IS TRACKING YOUR PROGRESS a missing piece of your business puzzle?
Vince Lombardi once said: “If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?
When you keep track or keep score, you have so much you can do with that information:
1. Know how far you’ve come. One of my business coaches pointed out how often we are focused on the future, and so we miss celebrating how far we’ve come. When you track your progress it’s easier to say, “Wow! We’ve come this far, let’s keep going!”
2. Know if you are winning and by how much. We wouldn’t watch basketball, baseball, or any of the ball sports if two teams were simply playing for fun. We want to know who is the stronger, better or luckier team that day, and we know there is an ending point. We stay to see who won, by how much and how each team acts afterwards. When you keep track of your results, you know where you are and when.
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3. Tweak your actions to shift and improve your results. When you track things, patterns emerge. As a coach that’s one of my jobs: to note my clients’ patterns and tweak to improve results. When you track your progress and results, you are giving yourself the gift of seeing what is working and tweaking or eliminating what isn’t.
4. Celebrate along the way. This is something I missed when I was starting out, and it cost me some team members. I was too focused on the doing, going, getting-it-done attitude, and so I didn’t stop and recognize some of the milestones that would have given me and the team a break, a bigger reason to keep going and a way to create culture. Like dog training, when you recognize and praise the right actions, you get more of them.
5. Teach it down and out. When you track your efforts and results, you have the opportunity during the review of those efforts and results to teach, to demonstrate, or to ask for a lesson in how it worked and how to repeat it. “Show me how you got this result” is a powerful request for when it’s going well and when it isn’t.
If we don’t track what was done, it’s all a mystery. You’re planning or buying or reacting in a void. Are you willing to live in the dark this year?
