Here’s the recipe for a great New Year for your business
The group of business owners whom I have been coaching for six years just received a note from me. It said, “I know we are all busy with holiday events, gifts, family, and more. As it should be. But 2026 is only two weeks away and it deserves our attention so we can make the most of our opportunities in the New Year.”
Indeed, the New Year is almost upon us and for most of us serves as a bright line between what we have been doing and what we will do. I know, some of you function on a fiscal year that doesn’t start in January - including many financial businesses - or have a seasonal business - recreational, travel, or other - for which January is less important. But it’s undeniable that now is a great time to take stock before plunging in to make positive change for your business.
The recipe: Strategic focus to specific action
As a cook, especially in the holiday season I think a lot about what I am going to cook and bake for holiday events. Let’s translate that to business and see what you can cook up for a better future for your business.
Using the ingredients and recipes I have learned as a strategist, entrepreneur, and business coach, here’s my holiday recipe for you to use in this short interlude leading into 2026. I suggest taking out a sheet of paper, literal or figurative, and writing down:
Your compelling vision of what you want your business or non-profit to achieve or become.
Several big things that are in the way of attaining your vision, that have to be navigated or changed to attain your vision.
For each “big thing that is in the way of attaining your vision,” a short statement of what you can do to overcome, surpass, eliminate, navigate, or change it so that you will make progress toward your vision. (Hint: You can ask AI for ideas.)
For each short statement of what you can do, three to five specific steps you can take starting in January and proceeding through the year to make significant progress toward your compelling vision. (Hint: You can ask AI for ideas,)
Doing what I have laid out above creates key linkages: Vision => Strategy => Action. Using my recipe will give you the bones of an actionable strategic business plan. And you will be on the road to actually making what you plan happen.
Get out of your own way!
Ahh, if it were only that easy, right? I have presented you with a simple recipe - AKA logic model - that anyone can use for greater success. But way too often not only is the plan not created but when a plan is created it does not get implemented well or it is not implemented at all.
A year ago I wrote Why New Year’s resolutions fail: The problem of implementation and a little earlier I wrote Don't waste your time planning, unless... A lot of the thinking in those posts came from the research that I presented and mined in my book, BIG DECISIONS: 40 disastrous decisions and thousands of research studies tell us how to make a great decision when it really matters.
Let’s revisit the highlights of my deep dive into behavior to see what guidance I can offer now that will help you actually achieve greater success for your business or non-profit in 2026.
Truism #1: Write down your action steps and goals, put targets on them, and periodically - how about monthly? - measure your progress in attaining them. One research study showed that people who wrote down their goals were 42% more likely to achieve them.
Truism #2: Make your action steps and goals specific, challenging, and believable - and align them with your core values. Research shows specific and challenging goals lead to higher performance, but there's an inverted U-shaped relationship: too easy produces weak efforts, too difficult undermines performance. Goals must align with your values—the more alignment, the more likely you'll achieve them. In our FastTrack™ Strategic Planning app, we promote the use of SMART goals, that is, goals that are:
Specific: What exactly needs to be done? Who is involved?
Measurable: How will you know it's complete or successful? What does "done" look like?
Achievable: Is it realistic given your resources and constraints?
Relevant: Does this action step directly support the parent Strategy and, ultimately, your Vision?
Time-bound: What is the target completion timeframe (e.g., Q1, by end of June)?
Or maybe you should consider making your goals HARD. The HARD format was set up in response to the mechanistic SMART format. HARD promotes goals that engender an emotional connection, strong visualization, great urgency, and difficulty:
H – Heartfelt
A – Animated
R – Required
D – Difficult
Truism #3: Actively commit to your goals and engage others in achieving them. Go beyond just stating your goal—write it down, sign a contract, or commit to someone you respect. Share the burden and promote your goals at every opportunity, because silence signals you may not genuinely care or believe it will happen. Sharing engages others in helping you keep your goal in mind and at work on it.
Truism #4: Invest time and resources in achieving your goals and visualize obstacles in advance and what will be needed to overcome them. Without the necessary people, funds, and time devoted to execution, your plan becomes ineffectual or dies entirely. Decide beforehand how you'll handle difficulties that might arise.
Truism #5: Keep plan execution in the spotlight with regular updates and clear information flow. Without a specific focus on reporting progress, people fall back to prior activities. Have regular update sessions and create systems so progress data is at hand.
There’s solid research behind those truisms and even more helpful guidance available on goal achievement. Here are several excepts from BIG DECISIONS that you may find worthwhile considering as you develop your commitment to positive change for your business in 2026. They address research showing the value of announcing your goals, highlighting progress in attaining them, and tying incentives to their achievement.
Go public
A decision announced to the right people is more likely to be executed.
