Using The Summer Downtime To Assess Your Organization’s Direction

Last month marked the completion of my first year of writing for this blog and my second year of blogging in general. Looking back over the last twelve months, it’s hard not to feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction regarding the opportunities and relationships I’ve attained as a result of writing for my website. As this milestone also coincides with the year’s halfway mark, I also saw this as a good opportunity to review how much progress I’ve made in reaching the goals I set out for myself at the beginning of the year.

In some ways, it felt odd to be performing such an exercise in the middle of summer, especially when one considers the downtime most companies are experiencing right now thanks to vacationing employees and customers. As it turns out though, the summer downtime actually provides an excellent opportunity for businesses and their leaders to review their team’s efforts, in order to assess how much progress has been made in reaching their shared goals. By performing this review during the summer break, leaders will develop a better understanding of where to focus their team’s efforts when they return to full force at the end of summer.

Of course, in assessing the efforts made so far by your team, it’s important that you move beyond your daily work perspective by fostering a sense of inquisitive thinking about your business. This way, you can make a proper evaluation of your organization’s progress that takes into account not only the accomplishments and issues you’re aware of, but also those aspects about your operations which you ordinarily don’t have the time to review.

With this in mind, here are some questions to help you determine how successful your team’s efforts have been in helping your organization move closer to reaching your shared goals:

  • What kind of opportunities did we attract through our work? How do they align with our shared goals? Are they helping to build on them or are they steering us in another direction?
  • What tasks are proving to be more difficult than we planned? What changes can we make to facilitate the process? What resources will our team need to get past these obstacles?
  • What changes should we make in the upcoming months to ensure we stay on target? Are there any issues we can foresee based on the past six months that we’ll need to plan or prepare for?
  • What failures have we encountered so far? What did we learn from them and is there a risk the team could repeat these mistakes?
  • Which unexpected results from our efforts turned out to be of benefit to our team and how exactly did it improve things? Is there a way we can replicate those conditions as we move ahead?
  • Are the efforts we’re making leading to any progress? Should we consider starting over or is it time to change direction altogether?
  • Is the team still motivated about our shared goals? What can we do to maintain or build their drive to keep at it once the vacation breaks are over?

While summer provides us with the much-needed time to unplug and recharge ourselves, the downtime that comes with the summer months can also prove to be beneficial if we use this opportunity to evaluate our progress to reach those goals we mapped out at the beginning of the year. Making time for such reflection and review will not only help you understand what measures worked and what didn’t, it will also help you to better plan what tasks or issues will need to be addressed over the remaining months of the year.

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