Is the path ahead… behind you?
If you have big targets for 2023 and you lead a team, reflection can be one of your most valuable assets to activating the energy you will need for a successful year ahead.
Rushing into strategic planning for the next year, or setting goals without first taking the time to reflect on your success can fuel burnout, productivity, and disengagement.
So as you run your end of year planning meeting, follow these 3 steps to bring everyone’s energy up and ignite some excitement for a successful year ahead.
Step 1: Big Picture Reflection
Take a deep breath, settle yourselves, and take a moment to reflect on your team’s accomplishments. What went really well this year? What worked? Who deserves acknowledgement and recognition? Why did a project work so well?
You might even try a few gratitude exercises to bring everyone into space of celebration. This reflection backward elevates mood and energy to face uncertainty, connects team spirit, and brings more optimism to the year ahead.
Step 2: Make Room For New Priorities
Employees often spin their wheels when given too many priorities. By simplifying and clearing dead weight’ tasks from the pipeline makes progress easier to generate.
Split a page into 3 columns and give them the following labels:
- Start Doing
- Stop Doing
- Expand and Do More
Ask your team to focus on the past year and think about what projects, initiatives, data, tasks etc. you all could start, stop, or do more of to make next year even more of a success.
Write your responses in each section. Remember to pay close attention to the ‘stop’ column. As a leader, make decisions based on this feedback to let your team know you hear and support them.
Step 3: Entity Visioning
To begin any strategic planning session, start by visioning what’s possible. Create a shared vision of the coming year’s opportunities, and build consensus on your team surrounding your company’s vision, intention, and strategies and pathway for growth for the coming year.
This shared vision serves as the glue that holds all the ideas and actions you’ve planned together. It allows your team to anchor back to this vision to assure you stay on course, and serves as a focusing tool when everyone returns from the holidays, ready to hit the ground running.
A Team Visioning Experience:
A Guided Audio Experience for Teams to Create Vision for 2023.
This guided audio brings teams together to e-commit to a common shared purpose and amplify your company’s mission and values. This guided experience helps a teams identify a shared vision, opens doors for collaboration, and ignites collective energy toward teamwork, focus, and achieving 2023 goals and objectives.
Planning for Success
All great planning sessions require that employees be seen, heard, and valued. Having a facilitator immediately shifts the dynamic from Boss-Employee, to You-AND-Me. With decades of experience and tools utilized by institutions like MIT, Yale, and Google, we know how to plan and deliver annual strategic meetings for success.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
The Future of Work in the Era of New Possibilities: Today we are invited to expand our understanding that greater possibility than we’ve ever imagined is accessible to us. As leaders, we can ask “what will it take to make things better than this?” Read on for 6 tips and 8 practices for expanding your vision of possibilities.