June can be a tough month for most professionals. Your children are either done with school or nearing an end. Summer vacation planning can be quite distracting (though fun as well). All the while you’re amazed at how fast half the year has gone by! But more than all that, June provides a great opportunity to reflect on your goals and targets. You’ve most likely set annual goals and targets for yourself at the start of the year. As you’re approaching the end of this month, take some time to review your midyear accomplishments, whether or not you’re on track and evaluate how successful you’ve been so far. Here’s a quick checklist you can use as a midyear review guide:

1. How Accomplished Are You In Terms Of Your Goals?

Probably the first and fundamental aspect of your job to check upon should be your annual goals. There’s a good chance at the start of the year you’ve agreed upon certain interesting and challenging goals for yourself with your manager. The midyear point (June) is a great time to look back at what all you’ve accomplished, what your shortcomings are and what’s next for the remainder of the year in terms of your goals. Are you falling behind or ahead of your targets? Evaluate the factors that led you here. Is there something you need to do to catch up to your goals so you can end the year achieving them? If you’re ahead can you sustain it? What tools, support or resources do you need to get back on track? Are you headed towards overachievement of goals? These are all important questions to assess so that you approach the next half of the year more informed and prepared.

2. Have You Formed New Alliances?

Though most of your responsibilities primarily require you to interact with either your boss or your team members, forming new alliances is essential for your career growth. Developing cross-functional connections helps you get more insight to other aspects of the organization. These are useful information which you wouldn’t normally know about if you were to stick within your domain. Also, forming cross-functional alliances can benefit your career greatly if you’re working for an organization which believes in peer evaluations. These “advocates” can help you grow and become more visible to the management.

3. What Do You Need To Do To Get Growth?

If you’re achieving or exceeding your goals then you may want to look into ways of setting more challenges for yourself. After all, your career won’t progress if you’re just meeting expectations. You need a plan that’ll exhibit your willingness and desire to take on more responsibilities and the ability to work with an expanded job scope. Having a set game plan at the midyear point is a great way to ensure you end the year on a high that’ll be visible to the management. Alternatively, if you’re spreading yourself too thin then engage in a midyear review of how to better utilize your efforts to produce more favorable outcomes.

4. What Do You Wish To Achieve?

Sure you have goals and targets to achieve in a year, but an achievement that’s not expected of you earns you much respect and recognition. When you’re conducting a personal midyear review give some time to ponder on what you wish to achieve in the next six months. What are those achievements that fulfill your higher purpose. And even if it’s not linked to your professional growth, your achievement could be more personal. Whatever it is that you wish to pursue make sure you’re tracking your progress and reminding yourself to stay on course. At the end of the year when you do actually achieve it, make sure to celebrate your achievement.

5. Are You Adding Value?

Everything you do and contribute towards needs to point in one direction – adding value. Whether it’s to your job, your team members, your boss, your function or your organization, adding value is paramount to truly be successful. After all, why do what you do if it’s not adding value to the people, community and organization you work around. Ask yourself “what impact have I made?” The answer to that should be able to give you a clear picture of your true contributions that’s higher than just “doing your job”. If you can’t answer that positively, then take this opportunity to identify your contributing “unique value”.

Is there something else that you do which I may have missed out on? Do share them so we all can learn and adopt them into our own midyear checklist.

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