Goal setting isn’t necessarily seasonal. We can set new goals and make plans to reach them at any time. However, you and your organization likely set a myriad of goals and objectives at the start of each calendar year. These can be goals ranging from fiscal targets to market expansions, product launches, campaigns and more. Now, the year is entering its final quarter. The end isn’t at hand, but it’s getting close. Your target deadlines are now in view.
Whether you’re closing in on a successful completion, or you’re leagues away from where you thought you’d be, there are steps you can take down this home stretch for success. These are steps that should be part of your regular processes, whether your goal setting follows the calendar, or you’re focusing on something you set out to accomplish on a random Tuesday in the middle of the year. Where it falls on the calendar isn’t the important part; it’s how you wrap things up that matters.
This may feel counterintuitive, but it’s important: success may not look like reaching your pre-set measures and goals. This is one of the reasons why your January targets (or whenever you set them) shouldn’t be “set it and forget it.” You should be checking in and recalibrating your measures throughout the year.
In January, the timeline you set for a particular project may have felt like reasonable expectation. Yet as markets shifted, circumstances changed, and other factors outside your sphere of influence pressed up against the edges of your goals, the initial target may no longer be reasonable. Success can look more like progress than completion. Finding peace with that requires regular check-ins.
Throughout the year you should be evaluating your goals and your progress toward them. You should be making adjustments as the world outside your ideas smudges the edges of your plans. This final quarter of the year is a good time to take a real hard look. What can you do between now and the dawn of a new year to move the ball down the field? What should be extended beyond your original timeline? What progress have you made that should be celebrated? What is still realistic? What isn’t?
Malcom Forbes once said, “Failure is success if we learn from it.” You may not land where you thought you would when you started the year with fresh and shiny new goals. Moving into a new market may have proved harder than expected. The client you thought was a perfect fit may have proven not a match. The financial goals you eyed may have been unattainable. You didn’t fail because you didn’t reach them. You set out on an experiment with a set of measures to track progress when you set those goals at the start. The road to them – or away from them – is the real meat of success.
You learned something about the market you didn’t break into. More importantly, you learned more about you and your business. Use that knowledge gained to identify a better space to grow next. Falling short of your fiscal targets may have come with tools to budget better or to weather the economic storms out of your control. Take those lessons learned and use them to build a stronger business going forward. You didn’t fail. You learned from the process of aiming at something you didn’t reach.
You may be closing in on your deadlines, but that doesn’t mean that you need to press through to the finish line on goals and targets that are proving elusive. You’re investing a lot of time and energy to reach these milestones and goals you set months earlier. You can continue to spin your wheels and try to move toward something that’s not working. Or you can call an audible and wrap things up on this path early.
Take a good hard look at your goals. Identify the ones that are lining up to be successful. Continue working toward them. Consider the goals that are starting to look increasingly impossible. Are there adjustments you can make that can help you get closer to reaching the goal by year end? Make the changes. Is it simply something that’s not going to happen at this point? Maybe it’s better to call that effort off and refocus your resources and attention on the things at hand that can still be met on your current timeline.
The task that can be reached with adjustments will benefit from the additional attention you can give it when you call an early end to the goal that isn’t going to happen this year. Don’t just discard those missed targets, however. Take the time to evaluate why they didn’t work. Learn from the process. Consider tabling it and revisiting when you set future goals.
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