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Happy New Year! This is a term we hear often in the month of January. As a child, I always welcomed this time of year as each night, as I went to sleep, I prayed the next day would be the best…a snow day where school was canceled. However, as an adult, for multiple reasons (that meant my children were at home all day, messy roads to try to get to work, etc.), that was no longer my prayer and I even found myself dreading the long winter days and long nights ahead.
In this column, I have spoken often about the role my parents played in my life. One of the most important things my mother taught me was instead of looking at Winter as a time of dread, look at Winter and the new year as a time to slow down and enjoy the opportunity to recuperate after the busyness of the holiday season, read that great book you have been putting off and simply relax as you watch the animals and trees transition into a hibernation phase. Now my prayer is that we all take advantage of this sweet time to ‘regenerate’ and be our best selves when, in just a few months, the first signs of Spring become evident around us.
During this season, I also try to take a personal inventory of myself, both personally and professionally. I ask myself these three questions:
What do I want to start?
It can be tempting to frame our intentions for the new year negatively in terms of the things we want to eliminate from our lives. Begin with your aspirations for the year. Given the state of “all things put on hold” that reflected 2020 and 2021, you may also wish to look at the things you had to put on hold—on what you would like to restart.
What do you want to stop?
Often, we get into such a routine, we don’t take the time to evaluate what activities are consuming our days. As Steve Jobs, was fond of saying, “we will not have room in our lives for the big things we want to say yes to unless we are disciplined at saying no.” I encourage you to do a quick self-evaluation and try to determine if you may have picked up some bad habits over the past two years. Or perhaps you had to compromise your routine and habits out of necessity. Whatever the reason, now is the perfect time to choose some habits to leave behind.
What do you want to continue?
The past two years have forced us to dig deep, innovate and adapt. In doing so, many of us have adopted new habits or skillsets that have enabled us to function more efficiently and perform at a higher level. These may just be the habits we want to continue and build upon.
A final advantage of the Start, Stop, and Continue evaluation process is that it can help you break out of the trap that often comes with New Year's Resolutions. We start the year full of good intentions. A month or two later, we have forgotten our resolutions. Or, if we remember them, we do so with guilt over what we have not accomplished. Instead, make the process of taking inventory and setting goals an ongoing practice. Whether you revisit your habits and routines monthly or quarterly, make it part of the rhythm of your year— and may you view the shorter days/longer nights of Winter as a time to rejuvenate and refresh as we prepare for Spring ahead.
Here’s to wishing you and your families a happy, healthy, prosperous, and blessed 2022!
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Start Your Year Strong With Meaningful Goal Setting
January is a great time for organizations and individuals to set goals for the upcoming year. More well thought out and planned than casual resolutions, specific and clear goals can have a major impact on individual performance, satisfaction, and overall success.
Understanding the benefits of goal setting can help leaders message the importance to team members while also making it easier to allocate the necessary time and resources to setting, monitoring, and tracking goals.
Benefits of Goal Setting
Perhaps the biggest benefit of goal setting is that it helps to keep you motivated and focused. Goals allow you to prioritize tasks, recognize what needs to be done, and recognize when things need to be done. This makes it easier to stay motivated, stay on task, and avoid procrastination.
Goals also allow for increased personal and professional development. Goals give a clear path of where you want to go and help provide the steps to get there. Professor or Psychology Leslie Riopel explains that “[y]ou can’t manage what you don’t measure, and you can’t improve upon something that you don’t properly manage.” Goals allow you to measure, manage, and improve.
Another benefit of organizational goal setting, which is often overlooked, is that it leads to increased collaboration. When individuals have goals and understand how their goal connects to larger organizational goals, it helps to create more teamwork. Each person understands their impact on the organization and how their role contributes to overall organizational objectives. This leads to more engaged employees and more efficient team collaboration.
Finally, clear goals also provide a sense of self-mastery. When you can see your progress towards short and long-term goals, you have an increased sense of accomplishment and sense of satisfaction. Obviously, this is a benefit in and of itself, but it also leads to increased motivation and focus.
Tips for Goal Setting
One key to getting the most out of goal setting is to be thoughtful about how goals are set and tracked. Sticking with the acronym SMART goals is a great way to start. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.
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In addition, it’s important to set both short and long-term goals. While long-term goals are helpful to see an overall vision and major steps that you want to take, short-term goals are helpful to keep you motivated and focused on a day-to-day basis.
And, while workplace goals are important, it’s also a good idea for team members to set personal goals. “If I account for the whole person, not just the work person”, says Wharton Professor Stewart Friedman, “I’m going to get more value from them.”
From a managerial standpoint, having team members set personal goals lets you get to know them better and get a sense of their passions and what motivates them. From an employee standpoint, setting personal goals in the workplace can lead to feeling more valued, having a better work-life balance, and increasing workplace morale.
Finally, keep in mind that you don’t want to set goals and then never look at them again. Instead, you want to consistently refer back to set goals, track progress towards goals, celebrate the success of achieving goals, and use short and long-term goals to track overall performance.
Start the Year with Professional and Personal Goals
At Management Solutions, we create individual development plans at the beginning of each calendar year. Our objectives are to achieve company goals but also to balance those with personal aspirations. When we come together to set goals, we try to stay focused on living out organizational values, providing sustained delivery to clients, fostering collaboration, and building expertise.
