The Quarterly Planning and Education Session
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts
“Good news is a wonderful way to start meetings, it's a wonderful way to build relationships on the team, and to build trust on the team.”
— Mike Goldman
The Agenda
The agenda for quarterly planning includes:
Good News
Pulse check
Reviewing last quarter's results
Looking at core ideologies in your three-year plan
Checking on leadership team health and talent development
Participating in executive education and development
Collaborating on a strategic opportunity or two or three discussion issue topics
Planning a successful quarter
Cascading communication
The purpose of a quarterly planning and education session is to review last quarter's results, make decisions on key issues and opportunities, plan for the next quarter, and participate in learning and development exercises.
The session should ideally take one to two full days with the CEO and their direct reports that make up the leadership team.
Start With Good News
Discuss both personal and business good news
Good news helps to focus on opportunities and builds relationships
Focusing on good news helps to avoid burnout and keeps the team motivated
Pulse Check
The most important items for discussion in the meeting often come from checking how everyone on the team is doing
This is done through two or three pulse check questions. Examples of pulse check questions are "how are you feeling about the company right now?" and "what's the number one issue we need to overcome?"
The answers to these questions typically reveal the most important items for discussion
Review Results from Last Quarter
Review of the previous quarter's results, focusing on financial and non-financial key performance indicators (KPIs) such as revenue, net profit, client retention, and employee net promoter score.
Evaluate the rocks, which are 90-day priorities with accountability, from the previous quarter. The rocks are assessed based on a color-coded system: green for success, red for failure, and yellow for partial achievement.
Action items are categorized into three options: determining if there is a specific action to take, adding it to the issues list for future discussion, or marking it as a no-action item.
Check on the company's core ideologies, including core purpose, core values, and big, hairy, audacious goals, as well as the three-year highly achievable goal.
The leadership team's health and talent development are addressed, emphasizing exercises to build trust and empathy and conducting quarterly talent assessments to identify high-performing individuals and address any talent-related issues.
Core Ideologies And The Three Year Plan
Core ideologies and the three-year plan are important factors in business strategy, they are values and beliefs that shape a company's culture and direction.
The three-year plan is a strategic plan that outlines a company's goals, strategies, and tactics for the next three years.
Core ideologies and the three-year plan should be aligned and support each other for effective implementation.
The core ideologies should inform the three-year plan, and the plan should aim to uphold and advance the core ideologies.
Leadership, Team Health, And Talent Development
This principle emphasizes the importance of having strong leadership and healthy team dynamics to achieve the company's goals.
Leaders should be capable of setting clear expectations, providing guidance, and empowering team members to achieve their goals.
Team health is critical, as it helps to foster a positive work environment, build trust, and encourage collaboration.
Talent development is also crucial, as it enables team members to build their skills, take on new responsibilities, and contribute to the company's growth.
Participate In Executive Education
The goal is to keep ideas flowing and growing within the business.
The team should be open to new tools, techniques, and strategies.
Learning and growth should be a team effort.
One approach is to have someone on the leadership team teach the rest of the team something new each quarter.
This can be as simple as sharing a TED talk with the team.
Collaborate On A Strategic Opportunity & Planning A Successful Quarter
Discuss issues and discussion items from the ongoing issues list.
These discussions often drive the planning for the next successful quarter, which is the most important item on the agenda.
Planning for the next quarter involves reviewing the annual priorities and deciding whether they are still relevant or need to be tweaked or changed.
Quarterly priorities, or "rocks", should align with the annual priorities to drive success. These are the 2-4 most important priorities for the quarter.
Planning a successful quarter involves reviewing and potentially adjusting annual priorities.
Creating quarterly rocks, Planning for financial and non-financial key performance indicators (KPIs) for the quarter.
Cascading Communication
Cascading communication is the last item on the agenda for quarterly planning.
It involves deciding what needs to be proactively communicated to the rest of the organization and what should stay within the team.
Thanks for listening!
