a pen and paper.

Let’s examine the various resolutions you took and how you have accomplished them. A quick check, right now should inspire and drive your new plan:

Hating the hierarchy or demanding change?

Authority is not so fashionable anymore. It’s true at school. It’s true in business. Some young and not-so-young managers tend to blow the doors off traditional, slow and complex management practices. This can often be an individual sharp and impulsive reaction that reflects unease with bosses. This is generally not too difficult to handle. If the rules are correct and proven to be efficient, either the person becomes convinced or he/she leaves.

But what should be done when efficiency in policies, systems and processes are more and more questioned? Well, provided the criticism is repetitive and internal evaluation confirms the weaknesses, it’s inevitably about changing habits and attitudes. Change management is a fashionable topic, and for good reasons. Since the man started doing business, success has never been eternal. Success fades with the years. System efficiencies erode and corrode. Success stories evaporate. Market leaders change rapidly in our economy. Faster than ever before.

Practically speaking, you could (should) start by analyzing and rating the efficiency of your business where excellence is critical for the perennity of your company success. For example: project management systems would be an appropriate area of focus.

Cold call center, dehumanized robots or smiling human beings?

Telephone support ineffectiveness can hurt a business badly. We all suffer from the not always well-programmed robots guiding us through a nightmare of questions and answers, only to ultimately let us down. We all suffer from externalized/delocalized call centers where people do not always let their skills shine through. We all suffer from support people who are supposed to provide us with solutions but who are not always able to go beyond their written script or helpdesk software.

I happened to spend some time in France, and I was in touch with Orange, where I was asked questions that the telephone robot didn’t always understand, was then put on hold for 10 minutes, where I had to listen to a primitive electronic music loop sample, and was then hung up on by their system.

Kill bad habits [4]: listening, listening versus talking, talking

Please read “Kill bad habits” before starting to read this post.

Excerpt from the post “Kill bad habits”:
[4] Talking too much without asking questions
and paying too little attention (or zero attention)
to others.

Big talkers are most of the time terribly painful. You try to be polite – you cannot interrupt them abruptly telling them they are boring. But they are. Sure, you have experienced this many times.

I recently met a Swiss business owner who was interested in my communication skills and know-how transfer techniques. We had a business breakfast and I had to listen to him ramble on non-stop for half an hour. I couldn’t inject more than a few short sentences. At the end, he asked me how we could work together. Without letting me open my mouth to say anything, he added: “No, you’re not interested.” He was right. A big talker. A poor listener. But, after all not such a bad attitude reader!

One of my first drawings (not the best one…), as illustrated in my eBook ◊“Towards Profitable Growth”◊

Kill bad habits [3]: strengthen your meeting best practices

Please read “Kill bad habits” before starting to read this post.

Excerpt from the post “Kill bad habits”:
[3] Never respecting a meeting time schedule
and a strict agenda.

It starts with people coming late to the meeting. Accepting this is always a bad start. There is a long list of the wackiest excuses for being late. The point is that being late to a meeting is disrespectful to everyone in the room. I remember a GM who was always late to the meetings he had to attend. Worse, he did not pay great attention when in the meeting, only offering a few statements here and there, and he would then leave early before any decisions were made. Can you imagine that he is now leading a major subsidiary?

Kill bad habits [2]: analyse our wrongdoings, learn, teach, activate

Please read “Kill bad habits” before starting to read this post.

Excerpt from the post “Kill bad habits”:
[2] Ignoring “It takes months to get a customer.
Seconds to lose one” while expressing strong
disagreement with a customer.

Lack of self-control, excessive ego demonstration, poor listening: all this leads to incoherent attitudes that a customer is not willing to decrypt as they transmit bizarre messages as bizarre as the picture below:

Kill bad habits [1]: choosing between working hard or working smart

Please read “Kill bad habits” before starting to read this post.

Excerpt from the post “Kill bad habits”:
[1] Working long hours without an inspired
goal for the month, the week, the day.

If you are working long hours every day, chances are you will go through troubled times. First, it is extremely hard to work long hours and stay efficient all day long. You can have the stamina to live like this for short periods of time only. Second, this bad habit doesn’t keep you fit. On the contrary, your health suffers. Third, workaholism is more a disease of isolation than an example of best management practices, like sharing with others.

Kill bad habits

It’s amazing how people keep their bad habits active. Although they pretty well know that they are doing something wrong, although they understand what to do when they are told what to do, most of the time, they go on and stay trapped.

 

→ A few real-life examples here –ask yourself the question “How about me?”:

Back to 1784. Straight talk about delegation. How about your practices today?

Roger, a good friend of mine, always chasing for smart ideas, emailed me an amusing quote this morning.

Back in 1784 in France. Duke of Choiseul, a French military, statesman and skillful diplomat, with many provocative ideas, during a visit by Talleyrand, the Foreign Affairs Minister who served under Napoleon and later started negotiations to sell Louisiana to the US, said:

“In my ministry, I have always made people work more than I did. One must not bury oneself in papers; one must find men to sort them out. One must put to work those whose job it is to work; then a day has more than 24 hours.”

A rather cynical lesson on delegation, isn’t it?