It doesn’t matter who you are, whether you’re working alone or as the head of a team, the key to personal success and satisfaction is to take the steps necessary for you to achieve your best.
You can do this more easily if you think of yourself as a coach, charged with driving others’ efforts — even if that “other” is you. Sure, it’s more difficult to coach a team toward increased success than simply to coach yourself. But the basic steps are the same:
Step 1.
As with any journey, taking steps toward success begin with establishing a clear goal. There are several reasons for this, and chief among them is the simple fact that unless you know where you are going, you can’t determine whether or not you are moving in the right direction.
The best goals are specific, measurable, and achievable. They make it easy to determine whether or not a particular action will bring you closer to your goal, and they provide an objective basis for deciding at any point in time whether you have or have not achieved your goal.
For example, if your goal is to process 5,000 data input forms in a month, then anything that helps you process more forms — extra people, better equipment, improved procedures, and so forth — will help to bring you closer to your goal. And when you have processed the 5,000th form, there’s no doubt that you have accomplished your goal.
On the other hand, if your goal is to be the most popular person in your organization, there’s not many specific criteria available to help you determine what steps will move you closer to your goal, and it’s almost impossible ever to be certain your popularity is unsurpassed.
Step 2
With a specific, measurable, and achievable goal before you, it’s time to begin assessing and deploying the resources you can tap into to help you get there: What’s the budget? How many people can you rely on? What equipment is on hand? What additional resources are likely to become available later on?
How will you spend that budget? What tasks will you assign each of the people, if any, on your team? What’s the best way to use the available equipment?
Resource assessment and deployment are critically important because with the right resources, properly utilized, many objectives are easily reached. In the absence of necessary resources, or with adequate resources poorly deployed, many objectives are entirely unreachable.
Step 3
Knowing your goal, your resources and the best ways to use them, you can begin to implement a comprehensive plan of action. What will you do first? Next? Last? What tasks can be done simultaneously? What are the minimum results needed from one task before you can begin to tackle the next? For simple situations, it’s often merely a matter of taking one obvious step after another, and working until you’ve reached your goal.
As goals and resources become larger and more complex, developing and implementing your plans will necessarily grow more difficult and convoluted, involving sophisticated choices about resource allocation, timing, critical path formulation, and so forth.
No matter what the goal, the process is always the same: apply the available resources in the most efficient manner to the most important tasks in the most logical sequence until you’ve accomplished your goal.
Step 4
Reality, of course, doesn’t always follow your plan. It’s good to have a plan, but it’s better to have the flexibility to make changes in the plan as various tasks and efforts produce sub-optimal outcomes, and as unforeseen circumstances crop up.
Have a plan, but don’t be in love with it. Treat your plan like a roadmap, which allows for a theoretical set of directions to reach your goal. But always remember that actually accomplishing your goal is more likely to resemble traversing a landscape laced with unanticipated washed out bridges, detours, heavy traffic, and accidents. Getting to your goal is likely to take longer than you originally planned and involve excursions into areas you hoped to avoid.
Step 5
One of the most important elements in any effort to reach a goal is your inner drive to succeed. If goals were easy to reach, a great many people would usually get there ahead of you. It’s the nature of goals — and of worthwhile goals, in particular — to be relatively difficult to reach.
Quitters will never make it.
That’s why the road to success is traveled much more often by people who have cultivated a strong internal drive to overcome obstacles, endure difficulties, work around problems, and scramble along routes that others feel are just too dangerous to attempt.
Whether you’re traveling alone or shepherding a team along with you, you’ll accomplish a great deal more of your goals if you accept difficulties as everyday occurrences, and set your motivational level to “high,” rather than to “I wish this were easier.”
