Making the most of your clean slate state...

Whether you’re the resolution type or not, the dawn of a new year can’t fail to offer a fresh perspective. A stretch of time, clean and unsullied, on which to make the kind of mark you want , is hard not to lean into.

Not just that though, it’s also an opportunity to wave goodbye to the year just gone. To pack away all of the experiences, learnings, challenges and failures along with the Christmas decorations.

When you’re someone who likes to challenge yourself, and those around you, a fresh new year gives you ample opportunity to think about how you’re going to better what’s gone before. It’s very easy to feel as though anything is possible as you set sail onto the wide blue ocean of the year to come.

Having just finished last year, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that on that wide blue ocean you’re going to encounter storms, obstacles, headwinds and lots of unexpected challenges.

So how do you make the most of this clean slate and ensure you’re as ready as you can be for what gets thrown at you.

Here’s my top 5 tips for starting the year strong:

Review and restate the vision

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ll know that I’m a huge believer in having your vision on repeat. If you’re bored of hearing yourself talk about where your business is heading then you’re probably pitching it about right.

Your team should be using the vision as a decision making tool, a recruitment tool and a prioritisation matrix. There should be nothing happening in your business that doesn’t directly feed into the achievement of that vision.

I’m always surprised to see how big a gap this is in so many of the businesses I work with.

But the start of a new year is a brilliant time to change that. Review your vision, make sure it’s still relevant and restate it to the team. Then restate it again. And again, and again - until they’re singing it back to you like a chorus.

Sort out team niggles

Are you moving into the new year with people issues left unchecked? Whether you have feedback that didn’t quite land at annual review time or team niggles that just won’t go away. January is the perfect time to meet those challenges head on and get them sorted before you get too far into the year.

I’m a big fan of the grow or go mentality when it comes to fast growth businesses or high change teams. The people in your business need to be able to grow with you and the ever changing challenges you need to overcome.

It’s my experience though that high potential team members are often promotion hungry - and small(ish), fast growth businesses aren’t always able to support their hierarchical ambitions. Often, though, that’s because promotion is the only form of recognition they recognise.

Helping them to shift the focus to growth instead, especially when the scope or size of their role is growing exponentially, is the best way to re-energise.

Growth comes with self reflection and feedback, with the latter often prompting the former. Don’t fear the implications of the feedback you need to give to the team members that are underperforming, distracted by a need for hierarchical recognition or causing issues in the team.

Either they grow or they go - those are the only two positive outcomes that exist and your feedback will ensure that happens.

Reflect

When you’re a fast thinker, intent on growth and progress it can be deeply uncomfortable to focus on the past. Your instinct is to draw a line under any issues that have gone before and assume that, having lived through issues before, that you’ll be better at overcoming them in the future.

Your challenges and failures can be incredibly informative though - so take the time to reflect, in a meaningful way on the 5 biggest challenges you encountered last year and think about how to create a ‘never again’ plan to ensure that those things aren’t going to trip you up again.

Engage your team in building this, and building on it and allow it to form part of your ongoing discussions.

Nail down systems and processes

Boooorrrriinnnnggggg… I know. Try to stay awake for this one! You are in that lovely period of time, right now, where you have (hopefully) had a break at Christmas and have some reserves of energy to address some of the more pedestrian things that are going to make a world of difference to how your business runs this year.

Spend some time with your team working out the key systems and processes that need to be refined, repaired or retrained - by the latter I mean retraining the people that operate them to make sure they’re being used as efficiently as possible.

What are the things that need to change? How fit for purpose are those systems and processes? Fast growth businesses can grow out of both systems and processes very quickly.

Rate the current ones you have from 1-5 for effectiveness and ease of use. Then rate them for importance on the same scale. Multiply the first two scores together and then sort by highest importance and lowest effectiveness and ease. The ones at the top of the list are the ones you need to address first.

Identify strengths and weaknesses

I never fail to get value out of completing a SWOT analysis. It really only needs to take 15 minutes but can give you a whole raft of clarity on where you need to put your focus.

Make sure you’re as honest as possible with yourself. Bring the team in to review it with you and make a list of key priorities on the back of what you learn.

Think about how you can leverage strengths to make your life easier, focus on closing gaps and mitigating threats and assign the opportunities to different members of the team to make the most of.

Each of these activities should take you a maximum of 30 minutes - for the reflection and planning part at least, but will give you oodles of clarity with which to make the most of your clean slate state!

Enjoy…

As always, if this blog or any of the points made really resonates, do get in touch, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Either comment below or drop me a line on hello@rebeccamorley.co.uk