27KB
The 12 Week Year — Chapter-20: Your First 12 Weeks
- Source: /library/The 12 Week Year/source-file.pdf
- PDF pages: 151–166
- Pages without text: none
Chapter 20 Your First 12 Weeks The purpose of this chapter is to give you a proven path for the next 12 weeks so you can apply the concepts of the 12 Week Year in your life and in your profession. We wrote this book with the fundamental intent that it could be executed as written. There is nothing else you need to get going with the 12 Week Year, so let’s get started! Research on what it takes to make change happen, and to sustain it, shows that there are some things that you can do to increase your odds of being successful with the 12 Week Year. The approach we’ve outlined in this chapter, as well as the fundamental design of the program itself, leverages what it takes for you to change effectively. As you read through this chapter, feel free to dip into relevant chapters in this book for more detail and ideas to support you. It is our deepest desire to help you create new results in your life. As you apply the 12 Week Year, please email us to let us know how you are doing. The 12 Week Year is designed to help you to perform at your best through more effective execution, but to realize its full value, there are a few things that will help you to increase your odds of success. Resistance Monsters We would all be great if we did not encounter resistance when pursuing our life’s intentions. The reality is, the world requires that an effort be expended to accomplish great things. That effort is what stops many from becoming what they are capable of becoming. If you have read the book up to this point, you are aware of many of the barriers to change. In fact, the emotional cycle of change maps the emotional response to these barriers over time. The good news is that there
are simple things that you can do to overcome these barriers, but first it is helpful to be aware of the barriers themselves. The barriers to change are the monsters that you will face before you can reach your goals. Just like the monster under your bed at night when you were six, the resistance monster seems much less scary by light of day. So we’re going to take a look at some of the most common barriers to change. There are many great books that dig into the barriers to change; Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers, are a few of our favorites. For a deeper dive into the barriers and their solutions, I recommend that you read these powerful books. But for our immediate purposes, I just want to connect the dots between the common barriers to change to establish the rationale for the powerful tools of the 12 Week Year. The Need for Immediate Gratification Given a choice, people choose immediate and certain short-term comfort over potential long-term benefits almost every time, unless there is a compelling reason to choose otherwise. What this means is that even if a change could be hugely beneficial when implemented, if the immediate costs outweigh the immediate benefits, many will choose not to engage. To change your tendency to choose comfort over growth, the 12 Week Year brings your vision into the present via the 12 week goal. The goal links the actions that you take each day as part of your plan to your long-term vision. That’s why one of the recommended actions is that you review your vision for at least a few minutes each day. One of our clients who is in sales told us that he secretly hated to meet new people! That was an issue in his sales role since meeting new prospects in most cases is the required first step to selling something. He told us that the way he overcame that potentially career-ending issue was that he would pull out his vision just before he walked into a meeting with a new prospect, place it over his steering wheel, and read it aloud. In this way, he
reconnected with his personal motivation, his why for doing this job in the first place. By behaving this way each time he met someone new, he reset his in-the- moment benefit/price equation. Rather than choosing his short-term comfort, he chose his vision instead, and in the process, he chose to meet with new prospects. His vision and his daily actions were intentionally and powerfully aligned. Big Change and Multiple Goals A research study by Amy N. Dalton and Stephen A. Spiller, found that the benefits of planning diminish rapidly, if not altogether, if you pursue and plan with more than one goal. The study posited that in itself the act of planning for multiple goals discouraged people when they were forced to consider all of the obstacles, constraints, and forgone pleasurable activities, involved in reaching their goals. Intuitively this makes some sense. When people are confronted with a big project such as cleaning a very messy house with multiple rooms and many sub-projects such as piled-high laundry and dirty carpets, they can feel overwhelmed and ultimately fail to take any action at all. This also makes sense in the context of the emotional cycle of change introduced in Chapter 12. The shift from the first stage of change, uninformed optimism, to