“This feels risky! This feels risky!”

A colleague and I were joking nervously on the first day of an intense, weeklong training class.

We were about to begin a rigorous simulation as we learned to coach teams through high-risk, conflict-ripe situations.

In the release of tension through humor, we were being honest about our feelings and our sense of the learning risk we faced.

We met that risk. It was not easy.

But it was a definitely a risk worth taking.

Most of the business risks I’ve taken during my career have fallen into the “risk worth taking” category. They’ve been risks of all kinds, including:

– Starting a career in a difficult national and local economy
– Changing careers
– Changing companies
– Starting a business
– Moving halfway across the country
– Stopping work for a couple of years to get a master’s degree
– Changing careers
– Changing jobs several times in the same company
– Starting another business
– Adding new products and services as the market changes, some opportunities emerging, while others go away

For some, it’s because they see risk as an experience to be endured, not a process to be managed.

Or they don’t understand risk and its benefits, when successfully faced.

Risks in business can occur in many ways.

They can be the result of uncertainties with new projects, products or services.

Risks can arise when a company grows very quickly, or when it expands into unfamiliar markets and works to meet the needs of new customers.

Individual employees, too, face the risks of change. Sometimes that change is welcome or invited. But many times, that is not the case.

You get the picture: business risk can arise in many expected and unexpected ways.

No matter how you well you manage risk now, you can always learn to handle it better.

Start by understanding your risk personality.

Are you most likely to:

– Seek risk, seeing it as a challenge and an adventure in some way?
– Love the adrenalin rush of risk so much that you create it in situations where it doesn’t have to be?
– Try to understand and manage risk?
– Steer clear of risk in all forms?
– Believe that risk does not exist in your business or industry?

Remember, however you feel about risk, your competitors are trying to manage it better than you do.

And the company that handles risk most effectively has a clear advantage over more fearful and/or less adaptable competitors.

That’s because change is always underway, whatever your business or industry.

Consider these many moving parts that most companies face:

– Customers change in terms of what they want and need
– Markets move and adapt as new competitors emerge and others leave
– Technology continues to advance, and to become smaller, faster, and sometimes, less expensive
– Employees move to different jobs and companies
– Suppliers create new products and services, and enter new markets with the products and services they already sell

The net of it is that if you hate risk, and hate to change, you may become obsolete as you try to stay right where you are, attempting to preserve the status quo.

To understand how well you handle risk now, start by considering how you handled risks in the past:

1. Think of two to three major risks you faced in the past few years.

2. Did you anticipate these risks? If not, could you have anticipated them with more or different information?

3. How well did you handle each risk?

4. How could you have handled them better?

5. Are there risks you avoided? Were you able to keep them at bay, or did they show up again in a different, more vigorous or otherwise more challenging way?

Begin, also, to look ahead:

6. How would you like to improve your risk assessment and management abilities in 2013 and beyond?

7. What information might help you anticipate, understand, and manage risks better? How can you gather this information most easily?

Improvement begins with understanding and acceptance.

Knowing where you stand, currently, goes a long way toward helping you improve your risk management and other abilities.

We’ll return to the subject of risk in the next blog post. I’ll share ideas for how you can begin to handle risk better.

In the meantime, if you’d like more ideas on how to make the next year a better year, here’s a previous blog post I wrote, Seven tips to make your business change-ready for an improved year.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the weekly newsletter I publish. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Recall a time when you felt knee-deep (or neck-deep) in problems you weren’t sure how you’d solve.

How did you decide which one you’d tackle first?

Did that approach work?

If you need new ways to prioritize, try one of these ideas the next time you’re knee- or neck-deep in problems as you decide which one to take on first:

1. Revisit your plan

Check your project plan or long-term plan, if you have one.

This can help you regain your bearings as you recall your overriding goal (even if…as is probably the case…circumstances have changed since you created that long-term plan).

2. Allow yourself to dream

If you need inspiration to push over, around, or through problems in your way now, tap into dreams of the things you’d like to create in your work or life (you have dreams, even if you haven’t taken them out to look at them in a while).

