This question might resonate with you instantly, or you might be puzzling over the question slightly. If you instantly connect with this, can I check, are you keeping score personally or professionally?
If you didn’t connect immediately, have a think about your personal and professional goals, these might be the scores you need to think about and track.
Keeping score can be a massive benefit to you and you need to be aware of the potential negatives. You might keep a score on how much weight you have lost, how your business has grown and how many clients you have helped – these are firmly in the positive camp.
What happens though if you keep score on some more unusual things, like: those that didn’t help you, people who didn’t return your calls or those that caused you a personal or professional issue at some point. These can be some of the more challenging scores you or I might carry around with us.
Firstly, let’s explore if now is time to let go of some of the less helpful scores you are keeping. Pause and think about what you might need to let go of. It can be as simple as agreeing with yourself to no longer track that score, hold that thought or carry that reference around in your head. It can be liberating when you no longer feel the need to invest any more energy into this type of score keeping.
When you have done this, let’s see if we can reinvest that energy into the important scores you might want to track. How might you feel when you really focus on the positives, and what benefit might you get when you really invest in moving some of these things forward:
Your personal happiness
KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)
Your health and wellbeing
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) or net promoter score (NPS)
How much time you spend with people who really value you and care for you
Strategic AND operational goals – key in aligning short and long term goals
You can see these are a few personal and professional goals. I honestly believe if you want to achieve a great work life balance you need to think about these types of scores together. Here are a few things that I have learned that might just help you in creating a renewed focus:
What gets measures gets done, what gets rewarded gets repeated
A great contact of mine shared these two thoughts. Focus on the right measures for you and create micro and major rewards as you achieve steps towards your goals.
Keeping score not kidding yourself, guessing or making assumptions
It’s far too easy to hope and assume, it is far more powerful when you learn to measure and track. Don’t guess, instead, have a full complete measure (even if it is a little uncomfortable at first).
Quarterly focus
Having a good timescale to achieve anything makes sense. If the timescale is too short things may be too difficult. Too long and you may lose focus, momentum and enthusiasm. A quarterly goal tracked every week just hits that sweet spot. It keeps you on track and gives you time and space to achieve what you need to achieve.
Take (a fixed amount of) time to celebrate wins and mourn losses
Have you noticed you can dwell over some of the challenges you face personally and professionally. Do you get carried away with your big wins and quickly fall back into bad habits? Take a fixed amount of time to celebrate and commiserate, this helps you to keep focused and keep moving forward. Don’t berate or congratulate yourself too much. Learn from both scenarios and take the next step.
Tracking your progress, are you better today than yesterday?
This is the principle of marginal gains. If you focus time and effort to growing personally and professionally every single day, then these small improvements compounded over a quarter, then a year will give you huge growth and development. My two favourite questions to help people grow are: “What did you do well and how will you repeat it?”, and “What didn’t you do so well and how might you improve it?”. If you take this approach every day, week, month and quarter, that is a real growth path.
Keeping score is both tough and rewarding. The first stage is to track the right scores for you (personally and professionally), your team and your firm. Then be honest (and not modest) about where you really are and where you want to get to. Apply the five techniques above to help you get to each of your goals, making sure you are taking time to celebrate along the way.
To find out how you and your firm can track the right scores, speak to Nevil: nevil@newresults.co.uk, connect with him on LinkedIn or visit our website www.newresults.co.uk