Adam Lueken
In our last blog, we talked about doing a final goal review and team performance review for 2021. If you’ve done so, we hope you discovered helpful information on the year’s successes and what opportunities may still be on the table. The latter can help you start building out your practice goals for 2022 as the current year wraps up.
Practice goals are extremely important no matter what the size of your practice and team is or what dermatology services you offer. They will ultimately affect all aspects of your practice growth (or be a reason why your practice lacks growth). A helpful approach you can take when goal planning is the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)®, a system of management and goal planning technique created by Gino Wickman. This can help you reach your practice goals by establishing “rocks,” which are three to seven quarterly goals you need to achieve in order to hit your long-term targets. Essentially they are the foundation of your larger annual goals and will help you identify your actions, measure your progress and help maintain work/life balance in the process.
Determine What Your Rocks Are
Start with setting a mission statement for the year. In order to achieve your long-term annual goals, short-term goals are needed (basically how you’ll get there). These are your rocks. To begin with, write down everything you want to achieve in the first quarter of 2022. It may be a large list at first, but that’s fine as long as you’re able to keep them SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely). This will not only save you time and effort, but will also help get you closer to achieving the goal. If you can’t measure what you want to achieve, the rock will likely not contribute to the growth of your practice. Keep your them challenging but achievable. Make sure they’re relevant to your practice’s success and commit to a set time frame to stay accountable.
Make Your Definitive List
Now that you have a working list, it’s time to whittle it down to your priorities. It’s a good idea to aim for three to seven rocks per quarter (five is the target number). For everything you’ve previously listed, decide to keep it, nix it or combine it with another rock. Keep in mind not to set rocks that are too complicated, unrealistic or not key factors in what you want to achieve. It’s also a good idea to plan for potential obstacles, which is another good way to tell whether or not a goal is achievable. Get your team involved as well. Assign rocks to those team members and practice leaders you feel can best succeed with them and communicate your expectations.
Track and Measure
Even if your rocks are realistic and specific, don’t forget to consider key performance indicators (KPIs) for each. These metrics will help you determine if you’re on the right track with your rocks in the beginning and throughout the year. Setting and monitoring the right metrics can also help your practice:
- Identify the current performance levels of your team.
- Track progress on achieving business rocks.
- Focus on driving growth in key areas.
- Drive accountability among team members.
Also, it will be difficult to achieve your rocks if you don’t have the right system to track and analyze the progress and performative of your activities. It is important to find a way to monitor the outcome on a regular basis. By tracking and controlling outcomes, you can be confident that your strategy is working in your favor.
Meeting annual goals is just like setting annual goals – it doesn’t happen on its own. To help manage practice objectives for the quarter, you should also consider building an EOS scorecard. A scorecard helps track progress, predict issues before they arrive and meet rocks by operating proactively, not reactively.
Need some extra assistance with planning and making your 2022 goals a reality? We’re always a phone call or click away to help. Schedule a consultation with one of our practice management experts today!