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You recognize the signs. The parking lot at the gym is overflowing. Sales of books on how to lose weight and get organized are skyrocketing. Everywhere you turn, folks are furiously working away on their New Year resolutions. According to a research study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, 1 in 2 Americans made a New Year’s resolution last year, only 8 percent were successful in keeping it.
At work, you see a similar pattern. The year starts off with abundant optimism and adrenaline-fueled new initiatives. As a few months pass, the enthusiasm starts to dwindle, deadlines get missed and soon you’re on a death march project to nowhere.
Given the odds stacked against you, how can you ensure your New Year resolutions and initiatives don’t fail? Here are four tips to help you out.
In his book, “The Tipping Point” Malcolm Gladwell talks about the “Broken Windows” theory, where small changes like fixing broken windows, cleaning up the graffiti in a low-income neighborhood can help solve bigger problems like vandalism.
Same principle applies to the workplace, especially when trying to get folks to adopt a new system or different way of doing things.
Recently, we were working with a global client with a traditional sales-centric organizational culture. The plan was to roll out a comprehensive social media program but it was proving to be challenging to get the broader organization to buy-in.
So we introduced one small change.
We featured the company’s internal bloggers on a real-time leaderboard hosted on the company intranet. This was a small group of hard-working but underappreciated folks who blogged on behalf of the brand. This one event dramatically altered everyone’s perception of the program and catapulted these participants from anonymity to empowerment. We noticed a significant decrease in resistance to the overall program as other employees could now visualize and see tangible outcomes for themselves. Slowly but surely, folks at all levels in the organization started getting more motivated to engage in and support the broader program.
Our takeaway was that rather than trying to boil the ocean, start with one thing at a time. Launch a pilot or one part of the bigger project. Once you get the organizational buy in, gradually roll out the rest to maintain the momentum.
Some of the best advice I’ve received is from my personal life. Few years back, I was struggling with my diet. One day I started complaining to one of the trainers at my gym that all I had in my pantry is junk food.
So she asked me, “Where does that (junk food) come from?” I had to pause and think about it. She had a good point. I was the one responsible for grocery shopping and hence guilty of sabotaging my success. That day I went home and threw out all the fried snacks replaced it with healthier options.
Whether you’re struggling to make keep your fitness resolution or trying to get a new project implemented, make sure you are setting yourself up for success.
Start with a list of all the key people and dependencies for your project or initiative. If you know that 6months down the road, you will need Bob in legal to sign off on privacy policy for that cool new app you’re building. Make sure you talk to Bob and give him a heads up today. Don’t wait until you need his approval and risk your launch coming to standstill.
Use the same approach when you are presenting to your external clients or internal stakeholders. Solicit feedback and questions ahead of time from key folks in your audience. This will allow you to present your pitch without being derailed by unanticipated issues or barriers.
Take charge of your success and build an environment where everything is lined up to support you and nothing’s standing in the way of your success.
It’s true of both life and work. Things rarely go the way they’re planned.
Research has shown that when you’re trying to acquire mastery of a new skill, just before you start up the slope towards attaining proficiency, you will hit a chasm. Most people give up at this point.
That’s the reason why many fitness-related resolutions fail. Folks give up on their resolution when things get hard or life gets in the way of their resolution. The key to success is to keep pushing past that point and not give up.
At work, you’ll run across a similar chasm. Unexpected issues can disrupt all your best-laid plans. Anticipate that you will run into hurdles and plan for them. List all the reasons your big launch may hit a snag. Here are some common failure points – budget cuts, your competitor launches a new competing product or customers have a negative reaction to your recent announcement.
Create a plan that addresses your top 3 worst case scenarios so that if you come across that proverbial bump in the road, you already know how to work past that.
I was recently talking to one of my ex-colleagues at a large pharmaceutical company who had a project derailed because of a new FDA regulation. He encourages his team to anticipate these issues in advance and when unexpected problems come up, they continue working on the parts that are still viable.
Take another look at the project or business problem you’re trying to solve. Slice larger projects and initiatives into several smaller ones so that one part can still progress without the others. When life throws you a curve ball, you can still continue making progress without abandoning the entire initiative.
One thing pervasive in the corporate world is a chronic tendency to roll from one project or crisis to another without any pause. This pattern can be demoralizing for the organization and also is a quick path to burnout.
Set clearly measurable milestones and celebrate the wins, no matter how small. In your personal life, it can be running 2miles every other day or getting to the gym 3X a week. Every month you hit that goal, treat yourself to your favorite drink, snack or dessert.
At work, it can be a team lunch at a popular restaurant or a day at the ballpark. You don’t have to blow your budget as even small gestures go a long way.
The head of the technical project management group at a leading credit card company gives his team an afternoon off every time they hit a key milestone. Anticipation of the respite keeps his team motivated during long days and nights of working to meet tight deadlines.
Having a tangible incentive and knowing that there is light at the end of that tunnel ie. your project will make the year-long initiative less daunting.
New Year resolutions are made with best of intentions. Getting started is easy. Staying on track is hard. To make your initiatives stick - start small, set yourself up for success, plan for setbacks and celebrate your wins.
Mia Dand helps global companies maximize the ROI on their social and digital media investments by advising them on redesign of their internal organization structure, processes and social technologies. Working for Google, HP, Symantec and eBay in the past, Mia is now the CEO of Lighthouse3, a digital and social media consulting agency. Her firm’s focus is on innovative ways that companies can successfully compete by becoming more customer-centric in our increasingly connected world.
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