Build Traction to Achieve Your Goals

Momentum. Movement. Sustainability. Traction.

These words describe what most people seek as the secret sauce to reaching their goals. Sometimes, the work to achieving goals is getting started, but the most difficult part is keeping the pathway clear and the vision in sight for traction of the goals to be realized. 

In a recent conversation with a colleague, friend, and client, he shared with me his unwavering determination to achieve his goals at work; he was curious about the secret sauce to building traction toward these goals.  As the new year begins, he is determined to set a sustainable process that aligns with his team's vision.

As his coach, I constantly measure this readiness. 

• Is my client focused on fixing his personnel problems and needs immediate coaching, or is he ready to step away from that situation and dive into what his team and organization need more broadly? 

  
  

• How ready is he to explore the department’s mission and vision and align it to the KPIs of his organization, because that might solve some of his retention problems?

  
  

• Is this client ready to explore the bigger picture of his leadership that will launch him to feel traction and acceleration toward his goal?

As we aspire to achieve great things in leadership and life, we often face the challenge of meeting the expectations that we set for ourselves and that others have of us. However, the truth is that many leaders lack the experience and skills (and time) to create systems that can drive their businesses forward. Instead, they resort to reactive measures, hoping that problems will magically disappear. But we can change this approach by embracing the idea of "traction" through the lens of a visionary, driver, problem-solver, and risk-taker. With the right systems in place, we can light the fire of motivation and ignite the will to make our expectations and visions a reality. Traction can help us create a culture of focus, efficiency, measurement, and reward, and ultimately lead us to long-term success.

In the coaching with my client, I urged him to develop his leadership goals using the systems his organization uses to evaluate his leadership. His homework was to dive deeper into understanding his areas of focus and to reflect on the leadership values that made them so important to him. While his work continues throughout this year, his engagement in the process of defining his intentions and his goals will become more clear to him and his team, and keep his engine revving to build traction in his goals.

With traction, individuals can work together towards achieving common goals in a structured and efficient way.

Start to Build Traction

1. Establish a collaborative vision for traction: As the leader, your role is to be a visionary for the group in coming up with ideas for the future that can happen today. To do this, you will need a team of people who can take part in crafting that vision together; those people are also the stakeholders who can lead other teams to do the work to build momentum and traction to those goals. The vision you craft (and later work to make a reality) is designed to accelerate others to grow and develop and is realized with the optimal results within your plan. If this is your starting point, you can download the free Vision/Traction Organizer from EOS.

2. Find your core focus: Leaders need to stay focused on one thing because when everything matters, nothing matters. Once you and your team have determined your organization's vision, values, and core areas of focus by being strategic in your leadership, it’s important to determine who will support that focus, and what foundations need to be in place to make that happen. Doing so gives transparency to the team on what’s important and what to invest their time into.

3. Determine and remove the distractions: When daily influences and roadblocks surround your team and cloud your vision, eventually those distractions become what you focus on. As you revisit your vision and your focus, your team should acknowledge the areas that are not part of the focus, and begin to eliminate and remove them from the picture. What you focus on is what matters, and when you focus on everything, nothing will matter. 

4. Define what makes you (and your focus) unique: Branding the vision and core area of focus will require some internal and external marketing, so defining what makes your organization, your service or product, your people, your vision, and your leadership unique plays an important role in the attractiveness of your organization to others. This part of the process can excite and motivate you and your team to continue to keep your vision and focus alive.

5. Keep checking in: One of the best ways to realize your vision and focus as reality is to check in on your team and where you are in reaching your goals. Taking in the small wins toward your goal allows the team to see where traction is being made, and what additional opportunities are hidden in the process.

   
   

Complete the Organizational Check-Up

Why is Coaching Important to Building Traction?

Coaching is a powerful tool for helping individuals and organizations achieve their goals. It's easy for leaders to fall into the trap of thinking that they must be the sole driver of success, but the truth is that embracing the concept of "traction" can help create a culture of collaboration and creativity.

Coaching can help ignite the fire within leaders to start conversations about crafting visions, staying focused, embracing individuality, forecasting for the future, and checking in regularly to ensure progress is being made by embracing traction and coaching, individuals and organizations can achieve great things and make their visions a reality. To assess your organization's strengths for building traction, click here to take the 20-question test.