“We are an organic growth company, not an active growth company.”

This is a verbatim quote from a recent client session. While there’s nothing wrong with these words, there is a challenge when relying on “organic” (or passive) growth when you want to double your sales revenue this year.

“Everyone lives by selling something,” according to Robert Louis Stevenson. We are all selling, all the time. We may not see it that way, but we’d benefit by taking a large part of the mystery out of selling. Keep the mystery in place and we don’t meet growth goals. Worse yet, we get into real trouble.

“There are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic timeframes.” – Dan Sullivan

The past three months have been full of annual planning sessions in which we review what we accomplished in 2016 and identify what we aim to achieve in 2017, especially in the first quarter.

Many companies had a great year in 2016. Some of the wins were tangible, dollar-driven results, while others were more qualitative. Wrapping up the year is absolutely a time for celebration, and it’s also a great time to reflect on what’s been learned and what lies ahead for 2017.

But not all goals were achieved.

A client reached out recently with the following:

“Stacy and I are planning to have a ‘difficult’ conversation with Joe tomorrow. His performance is leaving a lot to be desired. I suspect he will be surprised. We plan to talk in terms of core values, capabilities and accountabilities, but acknowledge that Stacy and I may have created some of this problem by stepping in and assuming some of his responsibilities (rather than holding him accountable). He may be in the wrong seat and, as we define the seats on the Accountability Chart, he may be better suited for a different role. Did we screw up?”