3. Follow your energy

Go where your energy is highest. Let it drive you through successful problem-solving.

Then use the energy of that success to guide you over, around or through the next problem in the queue.

4. Let logic be your guide

Review relevant facts and data, if you have them, to help point the way to the problem that needs your attention first.

5. Feel your emotions about the situation

Notice how you feel in the situation. What problem keeps you, your customers or team tied up in knots?

Have you ever discovered that you’re no longer comfortable in your “comfort zone”?

It happens more often than you might guess.

And it can happen to teams, as well as individuals.

What worked before doesn’t work anymore, and ultimately, it can be a blessing.

The “uncomfortable in your ‘comfort zone’’’ realization can happen slowly, subtly…or suddenly.

As once-comfort becomes discomfort, the desire to change grows, too.

Then, when the disparity between what you have and what you want becomes high enough, you’ll move and change and grow. 

The process is not always easy, however (change rarely is).

When you stretch and grow by choice, though – rather than being forced into it by circumstances - you’re likely to feel greater control about the process, pace, timing, outcome, and many other aspects of the experience.

Here’s some of what you’re likely to feel when you disrupt the status quo:

1. Exhilarated

You’re likely to feel more fully alive, for starters.

That’s because you have to be more attentive, more engaged, faster to notice and act on signals from your environment when you’re in new situations where you’re not quite sure of yourself.

2. Exhausted

You’re in potentially very different surroundings, receiving feedback that you don’t quite know what to make of yet.

You don’t always react in these circumstances in ways you understand or expect.

It can be exhausting to take all the change in, without the comfort of familiar structures, decision processes, and other means to sort, sift, prioritize, learn and do, all at the same time.

Sometimes at about this point, your old comfort zone looks tempting.

Resist to urge to retreat, however. There are better times ahead.

3. Exposed

It’s sometimes frightening not to be able to go back to what you used to do, almost on automatic pilot, perhaps.

Depending on how much you’re stretching the boundaries of your comfort zone, the degree, or speed of change can even feel dangerous.

You feel raw, exposed, vulnerable, off-balance.

It’s part of the growing process.

And you will get through it, yes.

4. Energized

Ultimately, the increased energy that comes with new range, new possibilities and achievement is much of what keeps you going through the uncertainty of change and transition.

Keep moving ahead.

It’s well-worth the risk and effort to grow beyond the once-comfortable zone that now no longer satisfies or fits.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish. Sign up for the newsletter here.

“I want what I want, and I want it NOW!”

That sounds like a little kid having a tantrum, right?

It wasn’t.

That was me, 27 at the time, on a gray, blustery day in the new city where we were moving.

My husband…who’d just accepted a great new job we didn’t expect just then, but which he couldn’t turn down…wanted to push on as we looked for the next place we’d call home.

And me?

I just wanted lunch.

Well, that, and to be listened to.

I quietly worried about how we’d afford a second house while we tried to sell our first one (a house we’d only owned for four months) in a difficult Midwestern economy.

And I wondered what jobs the new city might have for me…again, in a very difficult economy.

I’d just started a new magazine for my current employer and had hoped to see it through its first important year of groundwork and growth.

Finally, in the wintry mid-afternoon wind of this not-yet-friendly city, I’d had enough of “making do,” being flexible, and not being listened to…by my husband, or, frankly, by myself, either.

I wasn’t being honest about what I wanted, up until that point.

“I want what I want, and I want it NOW!”

You know the feeling, too.

I know you do.

And you may know that feeling as the leader of a team or company.

When I think of this phrase applied to leaders I’ve worked with, I remember one client, in particular. He was one of the founders of a very rapidly growing financial services company.

I used to joke with him that what he REALLY wanted was to “defy the laws of business physics.”

In other words, he “wanted what he wanted” – major improvements in the way, and ease, with which work got done at his company – and “he wanted it NOW!”

He’d had enough waiting for change to move at a normal pace through his company.