the second stage, informed pessimism, begins with the development of a written plan that identifies the costs that must be paid to reach the goal. The way that you think about the magnitude of the execution effort affects your willingness to take action. Imagine for a moment that you have a plan to balance your personal budget, a weight loss goal with a diet and exercise plan, a plan to get married in six months, and to top it off, you have just taken a new job as a goal-based project manager! Now imagine that you add one more goal with a plan on top of all that. You decide, for example, to drive from Cleveland to Chicago to attend a wedding this coming Saturday. On top of everything else on your plate, you have added a new goal (to attend the wedding) and a new plan (the
directions to get there). According to the research, you should be overwhelmed and, rejecting plans altogether, making decisions on what feels right in the moment. That’s not what you do though, is it? In fact, you get in your car and using the directions you arrive on time and attend the wedding. How is that possible? Well, of course, the answer is obvious: You are only executing against one goal at a time when you are driving. You are not completing a project, balancing your checkbook, or exercising while you drive. You compartmentalize and set aside the divergent goals and their actions and you focus instead on executing your directions one turn at a time until you reach your goal. You don’t think about the trip in a way that overwhelms you. It turns out that using that trip approach works with your other goals as well. The drive confines your focus because you physically cannot do anything else while you drive. You might think about your other goals during the times between lane changes and map checks—on a long stretch of interstate, for example—but when you are actively making turns, all you are doing is focusing on driving. In the book Switch, Chip and Dan Heath point out that when your perception of the magnitude of a big change shrinks in your thinking, you are more likely to achieve your goal. It is important to note, that the ultimate goal doesn’t shrink; it is just your thinking about it that matters. The Dalton and Spiller study also confirms this. It found that if you think that your plan to reach multiple goals actually is manageable, then you are more likely to execute it and planning becomes beneficial for multiple goals as well. If you think your plan is manageable, you will execute it and benefit from it! In other words, the way you think about your plan, affects your ability to execute! Switch describes two ways to “shrink” change: First, limit the initial investment in time (e.g., spend five minutes cleaning), and second, set progress milestones that are quickly within reach (clean the small bathroom). By doing this, your thinking about the magnitude of your change shifts, and you can get “unstuck,” and begin to act. The 12 Week Year itself is designed to create a sense of measureable progress right out of the gate. In fact, at this point in your reading you have
already successfully taken the first few steps in your first 12 Week Year just by getting this far. In 12 weeks, your progress is visible and immediate. Your first day with your first weekly plan puts you in an elite group of people who are acting to reach new heights in their lives. If you implement the routines of the 12 Week Year, you are immediately acting to become proficient at execution, a skill that will pay great dividends for the rest of your life. The disciplines of the 12 Week Year also keep you on track even when you have multiple goals. When you set near-term 12 week goals with daily and weekly actions, you have in essence turn-by-turn directions to achieve each goal. In addition, you track immediate progress each day, while each week, you allocate time in your strategic blocks to keep you focused on one goal and action at a time. Taken together, the components of the 12 week system help you get through the multiple-goal barrier to execution one day at a time. Old Habits Your current actions are creating your current results. To create new results —to reach your 12 week goal, for instance—you will have to do things differently and do different things. The problem is that your existing environment and your old triggers, provoke you to continue with your old behavior loops, your old habits. In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg describes a four-step approach to overcome old habits and to create new ones, and one of the key steps he identifies is to work from a plan. A written action plan, what psychologists call “implementation intentions,” helps to create new behaviors even in the presence of your old environmental triggers. A plan creates a new set of conscious action choices that can help produce new results in an old environment. The weekly execution routine of the 12 Week Year creates a new execution environment with a set of new action cues and planned behaviors that change everything. If you consistently apply the weekly routine your 12 week goal will likely become a reality.
