Do you remember your 2023 New Years resolutions? Did you make those resolutions a reality? 

In coaching nonprofit executive directors, I always ask my clients to draft three to five goals for our year of coaching. These goals usually focus on professional effectiveness, succeeding in a newer role, building strong work relationships, and setting good life/work boundaries.

As we move into a new year, this is the perfect time for you to think about your 5 goals for the new year. Let me be clear that I’m not suggesting you have five resolutions that you try diligently to make a reality for a few weeks, only to cast them aside after a few weeks.

Instead, this new year is an opportunity to create some broad goals and develop a plan for how you will achieve those goals. The first part of the post will outline the five goals, and the second half of the post will share an easy method (and template) for creating a goal achievement work plan.

Goal: Your Relationships With Board Members

Whether you have a rocky relationship with your board or an incredible one, every executive director can build a stronger relationship with board members. (Or, if you’re not the executive director, this goal is about building a better relationship with your supervisor).

You will be creating a goal for your relationship with the board, not a goal for the Board to achieve. In creating this goal, think about the pain-points you feel with the Board. Do they involve just a few troublesome board members? Is board engagement low with board members being non-responsive or unavailable when you need them? Would you describe your relationship with the board chair as “effective, supportive, and mutually respectful?”

To help you think creatively about possible goals, I’ve shared a few examples:

• • • Better utilize the unique skills and connections of each board member
    • Have one-on-one relationship building meetings with each Board member (perhaps using the scientifically-validated Fast Friends model)
    • Create a plan for how you will recognize the contributions of each Board member
    • Design and implement tailored communication strategy for your Board

Goal: Your Relationships With Team Members

Unless you are the only staff member at your nonprofit, it’s impossible to do your job without the support, leadership, and hard work of other paid staff members. And your ability to get the most from your team is directly related to the quality of the relationship you have with each staff member.

Like your Board goal, this goal should be about building stronger relationships with your team members, not about your team members achieving specific goals. Instead of thinking about the ways your staff cause you pain, however, I want you to use your empathy muscle and consider the ways you make it harder for staff to be fully effective at their jobs.  (Of course, as Kim Scott often says, asking your team members “what one thing  could I do or stop doing that would make you even more effective?” is also a good idea).

Some examples of staff relationship building goals include:

• • • Reduce micromanagement (sorry, but every manager micromanages at least some of the time)
    • Fully commit to being on-time and present for weekly supervision meetings
    • Fulfill my commitments to staff (promises to follow-up, have a conversation with someone else, etc)
    • Seek and better respond to feedback from direct reports.

Goal: Most Important Responsibility in 2024

In the book CEO Excellence, the authors note that successful chief executives “do what only they can do.” What one goal – that only you can achieve – will ensure your organization has a successful year. Like the other goals, the one you choose depends on your organization’s current situation. But some examples include:

• • • Designing and implementing an organization restructure to ensure greater effectiveness
    • Ensuring the completion of a strategic planning project
    • Focusing on fundraising and operational efficiencies necessary to turn projected losses to surpluses
    • Leading a good jobs strategy effort

Goal: Professional Effectiveness

Everyone should create a professional effectiveness goal each year. This goal focuses on personal development that will help us leverage our strengths, minimize our shortcomings, and better use our time. A few examples include:

• • • Strengthen time management skills
    • Learn better meeting facilitation skills
    • Implement a task-management system
    • Enter professional coaching

Goal: Life Outside of Work

Especially in the nonprofit sector, a strong commitment to the mission and the organization often leads to us becoming consumed with our work. A life focused solely on work is no life at all, and we owe it to ourselves, our families, and our organizations to have a fulfilling life/work balance.

A new year is a time to consider new ways we can rebalance our work so that our personal lives feed us professionally (and our professional lives feed us personally). If you’re looking for inspiration as you create your own life/work balance goal, consider these:

• • • Stop checking and responding to work email before and after work
    • Make time to do something active every day – even if it’s “just” a 30-minute walk
    • Plan a two-week vacation (I’m surprised by the number of coaching clients who have never taken two consecutive weeks off)
    • Meet with a financial planner to create a money strategy that will allow me to retire in 20 years (or 10 years or 5 years)

At the start of this blog post, I encouraged you to create goals instead of setting new years resolutions. And the reason is simple: if you make a resolution to “do something active every day,” you are likely to give up on the resolution if you fail to meet the goal four days next week.  But the path to achieving goals aren’t perfect straight lines! We make progress, slip back, forgive ourselves, and start back again.

This is where planning becomes essential. Once you’ve developed these goals, create a plan for achieving them. With annual goals, I find it helpful to break the year into 24 units of time (each half-a-month long). This allows you to design a plan that works for you and gives you 24 opportunities to assess and get back on track.

I believe in this so strongly, that I am sharing the annual planning template below. I’m currently doing an interim executive engagement, and I will use this template to plan my own five goals.