Apply for a free coaching call with me
Get a Free Gift ⬇️
🆓 The limitless organization short video course
Connect with me
www.instagram.com/mikegoldmancoach/
www.facebook.com/mikegoldmancoach/
www.www.linkedin.com/in/mgoldman10/
I invite you to assess your team In all these areas by taking an online 30-question assessment for both you and your team at
-
I spent the first half of my career in management consulting, working for Fortune 500 companies, and very often we were asked to come in and create a three to five year strategic plan.
We would bring in a dozen people, spend millions of dollars over many months. Create a beautiful strategic plan, and that beautiful plan sat on a shelf and gathered dust. Now, why do you think that is? Why did we have so many smart people come in and do intense work? And yet that work went to nothing. It sat on the shelf, those beautiful binders sat on the shelf and gathered dust.
It's not because we didn't do great work. It's not because we weren't thorough in handling the business. It's not because we didn't have buy-in. It's simply because three to five months after creating that strategic plan, the world changed. The world changed and the leaders stopped holding each other accountable as they should stopped holding each other accountable for executing on that plan.
So that plan sat on the shelf, gathered dust until two or three years later, somebody would say, Hey, we need a new strategic plan. The process doesn't work. What I've learned over the last 15 or 20 years is that the answer is not creating a strategic plan every three to five years. The answer is in quarterly planning.
The answer is in creating a plan that is long enough that we can get something meaningful done, but short enough. That the world is probably not changing very much within that period of time, and we've gotta fire up our butt. We've got some urgency to actually put our heads down and get the work done.
Now, does that mean you never think further out than 90 days? Of course not. Part of the process of planning every 90 days is that in my planning and communication rhythm, once a year, we are looking out much further than that and we're looking out at our core purpose that's over never changing or almost never changing.
Our 10 to 15 year big, hairy, audacious goal are three hag or our three year highly achievable goal, or one year. Goals and priorities. We're doing all those things. But what's most important, even in the annual planning session, what's most important is the quarterly plan. Because it's in the quarterly plan, that stuff actually gets done.
So what I wanna talk about is I wanna get real practical in this episode, and I want to review with you what. A quarterly planning session ought to look like, and I call them quarterly planning and education sessions. So let's talk first about the purpose, then we'll talk about some logistics, and then we'll get into the specific agenda that you could use and obviously tweak for your own purposes.
But we'll get to this specific agenda that you could use, and we'll spend most of our session talking about that agenda. But the purpose of the quarterly planning and education is a few things. Number one, and this is not in order of importance.
Number one, it's to review last quarter's results to see what we could learn from last quarter's results. That's number one.
Number two is to make decisions. On key issues and key opportunities.
Number three is to plan for the next quarter, and when I get to the agenda, we'll talk about what we're planning for the next quarter.
And number four is to participate in learning and development exercises. And I'll mention when we get to the agenda one exercise in particular.
That's probably my favorite part of every quarterly planning session. So that's the purpose. Look at last quarter, make some decisions around issues and opportunities. Plan the next quarter, participate in learning and development activities. Now, from a logistics standpoint, I believe this is at least one, ideally two days.
Of work, and I don't mean two hours a day for, you know, seven, eight days. What I mean is literally taking a full day, or better yet, a full two days with the leadership team. And this meeting should be the CEO and the CEO's direct reports that make up the leadership team should be one or two days. Whether it happens on or offsite.
It depends if you can do it onsite without constant interruptions with you, if you can do it onsite and not have 10 minute breaks, turn into 25 minute breaks cause everybody's getting hijacked in the hallway. If you could do it on site and have the conversations you need to have. With flip charts and post-it notes all over the wall without the ability for other people to look in and see what's going on, because sometimes the conversations are not things you want to go outside of those four walls.
If you could do all those things, then onsite is fine. If any of those things are a problem, do it offsite. Do it offsite where you get in a different room. You can think creatively, you have less interruptions. You could have the discussions. You need to have it and wherever you have it. Make sure there's wall space because if you do the quarterly planning session right, there will be flip charts and post-it notes all over the walls.
I can remember, many years ago, I had a client all proud of themselves that they went offsite and they found this beautiful old vineyard to have our quarterly planning session, and it was gorgeous. Great lunch and all that stuff, but the room we had on the walls was a beautiful room, on the walls were these, paintings in these beautiful frames, we could not put flip charts over the paintings.
