There are 27 days until the end of the year, which means 27 days left to meet all of those lofty goals you set for yourself back in January. So how are things looking – have you done a recent progress analysis? A big part of achieving goals is reviewing them often so you know exactly where you stand. If you don’t know if you’ve reached your goals this year it’s time to get your team together and see where you are.

When you do call that meeting, you are going to come across some very interesting people, so let me introduce them to you now:

The excuse maker: This is the person that is going to figure out several different reasons, some of them probably even good, as to why the goal was unattainable in the first place. They might even say something like, “I told you guys we could never hit this…!” We all have a tendency to want to explain away poor performance but we have to be careful not to make this too easy on ourselves.

The diverter: This person is great at the “Yes, but…” approach. We can see what the problem is but we will divert attention away from it as quickly as we can to lead the discussion away from ourselves or where we failed. “I know we didn’t hit the sales numbers BUT the operations team couldn’t have delivered the products even if we had!”

The minimizer: This is the person that is quick to say he didn’t want to hit the goal in the first place, making it okay that it was never achieved to begin with. “Thank goodness that we didn’t hit 10% growth in units this year because if we had, our margin would have dropped just like our competition’s did.”

The sandbagger: I love this guy and have been guilty of being him in the past. The problem is when you set the objective too low and you blow past it you probably left something on the table. At review time there is always someone in the room that ends up 30% ahead of even their stretch goal, which is great, don’t get me wrong, but setting a goal too low can be just as bad as setting it too high.

Have your meeting today and at the end of it, read this blog to your group and see if you can put a name to my descriptions above. You might be surprised in what you find. Remember, you still have 27 days, so pick up the pace and sprint to the finish. You may not get 100% of the way there but anything you achieve to get you closer is a good thing. Let me know how your meetings go. Are you on track?