If you and your team “want what you want, and you want it NOW!” but you’re nowhere near the point of having it, these may be some of the reasons you’re struggling:

1. You’re not listening to yourselves, or each other.

Speaking from my own experience in the situation I’ve just described, and also, as a team leader and team member, at different times, listening is where you should start.

Are you listening to yourself?

Are you listening to each other?

Listening well, and fully engaging everyone in a project – and keeping them well-informed throughout it – can be far more powerful than you would guess in terms of creating success.

2. You don’t really know what you want…even if you DO know what you DON’T want.

Sometimes you know what you don’t want.

It’s what you have now.

But instead of that…you want…what, exactly?

If not knowing what you want is a problem for you or your team, try this (really…just try it):

- Imagine you have a magic wand, and can make any change that you want, right now.

- Now, imagine using that magic wand, and being in the new situation.

- Describe it. What’s “most different” from the situation you have now?

3. You don’t believe you can have what you want.

Sometimes teams don’t believe they can really have what they say they want.

To be fully activated, and on board, it helps to “pre-experience success.”

One way to do this is to envision success in detail, and to imagine the process of successfully getting there…over, around and through barriers you may experience on the way there.

Your team may also need more coaching, feedback, and peer interaction as they adjust to the changes they are going through.

4. You don’t know how to get what you want.

Wanting something, and actually being able to achieve it, are two very different things.

There are many ways to figure out how to get started, once you know what your goal really is.

Here are just a few of them:

- Research the best ways of doing the job.

- Take training.

- Observe, and ask questions of people who’ve already achieved what you hope to.

- Practice.

- Experiment, then observe what happens. Adjust accordingly.

- Get coaching and feedback.

- Pause to refresh, and stay connected as a team, as you move forward.

5. You don’t know if you can maintain success when you achieve it.

Think of it this way: if you happen to get what you want, but don’t believe it’s “really yours,” you may not be able to handle having it, much less be able to keep it.

It’s like a lottery winner who doesn’t believe he’s worthy of the lottery winnings, and fritters the money away to return to the more familiar, less-moneyed state.

Good fortune, even if you’ve worked very hard to create it, won’t “stick” if you don’t know what to do with it, or how to maintain it.

Prepare to be successful.

Start to develop the beliefs, knowledge and skills you’ll need to manage success when it arrives.

6. You’re not clearing the decks to make success possible.

Many people want to achieve success, but they don’t free up the time, energy, attention and resources to actually do so.

What do you plan to stop doing so that you can start doing something new?

Make success possible.

Make the time and space for it.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish. Sign up for the newsletter here.

What stops you and your company from sweeping away the main problems you face?

“Limited resources,” you may say.

Or, “There’s just not enough time to get ahead of things.”

Yet, if you add up all the money and time it takes to clean up after each individual mistake…well, the cost can be astounding.

Sometimes things just happen, and you do need miraculous saves.

And for those times, it’s good to have people on your team who can step up to be the hero or heroine. 

But it’s better not to need to use heroes or heroines regularly.

It’s not good for your customers, profits, or company.

And it’s not good for your blood pressure, either.

Put your greatest problem-solvers to work on long-term plays.

Try this approach:

1.  Make a list of the top three problems your company faces.

Start with the problems customers are most frustrated about.

These are the issues that might drive them to your competitors, if you don’t get the problems solved and, in the future, prevented.

2. Start with the problem that’s most painful to deal with now.

This is a problem that’s frustrating to customers and employees, both.

3. See the problem in its fullest extent.

Find a visual way to show or understand the problem, and to be able to communicate it well to everyone who is going to be involved in solving it.

A flowchart or simple drawing of the way the process works now can be useful for this step.

Show the pain points in the process in some way, such as by drawing red, radiating “pain points” or frustrated exclamation marks in the most troublesome parts of the process.

4. Tally up the estimated cost, lost time and other negative impacts of not having solved the problem yet.

Estimate the cost of fixing the problem each time you have to clean up something that has gone wrong, especially if the customer has received that work-gone-wrong.

