How to Celebrate Your Way to Increased Performance

This past weekend I traveled to attend a family birthday party - one of those round-number events that greeting card companies and relatives love. You know the drill -- someone achieves an age that can only be written with a zero and another high number and the whole family turns out to share in the cake and ice cream. I'm not a big fan of birthdays, but passing milestones is important, and celebrating them is even more important.

At the beginning of the year we wrote about setting goals instead of making New Years resolutions. In that issue, we said that goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Tangible. But we didn't say much about how to reach those goals. Since we're nearing the end of the first quarter of the year, let's do that.

1. Establish milestones. While your main goal might be a target for your annual sales, it's important to have milestones along the way. These should be realistic in that they should reflect any seasonality that exists in your business. Monthly and quarterly goals work well at this level.

2. Know what it takes to meet your milestones. For example, how many sales does it take to reach your first quarterly goal? What does that mean on a per-week basis? How about on a daily basis? It's important to know, at the end of every day, whether you're on track or not. Will you meet your goals if every day's results are the same as today's?

3. Track your progress. Keeping score is essential. A good tracking system is like having a GPS moving-map display telling you where you are at this precise moment on the road to meeting your goal.

4. Publicize your progress. If your employees don't know where you stand, then they don't know if their efforts are enough to meet the goal. Use a poster, daily or weekly announcements, anything you can think of to make sure that everyone in the organization knows how well you're doing.

5. Review your progress and make any needed adjustments. If you're starting to fall behind, don't give up. Never give up. Instead, look for ways to get back on track. Maybe it's time to get a bit more aggressive with your marketing. Maybe it's time to try something new, perhaps a cross-promotion with a business that gets a lot of traffic from customers you'd like to have. The point of this review, though, is not to beat yourself up over a lack of progress. It's to take a realistic assessment of where you are and decide how to make up any drop-off in your progress if you must.

6. Finally, celebrate your successes along the way. Did you exceed this week's goal? Do something fun. Did you make the monthly goal? Have some more fun. Surpass your quarterly goal? Do something memorable.

A Few More Tidbits on Reaching Milestones

I had a good time at the birthday celebration last week - better than I expected, actually. I'm not a big fan of birthdays but I am a huge fan of milestones. Over the course of the weekend I was reminded of the power of milestones in our work and in our lives.

Honor and celebrate reaching your milestones. You will draw strength and resolve from these celebrations.

Look forward to your milestones. Remind yourself that the next one isn't far away and that you're "almost there" if you have to. Self-encouragement is a powerful motivator.

Carry a mental map of your milestones. When I run, I know where the mile markers are on each of my routes. I can look at my watch and see how my pace measures up to previous runs. If I'm struggling a bit, I can encourage myself by remembering that there's another mile marker, another milestone, just up ahead.

So use milestones to cheer yourself on. When I get to the next-to-last one I always tell myself, "I can always do one mile." That makes the last and "longest" mile no tougher than the rest.

Enjoy the journey past your milestones. Soon they'll be like the mile markers on a highway that you're driving at high speed. You'll see them pass and amaze yourself at how quickly they pass by.

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