In my experience, run rate and momentum are the most important things that determine a business’s performance early in the new year. You can have glorious PowerPoint presentations that illustrate a bright, shiny New Year, but if there’s no momentum and your teams haven’t already upskilled and allocated significant resources to the plan, then you’re almost certainly going to face disappointment in Q1.

Trust builds when actions are aligned with words. Flow is maximized when work is aligned up, down, and across the organization. Accountability flourishes in an environment of strong communication and multidirectional transparency. The three are inextricably linked, and strong goal-setting practices serve as the foundation for establishing trust, accountability, and flow.

Goal setting within a business can be fraught with start-stops, discontinuity, extra-processing, and long wait times from ideation to implementation. Poorly designed goals that do not connect up, down, and across an organization can do more harm than good. That harm evidences itself in the form of team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance. Moreover, if corporate goals change too frequently, the organizational change management curve and many individual contributor change management curves can’t keep up, leading to–you guessed it–team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance.

It should be no surprise to frequent readers in this forum that the tools needed to improve the accuracy and fidelity of business forecasting are pinned in the tenets of continuous improvement and organizational health. The “ah ha” moment I hope you’ve had is the importance of having strong financial modeling skills embedded in your organization.