Include, for example, the cost of rework, the cost of making things whole for an unhappy customer, the estimated impact of lost sales and referrals in the future if frustrated customers quit doing business with your company.

5. See the problem as a puzzle you’re trying to solve or a game you’re trying to win.

Many people crave a contest, no matter what it is.

And if crave a contest, they probably also crave a “win,” whatever a “win” is.

Look at the problem creatively and make a game out of problem-solving and problem-prevention.

For example, you can:

– Reduce the amount of time it takes to do the job

– Increase customer satisfaction

– Reduce cost while increasing customer satisfaction

– Increase flexibility and responsiveness as you reduce costs

6. Experiment.

Experiment with ways of trying to win the game you’ve created.

Make notes about what you tried, and why, and what you think will happen, as a result.

7. See if the experiment worked.

Check to see if the experiment worked.

If so, move on to Step 8.

If not try another experiment.

8. Educate and implement.

Record the information you need to pass on to others who will use this process regularly.

Set them up to win the game you’ve created through this improvement. Teach them what a “win” is, in this process and for the customers who buy this product or service from you.

Better yet, involve them in some way in creating the game they’ll now be trying to “win” on a regular basis.

9. Follow-up.

This is the key to success in many things.

Check back to see if the problem was, indeed, solved, and if good intentions and ideas were sustainably implemented.

If not, go back as far as you need to in the process to understand the real problem you’re facing, and to solve it.

10. Repeat the process to solve the next problem.

Remember the list of your top three problems in Step One? Take the next one in the list and turn it into a long-term play, and a game you can win now, and well into the future.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish. Sign up for the newsletter here.

With one quarter of 2012 now complete, it’s a great time to do a quarterly review.

When you pause regularly – even briefly – to compare performance to plans and goals, you’re more likely to end the year having met what you set out to do.

Set the stage

First, set aside the time you need to be able to give this your full attention.

Second, get out of your office for a few hours to do the quarterly review, if you can.

Third, gather the information you need before you do the actual review.

You need a list of your goals for the year and quarter, if you set them at the beginning of the year (and if not, take the time to do that now for the rest of the year).

You also need information that tells you how you’re doing in the areas listed below, as well as others that are relevant to your business and situation.

Fourth, when you do the review, answer the following questions.

You can also cover the sections below, one per meeting, over the course of several weeks, if that works better for you and your normal work flow.

How are things with your customers?

1. How are things with your customers? How do you know?

2. Are they satisfied, overall? And are those results gradually getting better or worse? Why?

3. What are customers’ most common complaints or suggestions about how you can (or need to) improve? How are you using that feedback to improve?

4. Are there products or services they want that you’re not providing now? Where can they get those wants and needs met, if not by you?

How are employees, contractors and colleagues doing?

1. How are things with for the people who work for and with you? How do you know?

2. What’s their most common feedback as expressed:
- To you?
- To their managers?
- In public forums?

3. Are employees and peers positive, and feeling good about their work and the company? Or do they look discouraged, depleted or defeated?

4. Is the trend in employee satisfaction getting better or worse? Why? If you don’t know, how can you find out?

5. What’s the overall mood at your company now, if you were to describe it in a word or two?

How is revenue?

1. How are your sales, compared to your goals for this point in the year?

2. How are sales of specific products and services compared to what you thought they would be?

3. What’s selling better than expected? What’s not selling as well as planned? Why? How can you use the information to provide more of what customers want, and less of what they don’t?

Are expenses in control…and are investments allowing you to grow?

1. Are expenses what you thought they would be at this point in the year? What expenses are lower than you planned? Why? What expenses are higher than you planned? Why?

2. Are there expenses you’re delaying? Why? How will this be good for the business? How could delays hurt your business?

3. Are there expenses you don’t need to incur anymore? How can you phase these expenses out, or end them now?

4. Are there investments you need to make in the future that will help your company grow and improve?

What problems just won’t go away?

1. Are there problems you thought would be solved by now, but they just don’t seem to get solved, or go away (and stay away)?

