If you’re like most leaders I know, you’ve spent all year running at a fast pace with very little time to reflect deeply or hone your strategy and vision this year. For many industries, December begins to slow down a bit, giving you some space to actually engage in focused thinking. Thus, the end of the year is the perfect time to start strategizing and considering a vision refresh or reset.
If you’d like to do that, where should you begin? In this article, we’ll address a few major areas of your business, team, or even personal life that you should consider re-evaluating this year. The three areas you should focus on are: your values, your mission, and your strategic goals.
You may be failing to live to your company’s values
If you haven’t revisited your values in a while, it’s a great place to start. Your values are the foundation of your company culture and how you make decisions. If you’ve experienced some turnover or negative PR this year, it might be a sign that your values need to be updated.
For example, you might say:
- Our company values customer experience above all else.
- We always put the needs of our employees first.
- We are constantly innovating and pushing the envelope.
Yet, if you’ve been receiving complaints about your customer service on public reviews sites or social media (despite your value of prioritizing customer experience) or have brutally slashed employee benefits (despite the claim to value employees first), it’s time to revisit these values and make sure they still hold true. Updating your values can help you refocus your team and ensure everyone is moving in the same direction.
I’m not saying that you should update your values to say you don’t care about customers or employees anymore, but you should realign your reality with your values.
You might also find that the signs aren’t quite as obvious. Maybe it just feels like you’re drifting away from the core values of who you set out to be as a leader or organization.
Some warning signs of values drift are:
- Tensions or disagreements among employees or leadership about what’s important
- Inefficient decision-making because people are pulling in different directions
- People not living up to the values in their day-to-day actions
For instance, you say that you value open communication, but your workplace is characterized by back-room negotiations and rumor mills. This is blatantly in conflict with your values as the reality of the behavior of your personnel reveals that more often than not communication is not open at all.
In another common example, Acme Technology Company that initially focused on developing products that were environmentally friendly and sustainable may find itself tempted to invest in and develop products that are more profitable but less environmentally friendly as its goals shift towards short-term profitability.
Acme Technology Company’s change in focus and values may be intentional, or it may be an unconscious drift away from the organization’s original values. In either case, the company’s values have drifted away from their original purpose and goals, and this can lead to serious consequences for the company and their stakeholders.
You may be failing to live up to your company’s mission
While your company values are more internally focused, your mission is what you do for your customers or clients. If you’re not sure what your mission is, ask yourself:
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- What impact are we trying to make?
- What unique offering do we bring to the table?
If you’ve done any market research this year, then you should have some insight into what customers are saying about your products and services. Consider how that data has shifted since you wrote your mission statement. Have customer needs or preferences changed?
Does the public perception of your company’s mission align with what you want to see internally?
For example, take Paypal’s mission statement: “To build the web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”
If you survey your customers and find that they think your payment solution is inconvenient, hard to use, easily hacked/scammed, and overpriced, you’re failing at every point of your vision statement.
Here’s another example of a longer mission statement (longer isn’t better, by the way!) for a mid-market appliance repair company.
Our vision is to become the leading mid-market appliance repair corporation in the world, providing excellent service, top-notch customer satisfaction, and cost-effective solutions to our customers. We will be recognized for our commitment to quality and our dedication to providing the best repair experience, with a focus on innovation and sustainability. We will be a trusted partner, helping our customers keep their appliances running smoothly and efficiently, while protecting the environment and contributing to the communities we serve.
If, in after-service surveys given to customers, you discover that customers are overall dissatisfied with the level of service and think you overcharge, you know you’re failing to live up to your mission.
To be clear, I’m not saying you should lower your expectations and change your mission statement accordingly — just as was the case in the values section above — rather I’m saying that you need to recognize reality and perhaps re-train managers accordingly.
You need to refresh your strategic goals for the next year
After you have your values and mission established, you need to look at your goals for the upcoming year. Are they still in line with your values and mission? It’s important to make sure that your team is working towards the same end-goals.
For example, if the goal of the year is “increase profits” but you’re still not aligned on how to do that, it’s a sign that you need to realign around strategic goals for the next year.
Strategic goals should not remain totally static from year to year, rather they need a regular refresh as you find yourself facing new challenges and opportunities.
Perhaps you want to break into a specific new market.
Maybe you need to align teams to push out a new product.
You might need to implement a new training system for customer service personnel.
In all of these cases, you’re going to need to implement refreshed strategic goals for the new year to accomplish these initiatives.
To go back to our example mid-market appliance company, let’s take a look at what some strategic goal planning might look like.
Strategic Goal: Increase customer satisfaction for appliance repair services by 10% within the next 12 months.
Objectives:
- Implement customer feedback surveys for each service call to measure satisfaction.
- Increase average response time for service calls to within 24 hours.
- Train technicians on customer service best practices.
- Create a customer support helpline for troubleshooting and advice.
- Expand in-house repair services to include more major appliances.
- Develop an online booking system for customers to schedule service calls.
- Develop a loyalty program to reward repeat customers.
- Develop a customer referral program.
- Utilize marketing strategies to promote services and build brand recognition.
- Track customer satisfaction metrics and report on progress.
Coming up with this kind of strategic goal and these concrete, measurable, easily implemented objectives will dramatically increase your impact and effectiveness this coming year!
If you’re struggling with what ways you should refresh your strategic goals for this next year, a leadership coach would be a great resource to help you ideate, narrow down, and perfect what you want to do and why.
Our coaches at Leadership Coaching Network are a fantastic resource to help you or your managers begin to reflect on this past year and how to move forward in the coming one.
It’s very common that leaders get stuck in a rut, but by refocusing on the core values and mission of the company, and establishing new strategic goals, will help you kickstart the next year with a new level of success.
If you need helping doing that, our coaches are here to help!