Create Victories

Taking Control of Our Weeks to Create Future Momentum

I suppose I am like most leaders right now. The last 2 months we have spent dealing with daily news, announcements, shutdowns, etc. Managing the next 24 hours. And now we are beginning to “anticipate” the next 60 days. But in truth? Who the heck knows? As a national economy we are all so interrelated right now. Really, we are globally related. South Carolina manufacturing is affected by Michigan. And China. Also by Europe, other US states, Mexico. So even trying to anticipate the next few months can be frustrating, and frankly, unproductive. It is necessary, but not very rewarding.

But there are things we can do. We CAN create opportunities to affect our future, even if subtly.

A few weeks ago, I began to simply set 2-3 weekly goals for myself. Nothing super cerebral; just things I wanted to get done that had some impact on the next few months. At first they were simple: write a weekly blog, reach out to 2-3 employees a week that I had not had any time with, clear my desk, etc.

I realized I got real satisfaction from simply completing something that I HAD CONTROL over! I was creating my own “victories” for the week. And you know what? It gave me a surprising amount of satisfaction. Completion. Control.

So beginning this week, I decided that HTI needed to try something similar to this as an organization: set 2-3 weekly goals around things each department could control. This allows us to accomplish things we probably need to do more often, and also gives our business units an opportunity to see and celebrate “victories” at the end of each week.

These were not financial targets, or typical operation targets. They are simple things like reach out to our employees intentionally, or make contact with customers we haven’t heard from recently.

The point of this is simple: restore some control over the work week so that we can begin to impact on our next six months, not become a bystander. In doing this, we create victories weekly that build good “mojo” and momentum for the future.

Writing this blog was one of my goals for this week – now I can ring the victory bell!