2. Why is that happening? Are these just lower priorities than you originally thought? Or have you not yet identified what the problems really are, and what is causing them?

3. What information do you need in order to understand what the problems really are, and how to address them?

4. What do these problems cost the company in terms of:
- Rework
- Refunds
- Lost sales
- Lost customers
- Lost referrals
- Loss of opportunities to do higher-value work for customers
- Other costs of not getting it right yet?

5. Do you need to bring in new or additional resources to solve these problems?

And you…how are you doing?

1. What’s your overall mood about your work and achievements in 2012 so far? Why?

2. What’s going as well or better than expected?

3. What’s not going as well as you’d planned and hoped? Why?

4. What can you do to improve this situation?

5. Are there things you want to to let go, or delegate? What are they? How can you begin to do so?

Are you taking enough, and the right kind of breaks to do your best work?

1. Are you taking enough, and the right kind of breaks to refill and refresh? (Remember, your best ideas may come when you least expect them).

2. What is your main goal for yourself, and your worklife this quarter?

This year?

What else needs your attention now?

1. Are there other things that need your attention now, in addition to the issues we’ve discussed here? What are they? How can you begin to address them?

2. What are your top three goals for this quarter? For the rest of the year?

And while we’re at it…

Schedule your next three quarterly reviews for the rest of the year.

Also, take notes about what you learned during this review so you can create a regular review process that works well for you and your company or team:
- What was most valuable about this exercise?
- What would you do more of, and less of in the next review?
- How will you use what you learned through this process to improve your business, and company, this quarter? For the rest of the year?

There’s more you can do with quarterly reviews, but this will get you started.

Reviewing performance to goals (and new opportunities, as they emerge) can be an eye-opening, engaging and very powerful process.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Business is a game. It’s a game with high stakes, of course, but a game, nonetheless.

In spite of that, sometimes one’s zip, zoom and zest drain away.

When your enthusiasm has drained away – for any of many possible reasons - there are ways you can get it back.

Use one or more of these ways to get your game back.

1. A goal, or goals

2. Rules

3. An opponent (which may be your own past performance)

4. Feedback

5. Ways to track your progress toward the goal

6. Actions you can take to play the game better and achieve better results, with practice

7. Challenge that’s engaging without being overwhelming

Let’s take a look at each element in a little more detail:

1. A goal, or goals

An easy place to begin when you’ve lost your enthusiasm, is to clarify your goal.

Remind yourself why you do this work (in addition, of course, to getting paid).

Who benefits most from what you do, in addition to you?

What positive impact does your work have for them?

2. Rules

Rules can get complicated, over time.

Unnecessary details can cloud the “how,” even if you’re clear about the “what,” “who,” and “why” of your game.

See what you can simplify.

3. An opponent (which may be your own past performance)

You may have a clear opponent in your game. It may be a competitor you’re trying hard to beat.

Usually the game that pays off best, however, is when you’re competing with your own customer-focused past performance, always trying to improve it.

Choose a worthy opponent that constantly helps you make your best better.

4. Feedback

Engaging games give you feedback.

Business is a game of “Who can satisfy the needs of the customer best?”

Look for ways to get and use strong customer feedback.

5. Ways to track your progress toward the goal

Sometimes the simplest thing you can do is to record something that’s easy to track but significant in terms of leading directly to the desired results.

It’s like a person who’s trying to let go of excess weight who decides to keep a food diary, trying to see what habits may be delaying, or preventing progress.

Paying close attention – as tracking forces you to do – often changes behaviors in a positive direction.

6. Actions you can take to play the game better and achieve better results, with practice

If there’s nothing you can do to improve, there’s no game.

And if there’s something you can do to improve, but you choose not to, there may be a game, but you’re choosing not to play it.

Look around for, and then take the actions you can take to make something work better.

It will, almost inevitably, lead to improved performance and results.

7. Challenge that’s engaging without being overwhelming

Your first challenge, if you’re feeling depleted or defeated, may be to figure out what the game really is that you’re playing, or caught in.

