Back

How to do? That is the question!

  • Share This:

The new year is here and we’ve probably decided on a resolution to pursue for 2022. Wonderful! Maybe that resolution is to achieve a promotion or raise. Maybe it’s to finally fix that leaky sink. Whatever we resolved to focus on, those goals will remain just as far as they were last year lest we review our capability to effectively bring them into reality. New goals are nothing without the means to achieve them.

We can’t just imagine a promotion and suddenly wake up the next morning with that sparkly new position handed to us. That leaky sink just wont magically fix itself. Our goals won’t materialize without us executing a strategy in pursuit of them.

Educator Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, writing for Forbes, notes several reasons why strategy execution fails. While Kraaijenbrink refers specifically to organizational strategies, we can easily check this observations against ourselves as individuals, especially in regards to areas such as our level of commitment, available resources, and the clarity of our objective. Getting promoted isn’t exactly a clear resolution, after all. Instead, focus on what steps we need to take to get us that promotion.

While many ideas might sound great, we should only pursue those within our realm of control and ability. This is not to say that we should shy away from challenges, but that we instead acknowledge our limitations and evaluate our resources. How much time we have to work on this? How much do we know about plumbing? Can we easily find time or learn what we need to?

Entrepreneur Mark Yegge discusses in this TED Talk five steps to execute ideas and goals. Among these steps, Yegge suggests that we should develop plans that best use our available resources. If we want to learn a new skill to qualify for that promotion, we should perhaps divide that objective into weekly goals, challenging ourselves to master one aspect of that skill every week until the target deadline. If we want to fix that leak, watch tutorials on how to do it until we feel confident to tackle it.

Today, let’s review our resolutions. What steps do we need to take to achieve them? What might obstruct us? What can we do to jump over those obstructions? Once we’ve figured that out, we can saunter forward, confident that our resolutions eagerly await us.

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”
— Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Do you have an idea you want to share with an empowered community of self-aware professionals? If you’d like to contribute an idea or article to ‘In The Flow of Work’ on the Evolve blog, just send us a message or submit a post to our Head of Content, Adam Schneider

Related Content

post thumbnail
In the Flow of Work
The Spice of Civility

The Dunes of Disagreement Times of political stress render civility as scarce as water on the desert planet Arrakis of Dune. Delineated here by SHRM, workplace etiquette tends to plummet in the wake of charged political...

post thumbnail
In the Flow of Work
Hiring: Opposites Attract, But Like-Minded Last

The Right Fit How we integrate and interact with the people around us might largely depend on personality, both theirs and ours. This is true in personal relationships as well as professional. Despite the...

post thumbnail
Company News
Odgers Berndtson US and SurePeople Join Forces to Revolutionize Executive Onboarding With Artificial Intelligence (AI), Prism Psychometrics, and World-Class Content by Harvard

NEW YORK, September 26, 2023 (Newswire.com) Odgers Berndtson US and SurePeople are reinventing Executive Onboarding with the launch of a groundbreaking new program leveraging SurePeople’s award-winning platform, powered by the Prism® psychometric algorithm and Harvard...

Man with beard resting head on hand, and a woman in the foreground, both looking up at a presentation.

Insights on People Analytics, Self-Mastery, High-Performance Teams and the Future of Work

Get insights delivered to your inbox.