Victim Thinking Sometimes people give away their power to the external by seeing their barriers as insurmountable. They would be great, but their circumstances won’t let them. As long as you see the solution to your greatness as being outside of you, you will remain powerless to change. The reality is that the only things you control are the way you think and the way you act; everything else, you can only try to influence. Personal accountability—ownership of your vision, goals, and plan—is the single most important thing that you can do to become great. Re-read Chapters 8 and 18 to remind yourself of the power of accountability as ownership. They are probably the most powerful chapters in the book. Your First 12 Weeks Your first 12 Week Year may well be your most important. If you decide to dabble with the 12 Week Year to get familiar with it, you probably won’t see great results. Here is Casey Johnson’s experience with dabbling at first, and then what happened when he committed to fully engaging with the system. To get the most value from the 12 Week Year my advice to you is to sell out to it from the get-go. Set your ego aside and acknowledge that someone else might know some things that you don’t, and they might be able to help you get better. I was first introduced to the 12 Week Year in March when my firm hosted a two-day training session with the authors of the book. At first I wasn’t bought in. I dabbled with the concept and didn’t see much in terms of improvement. I thought that I already knew what I needed to do to be successful, and I felt that there wasn’t anything that I could learn from the 12 Week Year. It turns out I was wrong. Three months later in July, my results were not where I wanted them to be and they were well below what I felt that I was capable of delivering.
At that point I was presented with the opportunity to hire a 12 Week Year coach and I took it. I decided that I would fully engage with the 12 Week Year for the first time. As I look back now, that first 12 weeks of full engagement was all about setting up the habit of executing the 12 Week Year process. I set a goal that was a stretch for me and I built a plan that focused on driving my weekly business building activity—asking for referrals in every meeting, and conducting six openers (face-to-face sales calls) each week. I worked to build in the process of using a weekly plan, and I scored myself each week (by the way, don’t lie about your score—it won’t push you to get better if you do). I met with my coach and attended a WAM each week to help me confront my performance breakdowns. I changed many things, but the most important might have been that I started to value my time much more than I used to. Time spent has an opportunity cost—now if I am not tenacious about spending it on my highest value activities I feel like I am losing money. After my first 12 weeks, I had the 12 Week Year successfully installed. My activity was up, and the results were starting to appear. By the end of my second 12 weeks, I had closed more business than I had in the previous year and a half! In my company’s annual life (sales) promotion, I was the number 4 agent in the country for delivered first- year commissions at my experience level! I had done OK the year before, but my name wasn’t even on the list of top performers. It is now! I tell anybody that will listen, that if you are thinking about the 12 Week Year, don’t dabble—engage. Casey’s story is exciting, but it isn’t unique. The 12 Week Year can help you to reach your goals faster than you ever thought possible. The key is to fully engage in the first 12 weeks. To apply the 12 Week Year well, you will need more intentionality regarding how you think and act each day and week. The good news is that the 12 Week Year is designed to help you do exactly that. Every 12 weeks has a pattern, similar in many ways to a 12 month year.
The first repeating pattern that happens every 12 weeks, is to set (or reconnect with) your long-term vision. The good news is that you have probably already accomplished this step. If not, I suggest that you go to Chapter 13 and create your vision. After you have determined your vision, the next step in your first 12 week routine is to set a 12 week goal that represents progress toward your vision and that is a great result in and of itself. Once your goal is set, you will build a 12 week plan to reach it. Creation or refinement of your vision, goal, and plan is something that happens before each 12 Week Year begins. Your first 12 Week Year is unique. In fact it’s helpful to frame it in three four-week periods. Your First Four Weeks Studies have shown that when you are introduced to a new concept or habit, the sooner and more often you act on it, the more likely it is that you will incorporate it into your daily routine. If the next 12 weeks is going to be a breakthrough for you, it will be because you decided to do the things necessary to drive your performance to new levels. Use the tools and concepts of the 12 Week Year to effectively work the plan that you have created. Take the time each week for the strategically important items that matter most over the long term. Focus on the foundational practices of the 12 Week Year and make them yours as quickly as you can. Install the weekly routine and make these three steps your new habits.