You may discover that the game is one you don’t want to play anymore. Plenty of people have found themselves in that situation at one point or another.

On the other hand, you may find and renew the drive and commitment to drew you to this line of work, or this company.

Maybe you find you need to up the ante, and expect more of yourself and others, and then to make that more possible through various decisions you make and actions you take.

Or – quite the opposite – you may find you need to relax and smell the roses a bit more.

Maybe all you need is to appreciate your work more, and to enjoy the process of doing it (I’m not kidding. Focus on the process…enjoy that…and the results are likely to be more satisfying, as well).

Whatever you find, the sooner you take the time to refresh and recover your game, the sooner you’ll be playing the game you’re really meant to play, and win.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish. Sign up for the newsletter here.

“I’ve had it! I just want this pile of problems to go away!”

Does that sound like something you’ve said (or a cleaned up version of it)?

The person in this case was overwhelmed and dispirited by the problems of rapid growth, as was his whole team.

“I just want to get things done, and to solve problems so they stay away!” he said, dejectedly.

That sense of frustration, and momentary futility affects startups, mid-size companies, and corporations, as well.

For example, “No one has time to improve the way we get work done,” said a beleaguered colleague recently. She’s a long-time manager at a leading high-tech firm.

“We just have to keep pushing work through the processes we have, hoping they’ll get the work done well enough,” she said, in exasperation.

Surely there is SOMETHING you can do if you’re feeling this way, right?

There is.

Start simply, but start.

One way to begin is by answering one or more of the questions below.

Your answers can guide you to begin making improvements, the benefits of which add up in a big way.

1. What isn’t working?

Make a list.

Start with the things that are causing you and the people at your company the most pain.

Then, in front of that list, put a list of the problems that are causing your customers pain (you know what those things are, right? If not, find out).

2. How do you know you have a problem?

Gather the facts.

You may discover, in the process, that there are, indeed, problems, but they’re very different from what you expected they would be.

3. What does the problem cost you or your company now?

Once again, you may be very surprised. Sometimes problems that seem small are costing you a lot of money, or may in the future.

You won’t know until you check.

4. How does the process work now, before you improve it?

Draw a picture of the process, the way it works now.

Then, ask a sample of other people who use the process to draw a picture of how it works, as they see it.

The differences may be eye-opening. This may show you that another problem is also in play: poor communication.

5. Who do you do your work for?

Be clear about who the customers are for the work that you, specifically, do. In many cases, this is someone inside your company.

6. How do your customers want the work done?

These tell you what your customers’ requirements are. These often include details such as what your customers mean, specifically, when they say they want something that is “on time,” ”accurate,” or “cost-effective,” for example.

Customer requirements are your standard for success.

Know what they are and meet them.

7. If you don’t know what your customers want from you, how can you find out?

Then, do that.

8. If the process were working perfectly, what would it be like?

Imagine the process working easily and effectively, with little or no waste.

Describe and then write down a few of the most significant details in that perfectly-working process.

9. How is that perfect process different from the way the process works now?

Make a list of the differences between the way things could be, and the way they are.

10. Who are the customers your entire company does its work for?

These are the people who ultimately pay your salary when they decide to continue to do business with you, and to refer you to others.

11. What do your company’s customers want?

Make sure everyone in your company knows who your shared customers are, and what success means to them in terms of the products or services they buy from you.

12. How you know this is what they want?

Often, companies guess about what their customers want. Or they may assume they know better than their customers do about what’s important or valuable to them.

Few companies last long if they follow this, “We know what’s best for you” strategy with customer needs and requirements.

Don’t be one of them.

These 12 questions, and your answers to one or more of them can go a long way toward helping you start to solve the problems that typically cause you pain now.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish. Sign up for the newsletter here.

An end-of-year, or end-of-project, assessment can be as simple as this:

- Did you meet your goals, or beat them?

- Or did you miss them?

- Why, and how?

That’s all you REALLY need to know to understand if you’ve been successful, right?

Not so fast.

