Set Yourself And Your Team up for Success 90 Days at a Time

The temptation to let yourself off the hook early in that twelve-month period is real, and the ability to rationalize some “miracle” success will save you in the final quarter is an illusion that rarely happens.

Leadership circles love to talk about vision, strategy, and planning. The only problem is the planning part often atrophies because—quite frankly—it’s just not as exciting as whiteboarding a new idea.

Hope is a terrible platform upon which to build your execution strategy.

I’ve learned that twelve-month planning is appropriate at the strategy table—but so is execution. Leadership circles love to talk about vision, strategy, and planning. The only problem is the planning part often atrophies because—quite frankly—it’s just not as exciting as whiteboarding a new idea.

But if you don’t set yourself or your teams up for success, you’ll get sucked into the common loop of “try, fail, and explain” up the chain of command. You might get a pass doing that for a period of time. Eventually, it will catch up to you. After all, you are measured on the results you deliver, not the quality of your intentions.

A lot can happen over a twelve-month period of time.

• Your competitor could launch a new product or service you weren’t anticipating.

• You could lose a key resource you were counting on.

• Revenue and margin expectations could be off-plan, so now you have to participate in the corporate concession process.

• You realize in Q4 that you should have made a different decision in Q2.

In today’s world, adaptive leaders win.

The technology space has known this for some time. They pioneered SCRUM, sprints, and iterative management structures. And for the non-technical teams, it would be wise to look intently at how technology leaders are using tools like “minimum viable product” and “test and learn methodology” to win fast and fail forward.

I’ve frequently found myself in two common situations:

1. I’m responsible for reinvigorating a declining line of business.

2. I’m responsible for research, assessing, and launching experimental projects.

There are a lot of moving pieces in both realities. It’s more than just one person can process, assimilate, and integrate. Even more, it’s a multi-disciplinary and cross-functional effort that requires people who don’t regularly work together to work together.

If you have appropriately aligned each pillar, then you have a clear, actionable path forward and a much higher degree of likelihood of delivering on those annual goals.

After years of trying a variety of different methods, I’ve landed on an approach that has worked. It doesn’t mean I’m not continuing to change, update, and learn, but it has tremendously changed the speed at which internal and external stakeholders can convene, collaborate, create change, and—most important—deliver on the objectives and key results.

Let me break down the pillars for you.

• All annual goals are parsed into quarterly outcomes. These are cumulative in nature and designed to compound over time.

• Quarterly goals are broken down into monthly milestones. These milestones are akin to key results in that they are defined and measured.

• Monthly milestones are then reduced to weekly commitments. This is where you really tease out the interstitial steps, activities, and key dependencies.

• Weekly commitments are then turned into daily actions. When you spend less time thinking about what you need to get done, you have more time to take action. Further, you end the day knowing you tackled the most important work that day.

If you have appropriately aligned each pillar, then you have a clear, actionable path forward and a much higher degree of likelihood of delivering on those annual goals.

But defining the pillars is just one part of the process. The other part is the management approach.

• Each team meets twice weekly for 29-minute stand-up meetings. That way you are never more than 72–96 hours away from discerning if something might not be going as planned or intended.

• Every six weeks each team member submits a progress report that assesses the first six weeks, their current state, and how likely it is they will deliver on their quarterly outcomes. This is an excellent coaching opportunity as well as a planning tool.

• Every quarter each team member submits a review that includes not only what happened but key learnings, risks, and insights that might inform how you conduct subsequent quarters. This often provides profound intelligence that not only documents a quarter’s efforts but also informs executive thinking.

If you follow this ninety-day plan, you will have four attempts to course-correct before you have to account for your annual goals.

And if you know in Q2 that you’re off, you can adjust immediately to get things back on track rather than “hoping for the best” or “feeling your way” to success.

An Unexpected Learning

One unexpected learning in all of this for me is how this framework allows for each team member to co-create each quarter with you and the entire team. That experience is what I call “transfer of ownership.” And, truthfully, you can’t buy an owner’s mentality. But when an individual contributor feels like their fingerprints are all over their success, the best of self-determinism and teamwork really shines through.

If there is one thing every team I’ve led has heard me say a thousand times, it’s this: “Teamwork makes the dream work.” I believe that in my soul.

When you set your team up for success, you set yourself up for success, too.

While things like division of labor and strategic planning theory still work, many of those methodologies must be adapted for a more dynamic, data-driven environment where listening platforms and feedback can happen almost instantaneously.

This is the backdrop upon which you could and should rethink your approach to leading and managing yourself and your teams. And now perhaps you have a more measured and systematic way of doing it.

Ben Stroup is Chief Growth Architect and President at Velocity Strategy Solutions where he helps leaders design, develop, and deploy smarter business growth strategies. Ben is a futurist, disruptor, and data champion. He leads a team that takes a structured learning approach to business challenges, which allows them to assist leaders in bridging the gap between ideas, innovation, and revenue—taking ideas from mind to market.

Velocity Strategy Solutions is an on-demand, next-generation business strategy and management consulting firm which provides clients with a relentless focus on data, execution, and results that positively impact the bottom line. Velocity delivers integrated people and revenue strategies combined with a disciplined approach to growth architecture that elevates the capacity of leaders, teams, and organizations to succeed and win more.