How to Implement Your Annual Plan and Achieve Your Goals

Coming up with new ideas and goals for your business might come naturally to you. Many business owners love to dream. However, when it comes to communicating those goals for your team and delegating the work, things can get more difficult. 

Have you ever thought of a project, communicated it to your team, and then nothing happened? You’re not alone! Turns out communicating something once isn’t enough to effectively delegate the work. What’s missing is a system that will hold people accountable to the work over and over. 

Leverage Your Team 

Your team members are the ones who will be doing the work. Don’t hold onto tasks because you haven’t delegated successfully in the past. There are ways to empower your team members to take action and do the work well—often even better than you would have. 

1. Be clear. Define why you’re assigning this project and what it needs to do. Assign a deadline. Ask for the communication you’ll need along the way. Define what success looks like. 

2. Empower. Communicate what level of autonomy your team member will have on this project. Do they need to research possibilities and check back in with you? Or can they keep you informed as they take the lead?  

3. Follow up. By determining when and how the stakeholders will be informed of project progress, you take the burden off yourself to remember to follow up. It will happen naturally as the rhythm of project communication. 

Define Your Projects 

Determine what projects are needed to make your goals a reality. Each goal may have several projects associated with it and may involve multiple teams. We use a proprietary tool called the Annual Roadmap to finalize our outcomes and projects for the next year that keeps the goals and projects organized and visible throughout the year. 

You’ll also need to define who will be the leader of each project. Who is the person ultimately responsible for the results? That’s the person you need to delegate to. 

Systemize the Work

If you like to focus more on creating and ideating, you may not be the best person to systemize your projects. There are likely people on your team who are great at it. Figure out who those people are and get their help. If you don’t have any on your team, seek out a freelancer.  

For example, we use the Full Focus Planner System internally to track our projects week to week. This system has a physical planner to track your Quarterly, Weekly, and Daily Big 3s. Your Big 3s relate back to your most important work, which is tied to a goal. Connecting the projects back to your original goals and vision ensures the right work is getting done. Check out the planner here. 

We check in weekly with our progress and meet bi-weekly to address any issues. We also define KPIs that will show whether or not we’re on track to reach our goals. That information often helps address issues before we’re even aware of them.  

We also track our progress in our one-on-one meetings. We ask each team member to rate the current state of their projects using the colors green, yellow, and red. Green is on track. Yellow is a flag that the project might be behind. And red means the project is stopped. 

Try It Out

Reviewing project status consistently and making it part of our daily processes has allowed us to achieve our goals each year. We spent time experimenting with what worked best for us, which also works well for the companies we consult and train with. 

You don’t have to delegate every project for the whole year right now. Start small. Choose one project to assign to a leader or your executive assistant. See how it goes. Ask for feedback. 

If you want to learn more about our proven productivity systems, book a Discovery Call now and check out our Business Services.