We all know it’s hard to achieve business success alone.

Whether you own your business, manage a team or even supervise a small department, you only reach success if you and your co-workers push toward the same goal.

So now that you’ve done all the strategising on your own to nail down your goals (from your own personal success all the way down to the 90 day sprints), it’s time to share those thoughts and plans with your team.

But if you want your team to really connect with these goals, they need to be invested in them as well, so we offer up the following tips for sharing your vision.

Connect with what they want …

Then you can get what you want.

Many executives make the mistake of just handing down the KPIs for each year rather than considering the team and explaining why this matters not only to the business but to them personally.

If you listen to your team members and link how their work contributes to the goals of the business, then it might get their attention more.

Then you take it a step further and explain how meeting those goals for the business could bring them closer to their personal desires—whether that means making more money, working three days a week or achieving the next promotion.

If you tap into their personal motivation and connect it to the business goals, then you have a better chance of inspiring them to work harder.

Stop. Start. Keep.

Try this exercise with your team as you discuss the upcoming 12 months and the goals associated with them.

• What do you want to stop doing (i.e., what are the frustrations)?
• What should we keep (or what do we love doing and is working)?
• What should we start (i.e., what should we be doing)?

If you have the time, pull the team together and actually run the process.

However, if that’s not possible, then you can either set up a virtual board where everyone can add stickies, or if you have a board in the office that everyone sees, then you use that to allow people to add thoughts.

Encourage the team to write down ideas on any of the three topics for two weeks, and then put together a summary that connects with the goals and how to meet them.

Using this method the whole team feels as if they engaged in the process of creating the plans for 2018-19.

Start with the WHY.

Think about what Simon Sinek, bestselling author and man behind the famous TED talk, says is the difference between successful businesses and leaders—it’s how they communicate.

• He says most businesses know what they do, some know how they do it, but very few focus on the why; why the business exists.
• Sinek says that successful businesses don’t start with the what but rather flip it and start with the “why.”
• Or rather, thinking about the core purpose of your business and how to align your company’s marketing with that purpose.

Work with your team to help define the “why” of your business and together how you can harness that to further your vision.

Keep the focus on these goals

Don’t just spend one day sharing the vision and get everyone excited to tackle the next year, only to get entrenched in the day-to-day and lose the big picture.

Find ways to remind the team of how every task, each step of those 90 day sprints, contributes to the realisation of the shared business goals.

Reference how working towards meeting these expectations will not only make the business successful, but help them personally as well.

Now that you and your team are looking toward a successful year together, then don’t miss out on the last of this month’s posts to learn more about keeping a successful mindset.