Presidents Message - Plant Your Crop to Harvest a Good Year

By Benjamin Rand

The first days and weeks of a New Year are always exciting, characterized by a sense of opportunity, and of renewal. That can be particularly true for business people on a calendar fiscal year who typically have new budgets, new plans and perhaps even new positions to fill. And who among us is not happy to trade a very trying 2009 for the potential of a better 2010?

The challenge for business leaders at this time of year is how to appropriately focus and channel that initial optimism and energy to get your organization off on the right foot. Consider this four step plan: Close, Revisit, Optimism and Prioritization (CROP).

Closing out the last year is an important step to ensure that everyone is focused on the new year and not looking in the rear view mirror. This is the time to honestly assess how well you did as a group in meeting your goals and objectives. Ideally, you should have your final financial results and other quantifiable numbers to share. The key is to be honest, fair and focused on lessons learned rather than excuses or blame.

You can use a “town hall” meeting, a newsletter or even a mass e-mail as your vehicle for communicating this information.
Next, revisit your organization's mission and objectives. This may be obvious if your mission and/or objectives have changed, but even if they have not, you will do well to remind yourself and your people of what your common purpose is to set the tone for the year ahead. A mentor of mine used to claim that people only internalize about 20% of what they hear. He maintained that good leadership was all about communication and that you should repeat everything at least five times to ensure that the organization really got the message. This renewal step is designed to get everyone on the same page to start the new year.

Express your optimism about the coming year. As a leader, it is always your responsibility to be optimistic and it is especially important (and easy) to do so at the start of a year. The key here is to have realistic goals and objectives for the current year. If your organization believes that it can reach its goals and objectives, the battle is more than half won.

Finally, prioritize your plans so the organization knows what to focus on first. When energy and optimism abound, people can become impetuous. There should be a logical sequence to your plans for the new year and now is the time to remind your organization of that. Everyone may be excited to achieve Objective C, but usually that requires that you achieve Objectives A and B first. Lou Holtz, former head football coach at Notre Dame, refers to this as W.I.N. (What's Important Now). “Of course we wanted to win the championship,” he said, “but first, we better win this game and to win the game, we need to score and to score we need to gain yards and to gain yards we need to block somebody.”

You can plant this CROP any number of ways: conduct a “town hall” meeting; write a column for your company newsletter; or send an e-mail to your team. Here's to a Happy New Year and a good harvest in 2010.