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As the new year gets underway, many organizations are developing, refining, or beginning to implement their 2026 objectives. While much time is spent aligning on goals, defining metrics and KPIs, and refining the performance management process, less attention is often given to the ways of working that enable or hinder the achievement of those objectives. For example, an organization may set a clear objective to accelerate product delivery, yet slow decision-making, unclear ownership across functions, or excessive approval layers can erode progress long before performance metrics reveal a problem. Put differently, you can have the right objectives and the right people focused on them, yet it is often the ways of working that ultimately determine whether objectives translate into the desired performance outcomes. To surface these issues early, I created a one-page cheat sheet that leaders and their teams can use to identify which current ways of working could detract from goal achievement if left unaddressed. It is anchored in a simple but powerful question: “If we were to fast-forward to the end of 2026 and see that we fell short of this objective, which ways of working would we say got in our own way and contributed most to that result?” From there, teams identify two to three actions they can take immediately to reduce the likelihood of that outcome. Early action matters because once results are off track, the window to materially change performance outcomes narrows quickly. Take this action now to turn ways of working into an execution advantage rather than a performance risk.