Real success means much more than just “hitting your numbers” by the end of the year, or the end of a project.

Success that’s worth more than its weight in gold prepares you for the future, too.

Real success makes you:

- More confident because of what you’ve experienced (or survived).

- More able to repeat or improve on successes and challenges from the past.

- More skilled in seeing problems that may occur before they happen and so, more able to prevent or minimize them if they do.

- More able to dream big and do big because you trust yourself. You know now that you can experiment and adapt your way through unexpected events and challenges.

Set aside some time before the year ends to understand what you think and feel about the year that’s ending, as well as the year that’s about to begin.

Consider these questions, for starters:

1. What were your 2011 goals?

2. Did you meet them or miss them?

3. Why and how?

4. What have you learned this year that can help you in the year ahead?

5. What are your goals for 2012?

Make sure they’re written as SMART goals: specific, measurable, appropriately aggressive yet attainable, relevant and time-bound.

6. How do you want to be different at the end 2012? For example, what:

- Actions do you need to take?

- Knowledge and skills do you need to acquire

- Beliefs do you need to have or change?

- Habits do you need to drop or improve?

- How can you make these changes most easily?

7. What’s your biggest fear about the year ahead? What can you do to prevent or minimize the impact of it, if it does happen?

8. If you were to REALLY “wow!” yourself by the end of 2012, what would have happened? How?

9. What assumptions are you making about your 2012 goals, and the process of reaching them? How can you test or challenge these assumptions, and change them if it turns out you’re wrong?

10. What support do you need for the year ahead? How can you get it most  effectively and easily?

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish. Sign up for the newsletter here.

“I have feedback for you.”

When you hear those words, what do you think?

And what do you feel?

Your reaction may be similar to what many other people report: the idea of giving or receiving feedback makes you cringe.

If you’re a manager:

Providing feedback, including annual performance reviews, may be one part of your job that you’d love to skip.

Yet providing high-quality feedback is essential for your team’s and individual employees’ success.

If you’re an employee:

Receiving feedback, if it’s poorly provided, may make you feel smaller, less able, somehow diminished.

On the other hand, if feedback is well-done, you feel stronger, more capable and more likely to make the requested improvements.

With feedback there is – at least, in many people’s minds – the possibility that there will be tension and conflict.

Just remember that compliments are feedback, too.

Watch out for these five ways feedback can go off-track the next time you’re giving feedback, of almost any kind:

1. Feedback is not clear or specific enough to be understood or actionable

One colleague reported that when she lost her job during a round of layoffs at her high-tech company, it was not at all clear what had just happened.

She wasn’t sure whether her manager was telling her about THE layoffs, or HER layoff.

2. Feedback is focused on the person sending the message rather than the person receiving it

Nervousness or fear of possible conflict can play a big part in this.

If you’re a manager or leader, your job WILL include providing regular and timely feedback.

Get used to it, and learn to provide it well.

Plan and practice.

3. Feedback is not connected to the “big picture” or overall goals

All too often, when I hear about clients, colleagues, family and friends receiving feedback, I hear their frustration with changes that seem small, focused on matters of personal style and opinion.

I’d love to pull their managers aside and advise them to explain the context of the feedback, and the change they would like to have made, and why it is important.

A manager can and should describe, for example, how the change links to the organization’s long-term goals and priorities.

In addition, the person receiving the feedback should be clear about how the change supports his or her personal objectives.

4. There’s not enough time provided for good feedback

Important discussions take time, especially when changes are involved.

Make the time, and take the time to do the job well.

5. There’s no coaching or mentoring, just a “gotcha” style of feedback

“Gotcha” feedback is all too common, in all types of human relationships.

Make sure you’re not guilty of it.

Provide positive feedback along with information you’re providing about improvements you want the person to make.

Make feedback easy to take, and easy to use for good results.

Leave the person whole, feeling positive about his or her ability to successfully make the changes that are ahead.

If you found this post valuable, share it with friends and colleagues who can use this information, too. You’ll also like the free weekly newsletter I publish. Sign up for the newsletter here.