- Plan your week
- Score your week
- Participate in a Weekly Accountability Meeting (WAM) To help you execute better it’s important to also block your time and track your key measures. Decide right now to commit to staying on track for your first four weeks. The first four weeks are critical. These first weeks are all about getting a
fast start toward your goal, and establishing the 12 Week Year as your execution system. In your first four weeks, use the weekly routine to get some early successes and to establish some new habits. A good start makes the end goal more attainable. Don’t start a week without a weekly plan. Each week take a few minutes and score your execution (score from Week 2 on; there is nothing to score until you have finished Week 1). Attend your Weekly Accountability Meetings and engage. Pay attention to your scores, track your progress, and respond to any performance breakdowns. Your Second Four Weeks You probably know people who tend to start strong with new things but then abandon them before they experience the full results. Don’t do that! Seriously, once you start the 12 Week Year, it gets easier and easier each week. It becomes your routine. The second four weeks are important because the newness of the 12 weeks has worn off, and the end of the year is still a way off. There might not be as much urgency for you in these middle weeks. It is precisely now when you can set yourself up for success for this, and your subsequent 12 Week Years. You should be seeing progress in your lead and lag numbers, your weekly scores should be improving toward 85 percent, and you should have a sense of progress toward your goal. If not, identify the breakdown and commit to resolving it. Whether it’s your plan, your execution effort, or both, now is the time to address it. Learning to use the 12 Week Year as a deliberate practice system is a skill that will pay off for you. Your Last Four Weeks (and the Secret of the 13th Week) The last four weeks of the 12 Week Year are your chance to finish strong. Whether you are on track to hit your 12 week goal or not, by finishing
strong you will create positive results and set yourself up for the next 12 weeks as well. At this point you have successfully done what most people rarely do, intentionally change the way you think and act to create a permanent leap in your performance and your capacity. In the first 12 weeks you have two basic goals: One is to hit your 12 week goal, and the other, perhaps more important, is to learn how to apply the 12 Week Year effectively. Make this a learning experience. Pay attention to what worked for you and what didn’t. Carry that learning into the next 12 weeks. That’s what the 13th week is for. It’s a chance to have an extra week of effort, if you need it to hit your goals. It also provides a time to assess your performance and decide what if anything you will do differently in the next 12 weeks. Finally, Week 13 is an opportunity to recognize and celebrate your progress and success. Success Tips We send out coaching emails to our community at key times over their first 12 weeks. We have collected them for you on the following pages to refer to as reminders during your first 12 weeks to help you stay on track. Bookmark this section and return to it for inspiration. Also, visit our website at www.12weekyear.com and sign up for the Weekly Success Tips.
Week 2 Coaching Congratulations, you’ve completed your first week using the 12 Week Year Performance System. If you haven’t scored last week yet, take a few minutes now to score it and to plan the upcoming week. Once that is complete, mentally answer the following questions: How did you score? What were your successes? How could you have been more effective? Your first week’s score is not all that important. What is important is that you block out time each week to score and plan your week. You’ve made a commitment to improving and you invested time in determining your future and building a plan to accomplish your objectives. At this point all you need to do is execute your plan. Effective execution takes place daily and weekly. The key to achieving your 12 week goals is to consistently apply the system. Over time, you will see your scores improve. A score trend that is rising is an indication of more effective execution. Remember you don’t have to be perfect; just be consistent and persistent. Have a great week! “I don’t think there is any other quality so essential to success as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.” —John D. Rockefeller
Week 3 Coaching Welcome to Week 3 of the 12 weeks! Wherever you are in the application of the 12 Week Year, that’s okay. Don’t worry too much about your scores or even if you haven’t yet completed a weekly plan and scorecard. The decisive moment is right now. The key to execution is to consistently apply the system. Commit to your vision and your plan, and then re-commit to taking action—starting today. If you haven’t yet written your 12 week plan, then do it before the day ends. If you haven’t yet completed a weekly plan or scored your week, commit to do it this week. If you have been successful so far in applying the 12 Week Year system, great job! The most important objective during your first few weeks using the 12 Week Year is to engage. Once you are familiar with the routine of daily and weekly execution, then work on improving your weekly scores. Wherever you are, you’ve made a commitment to improving. You have invested time in envisioning your future and in building a plan to get there. Now all you need to do is execute your plan.