We encourage you to commit to setting goals this month. Take time to think through goals, make sure that they’re connected to organizational and personal objectives, and write them in a way that you can monitor and measure them. It’s exciting to see the behavioral changes and impacts that strong goals can have, so we hope you enjoy this journey!
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Join Us in Celebrating the International Day of Education
The United Nations has proclaimed that January 24 is the International Day of Education. A global celebration since 2019, the purpose of the day is to spread awareness about the importance of education.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) warns that “without inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong opportunities for all, countries will not succeed in achieving gender equality and breaking the cycle of poverty that is leaving millions of children, youth, and adults behind.”
With that in mind, the Day of Education was founded to highlight the importance of providing quality education to everyone and raising awareness for noteworthy education initiatives by governments, organizations, and educational institutions around the world.
Too Many Children and Youth Don’t Have Access to Education
Education is considered a fundamental human right, yet millions of people around the world are without access to even a basic education. Data from UNESCO provides troubling evidence of just how many children and youth worldwide are not given access to a basic education. Today there are:
- 258 million children and youth that don’t attend school
- 619 million children and adolescents that cannot read or do basic math
- 4 million refugee children not in school
- Less than 40% of girls in sub-Saharan that complete lower secondary school
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The Power of Education
The statistics that UNESCO provides on how many people lack access to an education are troubling in any context, but they are particularly tragic when discussed alongside the powerful impact that a good education can have on individuals and communities.
One primary goal of the Day of Education is to highlight the role that education can play in bringing about global peace and sustainable growth. Education provides an opportunity to break cycles of poverty and achieve gender and racial equality.
How to Celebrate the International Day of Education
Given the power of education, it’s vital that we all work together to ensure that children, youth, and adults around the world have access to quality education. The International Day of Education is a perfect opportunity to highlight innovation solutions, provide financial support, and mobilize volunteers to help with these efforts.
UNESCO will host events at its headquarters in Paris and New York on January 24th. In addition, you can celebrate by donating school supplies to a local teacher, providing financial support to reputable institutions that help individuals in need get an education, signing up to tutor a student in your community that needs help, or even by going back to school.
At Project Controls Solutions, we appreciate the power of education and are committed to doing our part to help ensure that everyone gets the education and training that they need. We couldn’t be more proud of our team, which recently was awarded the UK Social Impact Project of the Year for its work developing and delivering a project controls training program for rural, de-industrialized, and disadvantaged communities. The team saw a problem and went about creating a solution that changed the lives of individuals and communities.
This January 24th, we’re celebrating the amazing work of our team while also looking for other ways to promote education in both our local and global community. We hope you’ll join us in this celebration and challenge!
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Project Controls Solutions Corner
As Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in education pays the best interest.” Project Controls Solutions is driven by the vision of meeting the industry’s rapidly growing need to educate and train the future generation of project management and project controls professionals. We are thrilled to announce that our PCS Academic Certificate Program has received the honor of being shortlisted for the Association of Project Management (APM) Education and Research Awards Developmental Program of the Year. Developed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to support our profession in addressing the skills shortage in Project Management and Project Controls, the PCS Academic Certificate Program provides holistic project management/controls training that furnishes companies and individuals with the necessary technical, behavioral and contextual skills to allow them to think critically, conduct rigorous analysis and generate recommendations to support successful project delivery. Our PCS Academic Certificate Program is an outgrowth of our mission to help create well-paying, sustainable careers for people from all backgrounds. Many of the students graduating from the PCS Academic Certificate Program come from rural, economically disadvantaged, or other underrepresented populations. The program, led by industry experts with each having over 20+ years’ experience, is the core of our efforts to be at the vanguard of providing meaningful work, dignity, and social mobility to people no matter where they live or who they are. We are proud of this honor conferred by the APM and look forward to the continued opportunity to instill a culture of innovation in our graduates that immediately creates business value for every client.
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Spotlight on Impactful People
Throughout 2022, Management Solutions will be celebrating our 20th year of being in business. As part of our year long celebration, we wanted to spotlight a few individuals that made our journey along the way possible. We recognize no one succeeds on their own; it truly takes a village and we have had the help and support of some very willing people throughout our 20-year journey and for that we are thankful. Although more people have helped us than we can ever highlight we tried to narrow it down to 20 over the past 20 years. Please check us out each month as we highlight and say thank you to a person or group that positively impacted our company.
In our first spotlight, we wanted to say thank you to two local business owners that gave endlessly of their time as we were planning to start the company, launching in that first year and even serving as wise counsel throughout our journey. Stan Love of CS Engineering, Inc. and Dan Hurst of Strata G both gave of their time as we came back with question after question. They were always patient, willing to share best practices, and both have even partnered with us on contracts in support of our clients. To Stan and Dan, thanks for all you did, it is much appreciated.
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A Lightbulb Moment
Imagine what it was like back when daily routines were signaled by the rhythms of sunrises and sunsets, when your wake-up call was the crowing of a rooster rather than the buzzing of a phone. That’s what it was like before this day in 1883, when Thomas Edison used overhead wires to electrify Roselle, New Jersey, proving that an entire community could be lit by power from a central generating station. This innovation sparked the modern industrial age, not only making it possible for factories to run after dark, but also laying the groundwork for explosive growth in manufacturing, scientific research, and communications. With our innovative array of project strategy, delivery, and execution services, MSLLC and PCS strive to create ‘lightbulb moments’ for our clients by tailoring our solutions to meet clients’ unique needs.
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