They did now not allow us to take the paintings off the wall. So it actually was a horrible room to have our meetings because we'd have discussions, we'd wanna make decisions, we'd wanna see things up on the wall, and we couldn't do that. So make sure you have wall space. Now let's get into the agenda.
For the meeting, I'm gonna take you step by step. The first thing you want to do in the agenda of this meeting, and I think this is the first thing you ought to be doing in a bunch of your meetings, is you want to go through good news. Good news is a wonderful way to start meetings, and I actually have my team talk about personal good news and business, good news.
Now, why do we do that? Is that just fluff at the beginning of a meeting? Absolutely not. It's a critical, critical part of the meeting. The reason for good news is because as an individual and as a team, you get more of what you focus on. If you focus on good news. If you focus on opportunity, you're gonna see more of that if you focus on everything that's going wrong.
And frankly, the rest of the meeting is. Tends to be more about things that are wrong than things that are right, but if you focus on everything that's wrong, you're gonna find more of what's going wrong and your team's gonna get burnt out very quickly. I have had teams that have had seemingly a horrible quarter, and they were all pretty down.
They missed their revenue targets, they miss their profitability targets, they lost a number of clients. And when we start with good news, all of a sudden air comes back into the room. And they start to realize it's not all bad. They're making some really good process that they could leverage so you get more of what you focus on.
Start with good news. Why personal good news? Why not just business good news? The reason for the personal good news. Is that it's a wonderful way to build relationships on the team, to build trust on the team. When you share good news, like we had a great weekend with my daughter visiting colleges, or you know, my mom got a clean bill of health, or you know, just had our first grandkid, whatever it is, when you share that good news, you get to know the people on your team better. And you get to have those closer relationships that may start from good news, have that filter through everything else you do. So absolutely start with good news.
The next thing on the agenda for the quarterly planning session is what I call pulse check or pulse check questions very often. The most important items on the agenda for a quarterly planning meeting are not formally on the agenda, and you'll hear the rest of the agenda over the next, you know, 10 minutes or so.
But very often the most important items are not formally on the agenda. The most important items come from checking the pulse of how everybody on the team is doing.
And I do that through two or three pulse check questions. I change those questions up each quarter when I work with my clients. I've got an inventory of about 25 or 30 pulse check questions, but they're questions like, how are you feeling about the company right now?
What's the number one issue we need to o overcome? What's something we need to discuss, but we're afraid to? What's the biggest opportunity? We'd like to move faster on. What's the biggest challenge our clients are grappling with? By asking two or three of those questions, and I do it with flip chart up on the wall question on the flip chart, people are answering those questions through post-it notes they're putting up on the wall.
That's the way I like to do it. It's not the only way, but by going through the answers to those questions, We typically find the most important items we need to discuss. Now, it's very important how you go through the pulse check. When I first started doing pulse check, I would actually discuss every post-it note and dive into detail, and all of a sudden we'd be three quarters through the first day before we'd come up for air, and we realized that we spent a whole lot of time talking about issues and opportunities, some of which weren't very important.
And then we didn't have enough time to talk about the most important things. So what I suggest is that you go through those Post-it notes and you categorize those Post-it notes in a number of ways. And there are really three options. When you hit a Post-it note, you look at a post-it note, you spend maybe a minute talking about the answer to the question, what's the biggest.
Challenge we have, you know, as a company or whatever the question is. And there are three things we do. Number one, I ask, is this an action item? Is there an action we ought to take? Is this as simple as, ah, we solve that by doing this by next Tuesday, or let's grapple with this in a meeting we're gonna have next Tuesday.
So number one, is there a specific action we should take? If that's the answer, we take the action. Number two is this a discussion item or something we need to add to our issues list for later in the agenda. And if it is, we write that issue down on a post-it note, put it on our issues list. We'll get to it later in the agenda, and I'll talk about that when we get there.
So number one, is it an action? Number two, is it something we need to add to our issues List Number three, is it a no action? No action means this is not important enough to talk about, so let's move on. Or no, action could mean it's absolutely important, but we've already talked about it. We're already taking action on it.