Tell a friend. Psychologist Gail Matthews asked entrepreneurs, educators, healthcare professionals, artists, attorneys, bankers, marketers, human services providers, managers, vice presidents, and nonprofit directors to implement weekly goals using varied techniques. Writing goals, formulating an action plan for achieving them, and sending weekly reports to a friend all helped goal achievement. Notably, “There was support for the role of public commitment: those who sent their commitments to a friend accomplished significantly more than those who [only] wrote action commitments or did not write their goals.”
When you tell someone about your decision and how you will implement it, you embed it in your brain and make an explicit commitment. Wharton professor Katherine Milkman explained, if in telling the friend you think through “when and where and how [you] will accomplish the goal,” the likelihood of not following through ebbs “because now there is this cue embedded in…memory that is going to trigger the recollection, ‘Oh, this is when I’m supposed to, this is the moment I said I’d do it.’” She added, “It also makes it harder for [people] to procrastinate because now they’re putting off something they explicitly said they’d do.”
To whom you commit matters. Ohio State and Penn State researchers studied how “the perceived relative status of a goal audience influences goal commitment.” They found that “the perceived relative status of the goal audience is positively related to goal commitment, and downstream performance.” The conclusion? “It is not enough for goals to be made known to facilitate commitment but… they should be made known to someone perceived as having higher status.” Those who made their goals known to people perceived as lower status did not perform better.
Howard Klein found that “people were motivated by sharing a goal with someone they thought had higher status because they cared about how that higher-status person would evaluate them, You don’t want them to think less of you because you didn’t attain your goal.”
Make progress visible and commit
Evidence shows that making the decision and implementation progress visible to members of the organization is key to successful implementation.
A survey of 250 businesses revealed that the longer businesses waited to state goals and key metrics and make them accessible, the worse they performed. Businesses that announced goals, set targets, and monitored key performance indicators (KPIs) regularly were far more likely to hit their targets, “with 96% hitting some of their targets and 41% hitting all their targets compared to just 23% of companies which were not metric-driven.”
And those who monitored key metrics in real-time were more likely to hit their targets again. “50% of companies who tracked metrics in real-time met all their goals in the last 12 months compared to only 24% of companies who did not track in real-time. Also, 92% [who tracked] metrics in real-time met some or all their goals in the last 12 months - compared to 64% of companies who did not track in real-time.”
When you announce your decision and intent to implement it, you make it important and actionable. An analysis of 35 years of research on goal-setting by University of Maryland and University of Toronto researchers found “two primary factors that help to enhance goal commitment are importance and self-efficacy.” A Penn State goal-setting wiki explained, “Goal commitment is the degree of determination one uses to achieve an accepted goal. Importance refers to the factors that make attaining a goal important, including the expected outcomes. Self-efficacy is the belief that one can attain their goal.” This can be “making a public announcement about the commitment, or…a formal program of inspirational mentoring and leadership.”
Use rewards: “Internal rocket fuel”
If the big decision is a broad, long-range challenge, use micro rewards to harness “the fear of missing out.”
In Psychology Today, Christopher Bergland relayed the findings of researchers at USC and Harvard: “Offering meaningless small rewards increases human motivation. Even if the rewards are arbitrary, the simple act of 'winning' a token reward inspires people to keep working towards a larger goal.” He wrote, “Neurobiologically the satisfaction of completing a task creates internal rocket fuel that energizes you to keep working towards your larger goal.”
Take small bites and big bites. Despite popular wisdom, evidence suggests that mixing small steps and big steps is more effective than only taking small steps, “eating the elephant one bite at a time.”
For the best results, pursue both “subordinate” and “superordinate goals.” Concrete goals motivate broad, long-term goal pursuit. University of Bern researchers noted that “goal-setting theory states that challenging, specific, and concrete goals (i.e., subordinate goals) are powerful motivators and boost performance in goal pursuit more than vague or abstract goals (i.e., superordinate goals).” Yet, “people pursue long-term goals more successfully when they focus on subordinate as well as superordinate goals.”
Take small steps to start, then move to the larger goal. Stanford professor Szu-chi Huang and two Chinese university professors found that “while people benefit from concentrating on small ‘sub-goals’ in the early stages of a pursuit, they should focus instead on the larger objective in the late stages.” They saw that “when individuals are initiating a goal and derive motivation primarily from the belief that the final goal state is attainable, the structure of sub-goals enhances the sense of attainability and therefore leads to greater motivation.” But “when people are completing a goal and the source of motivation centers primarily on the perception that their actions are of value, a focus on the overall goal (rather than sub-goals) heightens the perceived value of the goal-directed actions and leads to greater motivation.” Huang explained that people need to feel that their actions continue to be worthwhile in order to maintain motivation…they need to focus on that final goal to see value in their actions.”
Happy New Year!
There you have it: My holiday recipe for a great New Year for your business. Spend a little time NOW making your plan and laying out the steps you will take to achieve it in 2026. You won’t regret it!
