How do you define success?
For leaders, it should be about where we hope the organization will be in the future. What is the literal picture we hope to see when we’ve arrived at our destination?
Defining success is vital for organizational well-being. It gives us a target to go after. Used properly, it aligns staff around a common cause. Leaving our direction up to circumstances and our reactions to them will lead to marginal and haphazard outcomes at best.
Teams perform their best when we define our future success specifically and establish plans for the short and medium term to get us there.
“We will not have completed our task until we are very profitable, with others successfully running the business underneath us.” A client had recently started their business and established this vision for their future because they ultimately wanted to pursue a longer-term plan that would leverage their current experiences and skill sets.
The path to success starts by defining our future vision. It progresses through annual and quarterly operating plans that the broader leadership team has collaboratively created. And it culminates in weekly leadership meetings that wrestle with the important KPI’s and strategic initiatives that are needed to accomplish our vision. EOS, or another business planning tool, can help hold us accountable to this process.
Here are some key questions to consider in defining success for your organization:
- Do we have a 3-year Vision for our future that supports a longer 10-year target for the organization?
- Is this Vision Specific, Achievable, and Measurable (S.A.M.)?
- Have we brought credibility to our Vision by vetting it with outside input?
- Are operational plans in place to support our 3-year vision?
- Have we embraced the reality that the discipline of reacting to opportunities is vitally important for the organization’s success? Operational plans and their associated budgets are very important. Holding them loosely will aid us in reacting well.
- Have we articulated 2 pictures of success for our future, one that is realistic, and one that will occur if we are blessed beyond measure?