We don't need to spend any more time talking about it in this meeting. So, Is it an action item or what I would call a who, what, when does it get onto our issues list or is it a no action? That's how we get through our pulse check. So first item is good news. Second item is pulse. Pulse check. The third item is reviewing your results from the previous quarter.
How did you do on your financial KPIs, your typical PNL revenue, gross margin, net profit, cash flow? How did we do compared to our goals? Number two, what about the non-financial KPIs? Things like client retention, things like talent density. Things like our employee net promoter score or a client net promoter score.
How many new clients did we bring on this quarter? All of those important key performance indicators, and I have a whole other. Episode on key performance indicators. I don't remember the number, but check out the list of Mike on the mic episodes, and you'll see one on key performance indicators.
But we wanna look at our financial and non-financial key performance indicators. We wanna look at our rocks from the previous quarter. Now rocks are 90 day priorities with accountability. So we wanna go through and look at how did we do on our rocks from last quarter? Preferably they are color coded red, yellow, green.
Green means success, red means failure. Yellow means we are not quite there, but we wouldn't call it a total failure. So we wanna look at our financial and non-financial KPIs. We wanna look at our rocks for the quarter and we wanna look at any action items or who, what whens we have outstanding. That's reviewing results from previous quarter.
I don't like to spend a ton of time in the quarterly session on that. I wanna spend more time looking forward than looking backwards, and if you are doing the rest of your meeting rhythm, right? And again, in a previous mic, on the mic episode, I talked about the weekly accountability meeting. If you're doing your weekly accountability meeting, right, there shouldn't be a whole lot left to talk about because you're talking about how you're doing every week.
Next thing we wanna do is we wanna go back and look big picture and take a look at our company's core ideologies. And I think of core ideologies as the three-legged stool of core purpose, core values, and your 10 to 15 year big, hairy, audacious goal. We're not recreating that every quarter, but every quarter we wanna look back and say, how are we doing?
Living those things. How are we doing living our purpose? How are we doing living our values? Are we continuing to make progress towards our big, hairy, audacious goal? And we wanna take a look at our three hag, our three year highly achievable goal. Who and what do we wanna become? What are the numbers we wanna hit?
What are our differentiators? Are we moving forward towards that three year again every quarter? We're not recreating our three year. But we wanna take a look at how we're doing, moving towards the three year. Next thing we wanna do is we wanna check on our leadership team health and our talent development.
So from a leadership health standpoint, there may be exercise we're doing to build trust, build empathy, maybe some things from the five dysfunctions of a team. I'm a big Patrick Langone fan. You know, what are we doing to build our leadership team health? Number one and number two. Our talent assessment and talent development.
This is a key part of the quarterly meeting. Again, I talk about this in another Micah on the mic episode, doing our quarterly talent assessment, understanding who in our organization, who of our direct reports or reporting are performing as an A level, B level, C level, toxic C level, what actions should we take and holding folks accountable to those actions?
I'm gonna keep that real short. The talent assessment and a calculation I call talent density is gonna be the topic of my next book. There's a whole lot to say there, but watch the episode on the quarterly talent assessment and you'll get the idea. So good news, pulse check. Reviewing results from last quarter. That's one, two, and three.
Number four is the core ideologies and the three year plan.
Number five is leadership, team health and talent development.
Number six is to participate in some executive education. To keep the ideas flowing and to keep the ideas growing within the business.
So is there a new tool, a new technique, a new strategy tool? Is there some learning? I actually had a client where every quarter, someone on the leadership team was tasked with coming in and teaching the rest of the team. Something. Sometimes it was as simple as sharing a TED talk with the rest of the team, but you should be learning and growing together as a team. That's number six.
Number seven on the agenda is to collaborate on a strategic opportunity or hit some number of issues and discussion items. If you remember from back in on agenda item number two, which was pulse check questions, some of the answers to the pulse check resulted in items we've added to our issues list.
And if you're doing this right, you probably have an ongoing issues list that you haven't hit in Item number seven on the agenda. We're gonna go through these items and we're gonna say, Hey, given how much time we have, maybe there are 2, 3, 4 items from the issues list we can tackle. In some cases it will be, we're gonna make decisions about these issues.
