There was another big reason I liked December: I always set aside time to reflect back on accomplishments for the year.  We usually had some team recognition during the month, so I reviewed both the breadth and depth of what we accomplished as a group. It was also when I began to look at personal achievements for the year in preparation for my end-of-year performance review. When we hit December, reflecting on the past took precedence, at least for awhile, over preparation for the future.

Before the end of the year, you should set aside some time to take a look in the rear view mirror.  If you’re like a lot of folks, you may clearly recall failures but completely blank out on the great things you did during the year.  The time you moved a map into production before it was fully tested and caused a few orders to fail will be top of mind, yet the creative solution to a tricky requirement you devised that satisfied an important customer may be forgotten.  That’s not the way it should be.

For whatever role you’re in, at any level from entry-level to management, you wouldn’t be in your position if you weren’t adding value.  At any given moment, you should have a good idea of what you contribute to your organization and specific examples to tell your story. If you haven’t done a good job throughout the year cataloging those examples, now is a fine time to pull that information together. In many companies, like ours, on-line performance objectives are maintained in a system and it’s simply a matter of keeping up with your accomplishments in that application throughout the year. Or it could take a review of your departmental metrics, project lists, and things of that nature to spur your recollection of how you contributed.

When you’re pulling together this information, don’t disregard your non-metric-driven accomplishments.  Learning to map inbound cXML, at least to me, is far more important than cranking through a dozen straightforward X.12 implementation projects that you already are adept at handling. And how did you learn that new mapping technique? Class? Outside research? That’s important as well. As I mentioned earlier, it’s easy to recall getting chewed out for some hopefully rare error (you probably wouldn’t want to mention it anyway), and you can get a lot of information from various metrics your team maintains, but to paint a meaningful picture of what you really did this year you need to go beyond the easy stuff and think about how you added value to the enterprise. Whatever technique you use, just remember that you want to finish the year feeling good about yourself. Plus, performance evaluations are right around the corner, and you should be able to provide your boss a good picture of what you represent to his/her team.

This is a good time to think of the past, but it’s also appropriate to put on your thinking cap and ruminate about how you want 2011 and beyond to play out for both you and your team.  I’ve written in the past about the need to have a path in mind for your future, so I encourage you to spend some time thinking about where you want to be at this time next year.  As you age, the years tend to pass by in a blur, and unless you make a conscious effort to stop and think about your next steps, you may look up at some point in the future and realize it’s too late. Whether it’s training you need, a mentor you want to work with, a project you’d like to be aligned with, or some ideas you have for continuous improvement projects for  your team that you’d like your manager to consider, now’s a wonderful time to get your thoughts together about the future.  Take advantage of the slower pace and general feeling of bonhomie among your teammates and business partners to crystallize your thoughts about the wonderful year you’ve had and the bright future ahead.

I sincerely hope everyone has a great holiday season! Any thoughts or suggestions you’d like to make to me directly, please forward to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.