Week 5 Coaching Welcome to Week 5. How did you score last week? Are you on track with your 12 week goal? There are seven weeks left in this 12 Week Year. Seven weeks to make good things happen. A 12 Week Year is not a lot of time, so it is essential that you execute this week! Effective execution happens daily and weekly. With only seven weeks left, you can’t afford to score less than 85 percent from here on in. Your weekly score matters. You can score less than 85 percent and still experience significant increases in your business; however, you are leaving a lot on the table. The difference between good and great has a bold line of demarcation—it is 85 percent, week after week after week. You are five weeks into the first 12 weeks. What would be different if you had scored 85 percent or better each of the last several weeks? Think about where you would be today. It is amazing the difference in just five weeks! Five weeks of 85 percent or better can change your results; it can change your life. Think about the impact of three or four or five 12 Week Years of 85 percent. Have an 85 percent week!
Week 8 Coaching It’s Week 8 already! It’s amazing how quickly a 12 Week Year goes by. One interesting thing that often happens around this time in each 12 weeks is what we call productive tension. With the 12 Week Year, there is a clear line-of-sight that is created regarding lack of performance, which existed prior to applying the 12 Week Year but was not so evident. Productive tension is the uncomfortable feeling you get when you’re not doing the things you know you need to do. Our natural inclination when confronted with productive tension is to resolve it. In our effort to do this, we generally go one of two ways. The easy way out is to simply stop using the system. In this way you can turn off the light that is shining on your performance breakdowns. Typically this takes the form of passive resistance—you just put off completing a weekly plan and scoring your week, telling yourself that you’ll get to it later and later never comes. The other way is to use productive tension as a catalyst for change. Instead of responding to the discomfort by bailing out, use productive tension as an impetus to move forward into the change. Productive tension is exactly what you want to experience. It is the lead indicator of substantive change. If you eliminate bailing out as an option, then the discomfort of productive tension will eventually compel you to take action on your tactics. If turning back is not an option, then the only way to resolve the discomfort is to move forward by executing your plan. Learn to leverage productive tension for more effective execution and greater results. Take action!
Week 11 Coaching Welcome to Week 11. We have just one more week before this year is over. How have you done this year? Will you achieve your 12 week goal? Are you executing your plan? Remember our thinking drives our actions and ultimately creates our results. Are you still thinking that there is a lot of time left in the year or are you focused on the next few days as year-end? In the book Good to Great, author Jim Collins profiles a high- school cross-country running team that has won two consecutive state championships. The program had been transformed from being top-twenty in the state to consistent contenders and state champs. “I don’t get it,” said one of the coaches. “Why are we so successful? We don’t work any harder than other teams. And what we do is just so simple. Why does it work?” The answer might surprise you. The reason the team is so successful is because they finish strong. “We run best at the end of workouts. We run best at the end of races. And we run best at the end of the season.” The 12 Week Year is all about finishing strong. The end of the season is now. We have less than two weeks left in the year, less than two weeks to achieve your goals. Focus your energy on finishing the 12 Week Year strong. Next week, next month is too late. What can you do this week? This day! Make a commitment to finish strong: Finish the 12 weeks strong! Finish the week strong! Finish the day strong! Be great!
Team Application The first 12 weeks is a critical time for a manager wishing to fully leverage the 12 Week Year. Your team will look to you to determine if this is a new team direction or the flavor of the month. One important thing that you can do is to recognize progress early and often. Do this both individually and with the team. Create a sense of progress and momentum each week and be sure to recognize process change. You don’t control the outcomes, so focus on the process. Review your direct reports’ 12 week plans in the first week. Make suggestions for improvement, as appropriate, but make sure that the writer of the plan maintains control. Don’t let your team execute from poorly written plans, especially in the first 12 weeks. Check in to the Weekly Accountability Meetings (WAMs), if appropriate. Be encouraging! When you attend, bring your weekly plan and your score from last week so you can lead by example. Be sure to check in individually with everyone on their progress at least once every three weeks. Ask to see their plans, weekly plans, average scores, and lead and lag measures. As the old saying goes, inspect when you expect. After-Action Review One of the qualities of a leader is that they are always striving to get better, and to help their team get better. After-action reviews at the end of the first 12 weeks, and subsequent years for that matter, are an effective way to facilitate learning and improvement for you and your team. An after-action review involves taking time to review and identify what worked and ways to be even more effective next time. Be sure to conduct a robust after-action review at the end of each 12 Week Year.