It’s time. Every year, around this time, your organization announces new goals for the new year. Are you enthusiastically gearing up to set your course for new dialogues, decisions, and directions the new goal may take you? Or, are you discerningly taking pause to process just exactly how much change, commitment and collaboration is required? It’s a defining moment. You’re either on the start line, or you’re still stretching.

The good news is, if you’re reading this article, that you have your toes on the start line. After all, goal-oriented people read articles about this stuff. The bad news is that most goal-oriented people’s enthusiasm for a new starting gate can easily frustrate everyone else. When it comes to leading high-performance teams, your leadership skills can make or break your success.

Roles & Goals

The most important skill a leader needs is the ability to communicate concisely and consistently. Successful communication is about clarifying roles and goals so that your team knows precisely what is expected of them. Repetition and replay will go a long way toward promoting your objectives and fostering behaviors that change results. When you have regular touchbase conversations with your team members, the conversation lends itself to resolving challenges they face. It’s how you become able to sharpen and adjust individual skills to meet goals.

Measuring Up

If you want growth and improvement, you need to put some work in to tracking output, production, results. Are you tracking today?Surprisingly, most managers in business today admit they do not consistently measure their team members’ productivity. Start now. When communicating a new goal, provide a visual of prior year(s) results and the rate of growth already in your hands.

Planning to Plan

This is where the real work begins. Once you’ve mastered clarifying and tracking, you can better identify how to achieve the goals in the new year. How will you eat the elephant? Poor elephants, right? However, for as long as goals have been set, the elephant analogy represents the scale of effort and extension of time for completion. Feel free to enlist your team in crafting your own analogy for success, but keep the focus on dividing the effort in to right-size pieces for each contributor.

What would it take to achieve the goals you’ve set fort his year? Take time to launch your goals with thought and purpose. Start by clarifying your roles and goals, measuring up what is proven doable and finally, planning to plan. You just may find the journey to be more satisfying, and discover that the destination is an arrival you look forward to.