In some cases, it's about brainstorming, gathering more information. So a decision could be made post the meeting, but very often it's right here in this collaboration on a strategic opportunity or a discussion of some number of issues from the issues list. Very often these are the most important discussions.
You will have as a leadership team, and very often it drives the next item and most important item on the agenda, which is planning your next successful quarter. And what I mean by that, and this is typically, you know, a good portion of day two, when I do a two day planning session, it's at the very least, the afternoon, if not late morning, into the afternoon of day two, where we're planning the next quarter.
Now I'm planning the next quarter we're gonna start out by looking back a little bit, we're gonna look at our annual priorities, and let's say we're in Q2 or Q3 or Q4 of the year. We're gonna look back at our annual priorities and there should be two, three, or four annual priorities for the company, and we're gonna say, are these still the right annual priorities?
We're now 1, 2, 3 quarters into the year. Chances are pretty good. Things have changed. So we might say, yes, these annual priorities are still great, or we might tweak them, or we might make wholesale changes to the annual priorities. That's critical to do in the quarterly planning meeting because our quarterly rocks are quarterly priorities, and again, we, I call them rocks.
90 day priority is a rock. Your quarterly rocks ideally should be the next 90 day chunk. Of your annual priorities, so if your annual priorities are just not the right priorities anymore. You're either gonna wind up with the wrong rocks, or at the very least, those annual priorities are not gonna be helpful in driving the rocks.
So we wanna, number one, make sure we get the annual priorities right. Number two, we wanna create our quarterly rocks. What are the 2, 3, 4 most important rocks for the quarter? And we want a plan for our financial and non-financial KPIs. I talked about that when we talked about reviewing the results from last quarter, the financial and non-financial KPIs.
Again, there's a whole other episode that talks about KPIs, but it's number eight on the agenda, which is all about planning that next quarter, rocks and KPIs. Last thing on the agenda, I call cascading communication. Cascading communication very simply is agreeing as a team and I normally make a yes column and a no column.
Agreeing as a team, what do we absolutely need to proactively communicate out to the rest of the organization that we discussed over the last day or two. Do we wanna tell everybody else what our quarterly rocks are? Did we make a decision on an issue that we need to com proactively communicate to the rest of the organization?
What are the yes's? What do we need to proactively communicate out to the organization? And just as importantly, what are the nos? What did we talk about that needs to stay in the room? Like the quarterly talent assessment, you're absolutely not gonna go out and tell everybody who was an A, who is a B, who is a C, who is A toxic C.
But what else did you talk about? Maybe there's an issue out on the issues list that you didn't make a decision on, and until you make a decision, you don't want to talk about it with the rest of the organization. Maybe you talked about some cost cutting and some layoffs that need to happen that are not gonna get communicated.
Until you are ready to communicate them co. So cascading communication is important. So there were nine items on the agenda. Good news, pulse check number one. Good news. Number two, pulse check. Number three, reviewing last quarter's results. Number four, looking at core ideologies in your three year plan.
Number five, checking on leadership team health and talent development. Number six is participating in executive education, and development. Seven, collaborate on a strategic opportunity or two or three discussion issue topics. Number eight, planning a successful quarter. Number nine, cascading communication.
Now, the biggest excuse I see for not taking a day, or ideally two days aside to do this is we don't have the time. We can't afford to take our six most important leaders from the organization and pack them away into a conference room for two days, take them away for the business so we can work on the business and talk about these things.
Well, if that's your biggest excuse, I also want you to realize that's your biggest reason for doing it. If you are so focused working in the business, if you and the rest of your leaders are so focused in the weeds of working in the business that you can't afford to take the time to work on the business and step back for a day or two, that's a problem.
That means your leaders aren't acting like leaders yet. That means your direct reports are not managing themselves the way they should, or maybe they can. You just don't trust them enough to do that. So I'd argue your biggest excuse for not doing this is your biggest reason for biting the bullet and doing it.
So when are you gonna have your next quarterly planning session? Good luck.