Making good people decisions about whom to hire, develop, and promote can be devilishly hard. Building good teams of good team players is a roll of the dice without the right data. Creating strong strategies is sometimes a murky process if you and your team have behavioral blind spots that prevent you from seeing a clear picture of obstacles and opportunities. The penalties, if you can’t get these decisions right, can be devastating. You could lose your job if you work for someone else. You could lose your company if you own the place.

I think back over my career and I am struck by something. When I went through the best parts of it I was always blessed with three things:

We used a SWOT analysis and a Start/Stop/Continue analysis at least once a year to provide a close look at where we thought the business was at that time. After chewing on it for a couple of days (sometimes longer) we recognized there were usually two or three problems that, if we didn’t solve them, would keep us from achieving our goals no matter how hard we tried. Once we had that level of clarity we looked at options we could choose between to select a path forward. When the options were evaluated against the human capital, financial capital, and the time frame needed to make each one work, we chose what we thought was the best path forward. At that point, it was fairly obvious what steps would be needed to get where we wanted to go. We wrote those into a plan, assigned responsibilities, and communicated thoroughly to everyone who had a part to play.