Planning for Success: Your Blueprint for the Year Ahead

Does the start of a new year cause you stress? Do you already feel behind and it hasn’t hit 2025? Read on, I have a few easy tips to get you started for 2025. 

Reflect on the Past Year

To move ahead, it is important to reflect. Begin with your wins. Even in a difficult year, there were likely successes and learning. In this fast paced world we are quick to jump to the next item on our list, but reflection is an important component. Think about the setbacks you experienced, what did you learn and how are you going to apply that next year? Evaluate where you landed on last year’s goals. Write down three reflections from the prior year, make sure at least one is a success and one is a learning.

Define a Vision for Next Year

Where do you (or your team) want to be next year at this time? Visualize what that looks like. If you have a goal of changing jobs - what does your dream job look like? I advise visualizing all of the details. My most successful years have been when I had a very clear vision of where I wanted to go at the beginning. Write a one sentence vision statement. Make it simple and clear. Here are two examples;

“In this next year, I will develop the strategic mindset and professional presence needed to confidently step into a Vice President of Operations role, where I can drive meaningful impact by leading larger scale projects." 

“Our vision for the upcoming year is to foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and excellence, positioning our team as one of the highest-performing departments in the organization.” 

If you are crafting a vision for a team, I suggest writing a draft or providing a few prompts and doing this exercise with your team. Collaboration and buy-in is better achieved when all parties have a voice. 

Prioritize Areas of Focus

What are the top 2-3 areas of focus that you and/or your department have to achieve or work towards in order for that vision to be a reality? Think of the areas of focus as your road signs, they help you get to where you want to go. Here are two examples of focus areas: 

• Focus Area/Strategic Mindset: Cultivate the ability to think critically, anticipate challenges, and identify opportunities to align daily actions with long-term organizational goals
• Focus Area/Innovation: Build a team culture that encourages creativity, embraces new ideas, and leverages diverse perspectives to drive innovative solutions and enhance performance

If you are working with your team, talk about what innovation looks like and what will be different next year. Perhaps you need to build in time to allow for diverse perspectives on decisions or maybe your team doesn't feel their ideas are embraced. How will that change? Be specific in the discussion and ask questions. Make sure this is a safe space for feedback.

SMART Goals

Next you will need to craft a set of goals. The goal is the destination for the year. For reference, SMART goals are; s-specific, m-measurable, a-achievable, r-relevant, and t-time bound. Using this format will assist you in setting goals that move you and your team closer to where you want to end the year, the vision, keeping in mind the areas of focus (road signs). 

One exercise that I like to do to make this easier, is to take the vision (in this case for a department or organization) for the upcoming year and talk through what that looks like in deliverables. That could be financial; operating margin, sales, new customers or quality, etc. If this is a personal vision, think through what your vision looks like in deliverables, do you need additional education or training? How do you foresee building a strategic mindset? Make this tangible and identify the outcome wanted or needed. 

I advise keeping this simple and the number of goals low. I prefer three well-crafted goals. In the work environment you will likely have many things you have to work on, however keeping the priority goals to three and making those a focus will lead you and your team to greater success. If you achieve them before the year end, great- get started on the next ones.

Coming up - Creating an Action Plan